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The Silver Lining: The Court Has No More Credibility
The Supreme Court tossed its own rules to give Trump immunity
Now that the legal community has had a few days to digest the Supreme Court’s decision to grant the President of the United States practically complete immunity from criminal law, it’s become clear that, if the Court had any credibility left, it traded all of it in order to make this ruling.
To understand why this is the case, we need to look at originalism — this Court’s mandated method of interpreting the Constitution — and then note that it’s not just missing from the majority’s opinion; the majority did the exact opposite of it.
How Originalism Works
“It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Of course, “saying what the law is” requires the judge to interpret the law and apply it to the particular case. What if the law is vague?
Over nearly 250 years now, several methods have been developed to interpret U.S. laws in principled ways. Some methods are limited to solve specific problems, and many are concepts we use in daily life. For example, under the general/specific method of interpreting laws, specific provisions prevail over conflicting general provisions. If I say, “I hate…
