Coming on the heels of his lie-filled, disastrous debate performance last week, President Biden attacked the Supreme Court on Monday evening for stymying his Justice Department’s attempt to imprison Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 election.
“Each of us is equal before the law. … No one is above the law, not even the president of the United States,” said Biden, who regularly brags about defying the Supreme Court. “But [with] today’s Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity, that fundamentally changed.”
The remarks came in response to the high court’s Monday ruling on whether presidents possess lifelong immunity from criminal prosecutions and if they can be charged for actions they took while in office that fall within the scope of their official duties as president. The case centered on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s lawfare against Trump ahead of the 2024 election. Smith indicted Trump last year related to the demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In a 6-3 decision, the court’s majority, as my colleague Brianna Lyman summarized, ruled “that presidents have ‘absolute immunity’ for ‘actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority’ and ‘at least presumptive immunity’ for all ‘official acts.'” The majority did not grant immunity for “unofficial acts” and remanded the case back to the lower courts to determine whether Trump’s actions, as alleged by Smith, constitute “official acts.”
Reading from the White House teleprompter, a noticeably tan Biden falsely claimed SCOTUS’s decision “almost certainly means there are virtually no limits on what a president can do.” The president further contended the high court’s affirmation of existing law sets “a dangerous precedent because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law, even including the Supreme Court of the United States.”
As Judicial Crisis Network President Carrie Severino noted, Chief Justice John Roberts “explicitly” wrote in his majority opinion, “The President is not above the law.”
Biden used Monday’s speech to further attack the Supreme Court for issuing rulings Democrats don’t like.
“This decision today has continued the court’s attack in recent years on a wide range of long-established legal principles in our nation,” Biden claimed. “From gutting voting rights and civil rights, to taking away a woman’s right to choose, to today’s decision that undermines the rule of law of this nation.”
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He also tacitly admitted SCOTUS’s decision hampers his administration’s efforts to imprison Trump before the 2024 election and seemingly complained that voters — not his corrupt DOJ — will have the final say on Trump’s “behavior” related to the events of Jan. 6.
“The American people must decide if they want to entrust … the presidency to Donald Trump, now knowing he’ll be more emboldened to do whatever he pleases whenever he wants to do it,” Biden said.
Monday was hardly the first time Biden has used his position as president to undermine the Supreme Court, one of the last functioning American institutions Democrats don’t control.
During his State of the Union address in March, for instance, the president threatened the attending Supreme Court justices to their faces. Referencing the court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, Biden said: “With all due respect, justices, women are not without electoral, electoral power — excuse me — electoral or political power. You’re about to realize just how much you’re right about that.”
Biden’s attacks come as part of Democrats and their media allies’ seemingly coordinated campaign to delegitimize the high court’s Republican appointees. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett have found themselves as targets of dishonest hit pieces deployed by hack-tivist “journalists” in recent months.