Losing Our Democracy

A reader and I had a brief (but interesting, I think) conversation about presidential immunity:

Craig: If I had told you five years ago that the U.S. Supreme Court would be considering the assertion that every American was subject to our nation’s criminal statutes except for the most powerful person in the country, you would have told me I was insane.

Reader: But if the president doesn’t have immunity, he can be charged with crimes by his political opponents.

Craig:  Perhaps he would do well not to commit crimes like the ones following the 2020 election, resulting in four independent grand juries’ handing down four different indictments containing 91 felony counts.

This concept (“simply don’t commit crimes“) seems to have worked well for the last 240 years.  But then Trump, a career criminal, comes along, tries to overthrow the government, and now we may be looking at a dictatorship.

It’s hard to imagine how our Founding Fathers would have felt about this.  They certainly could have made an immunity clause a part of the Constitution. Do you think they simply forgot? Or maybe they didn’t think it was wise to install an authoritarian head of state.

Keep in mind the fact that they had a king and didn’t want another one.  That was the central point of the American Revolution.  I remember learning about this when I was a child.  Don’t you?