Chris Hayes Says Apparent ‘Philosophical Endorsement’ of Trump Immunity Claims by SCOTUS Is ‘Genuinely Shocking’ | Video
On Thursday the justice of the Supreme Court appeared to endorse the idea that Donald Trump should be afforded some degree of presidential immunity from criminal charges that pertain to his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes described the day’s proceedings as “almost a philosophical endorsement of the worst aspects of Trumpism.”
“Which is that this is all just power politics by another name,” Hayes continued. “That none of this actually adheres to any set of regularity or rules of law. That the reason that this hasn’t happened before is because there’s never been as partisan a prosecutor as Jack Smith, that that’s what’s unprecedented here,” he said incredulously.
At the top of the segment, Hayed likened watching the proceedings to having experienced “genuine vertigo, like almost a physical sensation of like, am I losing my mind here?”
“There’s something wrong about this,” he continued. The cause of the political whiplash, he said, is that “Donald Trump’s framing of this prosecution is that what is extraordinary about it is the fact of the prosecution. Whereas the lower courts and the rest of us, I believe, that what’s extraordinary are the actions he took to warrant the prosecution.”
“What is unprecedented here are the actions at issue, which is the first attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power since the cannons fired at Fort Sumter—not that an indictment was brought.”
This is a repeat of last month’s case in which the court blocked Colorado’s attempt to remove Trump from the state’s primary ballot. The “conservatives on the court,” Hayes added, have “adopted the notion that what is new here and extraordinary needs to be justification is the prosecution itself.”
The prevailing thought among the conservative justices, he continued is that “everyone below this court, these austere gentlemen with their impeccable vision, everyone below them are political hacks” and only their views on the matter are important. Not, say, the views of “the District Court and the Appellate Court and the Grand Jury and the Prosecutor and the Department of Justice and the Attorney General and the duly elected president who appointed him in the Colorado Supreme Court.”
Conservative justices, he continued, aren’t “considering that they’re the political hacks.”
“So to walk into the third branch of government, and these people with all this power, the creative minds who brought you ’12-year-old giving birth to her rapist’s child’, to listen to these folks and find them in the highest halls of power, adopting the most authoritarian and cynical vision of this was a genuinely shocking experience,” Hayes concluded.
While it seemed unlikely that today’s nearly three-hour-long session convinced any of the justices that Trump deserves fully immunity, the conservative justices who dominate the court 6-3 seemed sympathetic to the idea that he should be afforded some degree of protection, and that the case should return to lower courts. The case was escalated to the Supreme Courts after Trump appealed a lower court ruling.
Trump is the first former American president to face criminal prosecution. He has pleaded not guilty in this case, as well as in the additional three federal cases against him, and was not present at the hearings because he was required to be present at his hush money case in New York City.
Trump’s lawyer D. John Sauer argued that presidents should receive “absolute immunity” for acts undertaken while serving, a suggestion that was rebuked by the court’s liberal justices. Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson worried that such immunity runs the risk of “turning the Oval Office into the seat of criminal activity in this country.”
Watch the segment with Chris Hayes in the video above.
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