ignore the hed, this is extremely harsh criticism from the very measured Will Baude of the Court's rulings in the 14th Amendment and immunity cases www.nytimes.com/2024/07/05/o...
Sorry. This is still granting the Court far too much: "In case after case, it has rightly emphasized the importance of turning to historical understandings in deciding constitutional cases rather than imposing modern policy views."
The GOP majority's "historical understandings" are nonsense.
"Chief Justice Roberts is not pro-Trump, he just thinks Democratic-operated institutions are captured by a corrosive anti-Trump derangement" is a distinction without a difference IMHO
I did kinda share Baude's sense of Roberts' smugness that he's convinced himself he's performed an act of civic grace that will save politics from itself
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Roberts sitting smug, really thinks he pulled off a commendable Nixon Pardon that’ll go down as laudable wisdom
(it was not wisdom)
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That the media has spent the last forty years claiming that Ford's pardon of Nixon was an act of civic courage helped get us here. The media (and public) had it right in 1974: the pardon was the final
major act of the coverup.
One way it comes full-circle: there's no way a majority of SCOTUS in 1974–75 was going to hold Richard Nixon immune for obstruction for ordering HR Haldeman to order the CIA to obstruct the FBI's Watergate burglary investigation
And such precedent would not be reversed IMO
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Leon Jaworski's memoirs and law review articles make clear both he & Ford's staff expected in the month following Nixon's resignation to be eventually indicting & trying Nixon for obstruction of justice, but that Nixon's would have to be after the John Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, et al. trials
