Two titans of the American legal system had very different takeaways after Monday's Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity.
Former Trump White House counsel Ty Cobb appeared on CNN to undermine Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent for being big on "hysterical... screaming" — but dry on substance.
The court’s conservative majority ruled 6-3 — three justices were Trump-appointed — to allow for official acts to remain immune from prosecution. They left open the possibility that private acts could be prosecutable.
The decision called into question which acts are deemed official, as the 45th president has claimed in his defense of some of his criminal allegations; specifically the attempt to subvert the 2020 election.
Sotomayor's dissent wrote that the decision by the high court armed the president with monarchy powers to order the elimination of a political rival, a military coup or sell bribes to bidders: "Immune. Immune, immune, immune."
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"Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done," she wrote. "The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
Cobb forcefully disagreed.
"Her dissent was a little hysterical and it really offered no analysis," he said. A lot of a lot of screaming, no analysis. And I think that was unfortunate."
Instead, he openly wished Justice Elena Kagan would have taken on pen duties and written the document.
Harvard University constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe came down like a stack of legal tomes on Cobb for the Sotomayor slight.
"I'm afraid much as I respect Ty Cobb — I couldn't disagree more with his characterization of the dissents as 'hysterical,'" he said in a separate setting outside of the company of Cobb. "That sounds pretty sexist to me. There was plenty of analysis, much more analysis."
Tribe proceeded to grade the dissenting opinions with Sotomayor and fellow liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson an A+ and A, though he didn't say who earned which grade.
In a separate dissent, Jackson wrote that she wanted to lay out the “theoretical nuts and bolts of what, exactly, the majority has done today to alter the paradigm of accountability for Presidents of the United States”.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Tribe's former student, opposed the dissents and went as far as to accuse the three liberal justices of having misinterpreted the majority's opinion and engaging in "fear mongering."
Roberts wrote that they sought to "strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today."
And he wrote that "like everyone else, the President is subject to prosecution in his unofficial capacity."
Watch the clip below or at this link.
