'It makes no sense': Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson loses patience with Trump lawyer
Donald Trump's lawyer, John Sauer, struggled to explain his argument before the Supreme Court on Thursday — and one justice came close to losing her patience.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson debated with Trump's lawyer over the claim of absolute immunity for presidents for "official actions." But, when Sauer divided presidential actions and non-presidential, it prompted more questions from the justices.
Jackson specifically asked why President Gerald Ford would have pardoned ex-President Richard Nixon if there was absolute immunity. Sauer claimed that there were both official acts and non-official acts by Nixon.
At the start of Thursday's interaction, Jackson and Sauer agreed that there is no immunity for "private acts" by a president.
"All right. So, one thing that occurs to me is that this sort of difficult mind-drawing problem that we're having with all of these hypotheticals, whether this is a private act or a public act, is being necessitated by that assumption. Because, of course, if official acts didn't get absolute immunity, then it wouldn't matter. We wouldn't have to identify which are private and which are public, correct?" Jackson asked.
Sauer said that's the approach the D.C. Appeals Court used.
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"Right, I'm making — to the extent we're worried about how do we figure out it is private or public, we have to understand we are only doing that because of an underlying assumption that the public acts get immunity," Jackson said. "So, let me explore that assumption. Why is it, as a matter of theory, and I'm hoping you can sort of zoom way out here, that the president would not be required to follow the law when he is performing his official acts?"
She noted that there are a lot of important jobs
"There are lots of folks who have very high-powered jobs, who make a lot of consequential decisions, and they do so against the backdrop of potential criminal prosecution, if they should break the law in that capacity," she continued. "And we understand, and we know as a matter of fact, that the president of the United States has the best lawyers in the world. When he's making a decision, he can consult with pretty much anybody as to whether or not this thing is criminal or not."
Her question was, "Why would we have a situation in which we would say that the president should be making official acts without any responsibility for following the law? That's totally circular."
"It makes no sense."
See the full audio clip of Jackson below or at the link here.
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