On the Trump cases & Chief Justice Roberts’s “grand bargain.”
The Supreme Court appears inclined to rule against Colorado and in favor of Donald Trump in the state’s attempt to bar him from the presidential ballot. That, in any case, is the conclusion many have drawn from the questions raised by the justices during this week’s oral arguments on the case. Some suggest that the vote will be nine to zero in Trump’s favor, since the court can see—like everyone else with common sense—the chaos that will ensue if individual states are given the right to disqualify candidates from presidential ballots. From that standpoint this does not look to be a difficult call for the court.
The New York Times is out today with an interesting take on this case and the immunity claims Trump has made in connection to criminal charges brought against him by Jack Smith. The Times suggests, citing legal experts, that Chief Justice John Roberts is in the process of crafting a “grand bargain” designed to restore the court’s legitimacy in the eyes of Democrats and liberals: he will engineer a unanimous verdict for Trump in the Colorado case, then turn around to craft a verdict against the former president’s immunity claims in the criminal case. Such a bargain, the Times argues, would restore the court’s image as a nonpartisan arbiter of political disputes.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The New Criterion
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James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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