In December, the Justice department asked the Supreme Court to rule on Trump's immunity claim on an expedited basis. The court sat on its hands. The case went to the Sixth Circuit, where a three-judge panel ruled unanimously against Donald Trump's claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution. That decision was widely regarded as well reasoned. Moreover, most legal observers regard Trump's claims as farfetched and certainly lacking any support from the Constitution or 235 years of American history.
The Supreme Court is within its lane in deciding to weigh in on this issue, but 4 votes would have been sufficient to take the case on appeal. At least 5 votes were required to grant a stay -- freezing all activity in Judge Chutkan's courtroom on Trump's January 6 indictment.
When the court received the appeal of the Sixth Circuit judgement, it waited two weeks to respond and scheduled oral arguments for late April. A decision is not expected before June, at the earliest. This timeline makes a trial this summer or late fall, before the November election, highly unlikely (though still possible, depending on the decision and a host of other factors).
Should we suspect that the Republican-appointed justices are deliberately acting so as to aid and abet the delaying strategy of their party's presidential candidate? What else are we to think?
The Roberts Court, circa 2024, is far and away the most partisan Supreme Court in my lifetime (1950-present). Republicans hated judicial activism during the heyday of the Warren Court, but -- hey -- he was a Republican. The court's controversial decisions, from Brown v. Board of Education to Reynolds v. Sims to Miranda v. Anderson, et al., were not decisions that boosted the agenda of one party over another. Though they may have been regarded as liberal, this was the era of a Democratic Party of the Solid South. Republicans had not yet adopted the Southern Strategy and abandoned civil rights. The decisions were not partisan.
Even as recently as Bush v. Gore, when the Rehnquist court stepped in to stop the State of Florida from counting ballots and decided the 2000 presidential election, giving it to George Bush, it was not yet considered a partisan court by most observers. This, even though it was dominated by Republican-appointed justices and a Republican majority. Red vs. Blue America was just becoming a thing. Al Gore didn't hesitate to endorse the court's ruling, which he considered legit.
Those days are past. The Trump/McConnell Court has been shown to be highly partisan. Even before the Trump justices were put into place, it had become clear to conscientious observers that harmony with the agenda of the Republican Party, not strict constructionism, textualism, or original intent, most often carried the day with the court. In the Roberts era, in many controversial decisions -- District of Columbia v. Heller, Citizens United, Shelby County v. Holder, among a slew of for instances -- the GOP agenda won 5-4, with Republicans in the majority in each case. A bit later, with a change in the justices in place, the winning rulings for the GOP often became 6-3.
By 2024, the Federalist Society; dark money campaigns; scripted talking points by Republican members of Congress, FNC, and lesser conservative media; billionaires providing the taste of an oligarch's lifestyle to selected justices; the McConnell maneuvers in the Senate; and the extinction of Republican-appointees who more than rarely strayed from the party line to vote against the GOP agenda -- all this has brought us a court that is indelibly Republican. Not conservative: Republican. We can see it every term in their decisions, as they roll back precedents and, looking backward at what they imagine as a more glorious American past, impose their views on all of us who share the country today.
These justices understand the context of Trump's appeals. They know the stakes riding on his bid to return to the White House. They're not stupid. They could have acted with some alacrity so he was more likely to face a criminal trial for his bid to overturn his loss in 2020 before he goes before the voters on November 5.
They chose to act otherwise. We have every reason to assume the worst of the Republican justices. They most assuredly do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.