King President: The Supreme Court, Trump & Nixon’s Last Laugh
"This editorial comes to you from a place devoid of hope;. It will offer you none. What’s needed now isn’t false hope but a clear-eyed assessment of where some things stand.
"In ending one long tradition, the U.S. Supreme Court just ended another.
"When, a few years after being driven from office by the Watergate scandal, disgraced former president Richard Nixon sat down with David Frost for a series of interviews, he made an extraordinary remark about his own view of presidential power: 'When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.' It became a very famous quote, an 'I Am The Law' assertion of royal prerogative by the former president of a system of government explicitly created to repudiate such prerogatives. One could trot it out as exemplary of a particular out-of-touch criminal who’d let the height of his office go to his head, repeat it with a chill at how far gone someone can get under the corrupting influence of power or rattle it off with a mordant chuckle at a fool who, sworn to uphold a system in which no one is above the law, came to believe himself above the law. Everyone who repeated it over the years and canonized it as a classic reference-point was of one mind that what Nixon had expressed was a place we never, under any circumstances, wanted to go.
"Thanks to the Supreme Court, those people don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore. It can’t be said that in Trump v. United States, the court just enshrined Nixon’s words into U.S. law because the ruling is, by definition, a lawless one. What the court did, rather, was impose Nixon’s stated principle as the status quo. In a repudiation of the entire American experiment, the court took the occasion of the nation’s upcoming 248th birthday to rule that the President of the United States is now, in effect, above the law. That tradition that no one is above the law — a lot longer one than jabbing at Nixon for his failure to understand it--is now over...
Full article here:
https://jriddle.medium.com/king-president-the-supreme-court-trump-nixons-last-laugh-09f23decfa92