Justice Sonia Sotomayor Calls Out Catch-22 In Trump's Immunity Argument
HuffPost
"If he's not covered by the criminal law, he can't be impeached for violating it at all," the Supreme Court justice said during Thursday's arguments.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor identified a key contradiction underlying former President Donald Trump’s defense at Thursday’s Supreme Court hearing on whether he is immune from prosecution in a case charging him with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The discrepancy lies in Trump’s legal team arguing that presidents can’t be prosecuted for “official acts” committed while in office unless they are both impeached and convicted by the U.S. Congress.
For example, even if a president ordered a military coup or sold nuclear secrets to a foreign power — two hypotheticals posed by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan during the hearing — Trump couldn’t be held criminally liable without an act of Congress, his attorney, John Sauer, argued.
Furthermore, Trump’s legal team said that there needs to be a “clear statement” in the statute covering such acts that directly apply to the president. Otherwise, their liability would be moot.
But the liberal justices on the court, including Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, pushed back against that line of reasoning aggressively. They noted that it essentially created a Catch-22 by preventing a president from being impeached at all.
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