Letter: Openly flouting Constitution’s intent

Letter to the Editor

To put the matter in a nutshell, Trump v. United States wrongfully invents both absolute and presumptive criminal immunity for the president’s official acts. The Constitution clearly contemplates removing a president from office for official acts (such as granting pardons) that were procured by bribery and expressly allows subsequent prosecution for these same crimes. Similarly, the presidential duty to take official counsel of his attorney general does not logically entail that criminal conspiracies between these two persons are immune from prosecution or excluded from use as evidence in court (United States v. Nixon, 1979). For the sovereignty of law embodied in the Constitution recognizes only limited forms of immunity: namely, for acts of speech and debate in Congress and from spurious civil suits.

The six concurring Justices have throughout this case failed to distinguish between officeholders subject to criminal prosecution and the offices held, whose powers such persons have abused. This failure places one person above the rule of law, and thereby openly flouts the Constitution’s express intent to “establish Justice” by treating all people as equal before the law. Mistakes of this magnitude committed by qualified jurists in the face of cogent objections are rightly presumed to be willful errors. So we are forced to conclude that these Justices have deliberately defied and subverted the Constitution, and have thereby violated their oaths of office. For this, and to prevent further judicial malfeasance, they should be forced to resign in disgrace or removed from the Court by act of Congress.

James Campbell

Woodstock

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