The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to hand down its decision on Donald Trump's claim of absolute immunity for his "official" acts as President, despite first being asked to do so by Special Counsel Jack Smith 192 days ago. But one expert says, in a way, they already have.
Many court watchers expected the Court to rule on the question of Trump's claim to immunity from prosecution Thursday morning, but none came.
"Don’t hold your breath waiting for the presidential immunity decision. If you’re wondering whether the MAGA majority on the Court will let Trump off the hook, they already have. By doing so, they have already interfered in the 2024 elections," charges Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO, and the political strategist deemed the "architect" of the secret bipartisan shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election, according to TIME magazine.
The Supreme Court has "forced a historic crisis—an irreconcilable showdown between the normal operation of the criminal justice system (which should find Trump in pretrial and trial proceedings for his January 6th crimes over the next five months) and the normal functioning of presidential elections (which should find him campaigning full-time during those months)," Podhorzer wrote on social media Wednesday. "It didn’t have to be this way; it’s a crisis entirely of their own manufacturing."
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Podhorzer was behind something of a "conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes," a bipartisan effort to tamp down protests or violence when Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, that included "an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans... that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs," TIME reported just weeks after Joe Biden was sworn into office.
"The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy."
Podhorzer now alleges there has been a "hijacking" by "MAGA judges," in a social media thread called "powerful" by former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean.
"Imagine you were told that in another country, a president who had been defeated in a free and fair election attempted a coup, for which he was indicted—but four years later, the very judges he had appointed have helped protect him from standing trial so he could return to office" he posits.
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"Whether it’s in Orban’s Hungary, Erdogan’s Turkey, Putin’s Russia, or now the United States, authoritarian movements consistently attempt to amass and consolidate power by hijacking courts to provide them with post-hoc impunity. In the US’s case, the hijacking we now confront by the MAGA judges is the result of decades of hollowing out judicial independence by the Federalist Society and its revanchist backers."
And it started, Podhorzer says, with Bush v. Gore, the 2000 Supreme Court decision that placed George W. Bush in the White House.
"Since Bush v. Gore, the GOP-appointed justices have consistently acted to benefit Republicans electorally."
In his social media thread Podhorzer does not mention that three right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court today were part of the Bush legal team's effort at the Supreme Court nearly a quarter-century ago: Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
The rest of Podhorzer's thread recounts at least half-a-dozen instances when right wing justices have worked to help Republicans.
"Let's be clear," he concludes. " All six GOP-appointed SCOTUS justices, and Judge Aileen Cannon, have current or former associations with the Federalist Society. None of them can be impartial about cases involving Trump, because his defeat will also mean the defeat of their hard-fought ideological legacy."
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