3 days ago
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President Biden on Monday said the Supreme Court’s decision granting former and future presidents immunity from prosecution for official acts has left the American people in the position of deciding whether they want to grant Donald Trump the power “to do whatever he pleases, whenever he wants to do it” by returning him to the presidency in November’s general election.
Speaking from the Cross Hall in the White House, not far from the spot where then-president Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011, Biden panned the ruling from the six Republican-appointed justices, who said that presidents cannot face criminal prosecution for official acts. The high court took up the matter at the request of Trump, who is currently under indictment for unlawfully attempting to overturn his election loss to Biden in 2020.
Biden said the court’s decision has “fundamentally changed for all for all practical purposes” the principle that no man is above the law in America.
“This is a fundamentally new principle, and it’s a dangerous precedent, because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law ... the only limits will be self imposed by the president alone,” he said.
Referring to the genesis of the case Trump’s legal team had brought before the court — the riot Trump fomented to block certification of Biden’s 2020 election win — the president called that day one of the darkest in American history.
“Now the man who sent that mob to the US Capitol is facing potential criminal conviction for what happened that day, and the American people deserved to have an answer in the courts before the upcoming election,” he said, adding that the court had done “a terrible disservice to the people of this nation” by effectively blocking any chance that Trump could see trial for fomenting the January 6 riot.
“Now the American people have to do what the court should have been willing to do, but will not,” he continued.
“The American people must decide whether Donald Trump's assault on our democracy on January 6 makes him unfit for public office .. the American people must decide Trump's embrace of violence to preserve His power is acceptable. Perhaps most importantly, American people must decide if they want to entrust the president once again ... to Donald Trump now, knowing he'll be more emboldened to do whatever he pleases, whenever he wants to do it,” Biden added.
The president’s remarks came less than 12 hours after the court delivered its’ ruling, in which the 6-3 majority rejected Trump’s suggestion of total immunity but said some of the actions laid out in the federal election interference indictment related to his official acts and are protected.
“The president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the president does is official. The president is not above the law. But Congress may not criminalize the president’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the executive branch under the constitution,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
The court’s conservative majority granted him “presumptive immunity” for actions that the former president claims were in the “outer perimeter” of his official duties.
“Such an immunity is required to safeguard the independence and effective functioning of the executive branch, and to enable the president to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution,” the justices wrote.
Biden, his voice sounding far stronger than it did during his debate against Trump last week, closed his remarks not by quoting the court’s majority by instead by referencing Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s dissent, in which she warned that the Republican-appointed justices had made the president “a king above the law.”
“With fear for our democracy, I dissent ... so should the American people dissent,” he said.
