Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe expects the U.S. Supreme Court will likely overturn its own decision in Donald Trump's case.
Legal analysts lined up to denounce the court's decision Monday that gives Donald Trump immunity for actions taking in his official capacity as president. But in reading lawyer Robert B. Hubbell, Tribe quoted that the ruling is “destined to be remembered as a mark of shame for the Roberts Court just as Dred Scott tarnishes Chief Justice Taney’s legacy to this day.”
Hubbell, one of the top-rated Securities Litigation attorneys in Los Angeles, wrote that the constitutional theory is that all presidents were "subject to impeachment for actions immune from prosecution."
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“Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office," Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on the Senate floor in 2021. "We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation and former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
Tribe recalled the McConnell quote and pointed out, "That didn’t wear well, it turns out."
But he quoted Hubbell saying, with"Trump's iron-fisted control over the skulk of cowards banded together under the GOP banner, impeachment is no constraint on a future Trump presidency."
Neither legal expert believes that the decision will remain in place for generations the way most landmark cases stand.
"Trump v. United States will be overruled. The decision is so bad it will not stand," wrote Hubbell. "Like Dred Scott (holding that enslaved people are not citizens entitled to judicial protections), Plessy v. Ferguson (upholding segregation), Koramatsu v US (upholding the Japanese internment camps), today’s decision will be overturned by the acclamation of history in due course."
Hubbell gives it a few decades before the Court admits overturns the ruling, he wrote. There's also a possibility that Democrats can step in to marginalize the power of the court.
"Majorities in the House and Senatecan pass a bill to expand the Supreme Court, and a Democratic president can sign it. The reactionary majority can be overwhelmed by the appointment of four new justices, although expanding the Court by eight or more would be appropriate given the nearly hundred-fold growth in the U.S. population since six justices were appointed in 1789," Hubbell wrote.
While liberals are creating worst-case scenarios, Hubbell is trying to talk them off the ledge.
"We are going to win. The only thing that has changed is the timeline to ultimate victory," he wrote. "Generations before us fought and endured for decades to bring us to this moment. We can do the same.
"Indeed, we have a moral and patriotic obligation to do so. We owe a debt of gratitude to those who came before us and are charged with the sacred trust of delivering democracy to future generations. We can do that."
