Legal experts have informed the Daily Caller News Foundation that the recent bill proposed by Democrats, aimed at addressing the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, demonstrates their readiness to weaken a co-equal branch of government when they are dissatisfied with its decisions.
Days after President Joe Biden called for a constitutional amendment making it clear “no President is above the law or immune from prosecution for crimes committed while in office,” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced a bill that aims to reverse the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling. Schumer’s “No Kings Act” introduced on Thursday doesn’t stop with reversing the Supreme Court’s decision, but would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to even consider challenges to prosecuting a former president for alleged crimes related to official acts, along with challenges to the bill itself.
“None of that is constitutional,” Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, told the DCNF in reference to the provisions of Schumer’s bill.
Shapiro commented that both Schumer’s bill and Biden’s proposed amendment are overemphasizing Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion.
“It’s a reasonable and fairly narrow decision,” he said. “The outcry about it is either disingenuous or just not understanding the law.”
On July 1, the Supreme Court ruled that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for actions taken in their official capacity. The majority opinion assigned the lower courts with the responsibility of determining which allegations in former President Donald Trump’s indictment constitute official acts eligible for immunity.
John Yoo, University of California, Berkeley law school professor, told the DCNF that “the call to override the Court on the presidential immunity decision is part and parcel of Kamala Harris’s progressive assault on the Constitution.”
“Overruling the Court — through unconstitutional means such as a statute — show the disregard progressives hold for a co-equal branch of government,” Yoo said. “It fits with the call to place term limits on the Justices, which Biden proposes and Harris supports, or even to pack the Court, which Harris called for in 2020. It is an obvious threat, even if it never passes, against the Court simply because progressives disagree with the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution.”
The line-ups of votes from the previous term create a contradiction with the Democrats’ assertion that the Supreme Court is “out of control.” Despite this narrative, several significant cases, such as those involving challenges to the abortion pill and former president Donald Trump’s eligibility for the 2024 ballot, resulted in unanimous rulings. Furthermore, only half of the 22 decisions that were split 6-3 followed expected ideological divisions, with Republican-appointed justices on one side and Democratic appointees on the other, according to Empirical SCOTUS.
Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson told the Daily Caller News Foundation the bill is just “the latest salvo in the Democrats’ war on the Supreme Court.”
“If Democrats want to abolish presidential immunity, they cannot do so retroactively, but could try to pass a prospective constitutional amendment,” Jacobson told the DCNF. “Recognizing the unlikelihood of a constitutional amendment, Schumer seeks an end run by trying to limit the right to appeal to the Supreme Court. Whether that work-around is viable remains to be seen, but there is nothing principled about it.”
On Monday, Biden put forth a plan to establish term limits for justices, enforce a binding code of ethics, and pass a constitutional amendment to specify that presidents are not immune from prosecution for official actions.
The Founders were explicit: no man in America shall be a king.
But the MAGA Supreme Court threw out centuries of precedent and anointed Trump and subsequent presidents as kings above the law.
That's why I'm introducing the No Kings Act to crack down on this dangerous precedent.
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) August 1, 2024
Since Schumer’s bill would limit the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, South Texas College of Law Houston professor Josh Blackman highlighted in Reason that “a conviction of the President of the United States would stop with the inferior courts, and most likely, the D.C. Circuit, which by the way, will have a Democratic-appointed majority for at least the next two decades or so.”
Blackman observed that the bill has “no possibility” of passing in the present Congress, but could be successful if Vice President Kamala Harris were to win the election and Democrats were to secure majorities in both chambers.
“Once the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction is stripped for presidential immunity, it is only a matter of time before similar bills are passed for abortion, the Second Amendment, RFRA, and so on,” Blackman wrote. “This bottomless hole keeps going deeper.”
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