Today in Washington, D.C.

26 April 2024

I’ve been sitting here trying to wrap my head around how to comment on the Supreme Court hearing yesterday morning.

I’m surprised that none of the fine legal minds arguing against blanket immunity for a president have pointed out what I learned in Miss Hurley’s 4th grade class at Rice Square School. That was the year I first took a serious “government” course. When we read the Declaration of Independence (and we did-word for word, and debated every phrase), Miss Hurley pointed out that most of the document was an indictment of the King of England; that far from being a declaration of rebellion vs. the British writ large, the founders were laying the blame for the split squarely at the feet of a largely unchecked monarch.

I distinctly remember her saying, “This is what happens today if you commit a crime: the district attorney must go before a grand jury of your neighbors and lay out all the facts. This is what Thomas Jefferson is doing here. How many charges does he make against the king?” (The answer is 27, btw)

Miss Hurley wasn’t a graduate of an Ivy League women’s college (like most of the other teachers on staff); she matriculated at Worcester State Teacher’s college. She also taught my mother, and as Mom observed, “she was no spring chicken then, either.” But she recognized, like most people of her generation, that the founders were completely opposed to the concept of an absolute monarch.

I cannot believe that Miss Hurley would have ever imagined that ANYONE would argue before the Supreme Court the legality of a President ordering Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival or suggest that ordering a military coup to stay in power fell into the category of an “official act.”

I can imagine that she would be outraged that SCOTUS even deigned to hear the case. She would upbraid the majority for, in effect, normalizing such an outrageously un-American notion that anyone, least of all a president, was above the law. And she’d probably write an op-ed noting that the Department of Justice has over 115,000 employees, among them some of the sharpest legal minds in the country, and woe be to any president of any party who fails to listen to their advice.

Finally, since she had a rather tart tongue (like most teachers did in those days), she probably couldn’t resist pointing out that only one other President (Nixon) ever seemed to worry about being prosecuted after he left office (for good reason, it turned out), while the other 43 didn’t give it a second thought and gracefully slid into their roles as largely quiet elder statesmen.

Though she would have despaired at the end of the hearing, I hope that she would have heard Andrew Weissman’s analysis later in the day. He noted that even if SCOTUS opts to send the case back to the district level, effectively delaying the case well past the election, Judge Chutkin has a card to play. She can quickly schedule a fact-finding hearing which would effectively air all of the details that the former president is hoping to suppress until after the November election. (Shades of the NYC case: David Pecker has spent the last 2 days testifying to doing that very thing in 2016). I think Miss Hurley would give Weissmann an A+ for that solution.