"In its extraordinarily disturbing decision earlier this week granting presidents wide-ranging immunity from criminal prosecution, the US supreme court dramatically mis-weighed a competing set of risks to our constitutional democracy."
"On the one side of the scale, the court placed the possibility that a future rogue prosecutor will seek to settle political scores by indicting a former president for 'insufficiently enforcing … environmental laws.'"
"On the other side of the scale, we can place the possibility that a former president, having previously been charged with subverting the peaceful succession of power, returns to the White House, where he demands the prosecution of all those who tried to hold him to account."
"America’s first revolution was against a king. Republicans want a second revolution to install one. They are threatening violence if they don’t get their way."
The Guardian's assessment (from London) of the current US Supremes:
"This is a court for the rich and powerful, and it is making them more so. The founders intended the supreme court to be part of the solution to the tyranny of European kings. Mr Trump, and the court’s conservative justices, have made it part of the problem."
"The Roberts supermajority has taken a radical course where the judiciary is increasingly the final arbiter not just on the law but on the facts, the interpretation of those facts, the application of those facts in given situations, and the technical, scientific, and professional implications of those facts in the real world.
"Justice Sotomayor turned directly towards Chief Justice Roberts as she spoke. In normal conversation, when someone turns directly toward you as they speak, it is common to look back at them, perhaps even nod or smile to make them feel included and acknowledged. But Roberts never so much as looked back at her, his fellow Justice. I guess he saw no need."
Monday’s decision … ensures that, should Trump return to power, he will do so with hardly any legal checks. Under the Republican justices’ decision in Trump, a future president can almost certainly order the assassination of his rivals. He can wield the authority of the presidency to commit countless crimes. And he can order a subordinate to do virtually anything."
"The Court has now declared for the first time in history that the most powerful official in the United States can… become a law unto himself. Presidents alone are now free to commit crimes when they are on the job, while all other Americans must follow the law in all aspects of their lives, whether personal or professional."
"Six weeks ago, Sotomayor spoke at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she was honored with an award. She was remarkably candid about her experience working with six fascists. 'There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried,' she said. 'There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.'”
"By issuing this decision regarding presidential immunity, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court virtually guarantees that an unscrupulous politician who ascends to the presidency can take nearly any outlandish and illegal action and not face any consequences."
If the political history of this nation has any lesson to teach us right now it is this: The lack of accountability for high crimes and misdemeanors only compounds the original harm and ensures injustices in the future.
"No one should be above the law, especially the President of the United States."
"They know all this about him and decided to provide him a roadmap to dictatorship anyhow. They want him to be president again, this time fully unconstrained. And the real tell is they did it despite certain obvious ways it conflicts with their other, radical holdings."
"Tellingly, Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion spends not a moment condemning the violence in the Capitol on Jan. 6 or saying how awful the allegations against Trump are if true, or even celebrating peaceful transitions of power and reaffirming American democracy."
Nick Anderson's commentary on the "Supreme" Court ruling giving Convicted Felon Donald Trump now King Donald I absolute immunity from the law as long as he does his dirt while claiming it's "official."
"This decision is consistent with a trend that Donald Trump’s engineered court has consistently followed, which are … wins for corruption, wins for corporations, wins for insurrectionists, and losses for accountability, democracy and the American people. But this decision is by far the worst and most dangerous decision undermining the rule of law in the United States."
"This decision is the most reckless and dangerous decision ever issued by the U.S. Supreme Court, because it utterly transforms our country and the rule of law into one that’s optional for whoever is the president of the United States. This decision is not a legitimate decision, in my view."
"If the president under criminal indictment had not been a criminal, then the Court would not have invented Constitutional law to protect him.
Instead, it is only because Trump is an actual criminal that SCOTUS felt the need to create such an expansive regime of legal immunity for the chief executive."
"Yesterday’s immunity decision by the Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to the constitutional foundation of American democracy and eviscerated the rule of law. It will, in my view, go down in the annals of wretched Supreme Court decisions alongside Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu. It makes Bush v. Gore look like a piker."
"The door is now wide open to the kinds of fascism and authoritarianism we spent much of the 20th century and hundreds of thousands of American lives combatting overseas. Many of you will be skeptical of this. I will take no joy in being right about this. You can wait and see, but don’t wait too long. It may already be too late."
"I can tell you, I've never seen language like this in a Supreme Court opinion or dissent. There is something really dangerous going on here, and something that is really threatening the entire basis of our constitution and separation of powers."
"Deciding with what new tools of abuse and impunity to arm the presidency just as such a man [as Trump] is on the verge of its accession is a decision, not an ineluctable deduction from history and text and case law.
It is a decision of surpassing recklessness in dangerous times."
"Trump v. US was written by a Republican Chief Justice to protect Trump, the Republican Party’s leader, and by protecting Trump preserving the Republican Party’s electoral prospects. Whatever it might do to American democracy post-Trump is incidental. For the Republican majority on the Court, as for every Republican on their ballot this year, Trump must be above the law."