1: The US Supreme Court will not act prior to sentencing; there no basis for them to do so, and Trump's lawyers have not made any request.
2: Trump and Republicans see SCOTUS as an arm of their political and policy machine.
3: There is an increasing public perception that SCOTUS is not neutral.
But remember, he's "okay" with going to jail. (Again, no, he isn't.)
But uh.... just what the fuck is the Supreme Court supposed to do here? Jump into the appeals process mere days after the verdict and a month and change before sentencing.... to do what?
Trump's demand that his Supreme Court justices rescue him feels very much akin to Mike Lindell's plan to skip every stage in the American legal system and simply ask Trump's guys to unilaterally rule 9–0 in his favor
As dirty as the current SCOTUS is, they aren't doing squat until someone properly petitions them with a plausible basis for jurisdiction, which they won't have until 2+ courts review something. I'm not even sure there'd be one vote to jump that gun and I'm positive there's not 3.
Arguably they could fashion some of kind of All Writs jurisdiction out of an immunity argument, but that should have been raised and appealed long before trial.
SCOTUS is probably going to invent some 3-part test to determine whether a particular alleged crime was an official act as President. But it would strain credulity even for them to say that falsifying business records to conceal hush money payoffs was part of the office of the Presidency.
Do they care about plausibility? If they did it, what would the unavoidable consequences be for them, and by what mechanism?
If a ridiculous ruling is all that’s standing between them and a chance at permanent authoritarian rule, they won’t hesitate a second
This argument proves too much. You need to account for (e.g.) Texas v. Pennsylvania before applying this kind of reasoning. SCOTUS is bad right now, but it doesn’t act without at least a fig leaf.
