The New Yorker:

In arguments about Presidential immunity, the conservative Justices, who avoided mentioning Trump, made clear that they are less concerned with holding him accountable than with shielding former Presidents from retribution.

By Jeannie Suk Gersen

At a quarter to ten on Thursday morning at the Supreme Court of the United States, the current and several former U.S. Solicitors General milled about in the well between the counsel’s tables and the front rows, shaking hands with attorneys who were about to make oral arguments and chatting with veteran reporters who have covered the Court for decades. Special Counsel Jack Smith came in and took his seat. A U.S. marshal sternly shushed some prominent figures, and they went silent.

It was the third argument before the Court in three months related to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his loss of the 2020 Presidential election. This one (Trump v. U.S.) was about his claim that Smith’s prosecution of him for election interference (U.S. v. Trump) must be dismissed because a former President is immune from criminal liability for any official acts he undertook in office. When the Justices took the bench at 10 a.m. and looked out at the not-quite-full courtroom, their grumpy countenances seemed to reflect the Trump fatigue that many Americans are feeling.

As the Justices ground through nearly three hours of arguments, my mind went into split-screen mode: the gray decorum of constitutional debate over executive power in Washington, D.C., and the sordid vividness of Trump’s criminal trial about hush money happening at the same time in New York City. Trump himself was not at the Supreme Court hearing, because he had to be present as a defendant in a gritty lower Manhattan criminal courtroom, where David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, was testifying that, in order to aid Trump’s 2016 campaign, he paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a Playboy model’s story about having sex with Trump, with no intent to publish it, and sought reimbursement from Trump. 

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