President Joe Biden criticized the Supreme Court in a White House address Monday evening over its ruling that former president Donald Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for official acts taken while in office, but not unofficial ones.
“For all practical purposes, today’s decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what a president can do,” Biden said. “This is a fundamentally new principle, and it’s a dangerous precedent.”
Biden said the presidency will “no longer be constrained by the law” and that “the only limits will be imposed by the president alone.”
“This decision today has continued the Court’s attack in recent years on a wide range of long-established legal principles in our nation,” the president said, “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.”
The 6–3 decision released Monday morning, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority, distinguished between the president’s public and private actions and returned the case to a lower court. The case involved special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of the former president for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” Roberts wrote for the majority. “And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”
Because the ruling sends the case back to a lower court, it’s unlikely it will be decided before the November election. Biden said this delay is a “terrible disservice to the people of this nation.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the two other Democrat-appointed justices dissented from the majority opinion.
Sotomayor said the decision makes the president “a King above the law.”
“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” she wrote.
Biden said he concurred with Sotomayor’s dissent. “So should the American people dissent,” he said. “I dissent.”
Addressing the three liberal Justices’ dissent from his opinion, Roberts wrote, “They strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today—conclude that immunity extends to official discussions between the President and his Attorney General, and then remand to the lower courts to determine ‘in the first instance’ whether and to what extent Trump’s remaining alleged conduct is entitled to immunity.”