Chief Justice John Roberts on Thursday declined an invitation to meet with Democratic senators to talk about Supreme Court ethics and the controversy over flags that flew outside homes owned by Justice Samuel Alito.
Roberts’ response came in a letter to the senators a day after Alito separately wrote them and House members to reject their demands that he recuse himself from major Supreme Court cases involving former President Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 rioters because of the flags, which are like those carried by rioters at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a member of the Judiciary panel, had written Roberts a week ago to ask for the meeting and that Roberts take steps to ensure that Alito recuses himself from any cases before the court concerning the Jan. 6 attack or the Republican former president’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
But Trump is currently asserting in court that he does have that power! Absolute immunity remember? Who are you to say, peon, that the POTUS cannot dissolve the SCOTUS? He has absolute immunity, remember? That means he has absolute power to do anything!
What I was trying to say is that Biden should call the bluff, and force the SCOTUS to decide right now. Why not? If the POTUS really does have absolute immunity, why not? Do you see the insanity this road leads down?
Just your average joe who is able to read a few paragraphs. The federal government doesn’t have any power not explicitly granted to them.
It not a bluff it’s an important case. They should write an actually well founded opinion that doesn’t set up terrible case law for future generations.
You’re operating under the presuppositions that it does have absolute immunity and I don’t believe he does. As I said, the case hasn’t had an opinion. And I didn’t mention it previously but the state judge thing you’d mentioned earlier is also not in the power of the president.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
Article 2 is the bit to read.
I would like to say, for the record, that I wrote that late at night, and my phrasing probably came across incorrectly.
It wasn’t my intention to call you personally ‘a peon’. I was trying more to adopt the voice, for argument’s sake, of what an imagined President, using this supposed absolute immunity, might say to their critics – ‘who are you (out there, the people) to question my power?’
My apologies for it coming out the way it did.
I wasn’t taking that personally, my point was that in America the sovereign power rests in the people (vs England in the crown). We hold the authority under which the government exists.
As it should be! I hope in the long-term, that is proven to be true.