Reblogged:Who 'Slow Walked' Trump's Immunity Claim?

[Gus Van Horn blog]

An attorney, annoyed at the cacophony of clueless babbling about the court deliberations over Donald Trump's dubious immunity claim, explains (original thread) the "slow" timetable and identifies who is really to blame for the proximity of these proceedings to the election.

...Judge Chutkan deserves no criticism for this. Two months from filing to decision on a motion to dismiss in federal court is VERY FAST. Usually you are looking at six months or more. This case was expedited.

Donald Trump had a right, under law, to appeal this ruling to the Court of Appeals and to stay the trial court proceedings while he did it. You may not like this rule, but it applies to ANYONE raising an immunity defense, not just Donald Trump.

President Trump took his appeal and the court concluded briefing in JUST ONE MONTH, and then held oral argument on January 9 and decided the case February 6. This is LIGHTNING FAST. Most CoA cases take about a year to a year and half between commencement and conclusion.

Further, the DC Circuit itself broke a norm to speed up the case further, and NOBODY criticized it for breaking this norm. It's a technical issue, but the "mandate" is the date on which a court of appeals judgment goes into effect.

Dilan Esper's commentary on these "delays" that actually aren't goes on in some detail, and make for educational reading. (And it was good to see that I wasn't imagining things when I recalled the glacial pace of other court proceedings and thought this seemed fast by comparison.)

What I really appreciate, though, is Esper, whom I take to lean left, lays the blame for the real delay exactly where it belongs:

f you want to argue that a 5/24 decision is still too late, well, SCOTUS only controls the last 3 months of that delay. The rest of it? Blame the liberal Judge Chutkan and DC Circuit and ESPECIALLY the DOJ, who DIDN'T BRING THIS CASE FOR 2 1/2 YEARS!

Or, as I put it the other day:

If your're serious, pull it now. If you're not, leave it alone. (Image by jstark7, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)

In my uninformed opinion, I think if the Democrats were serious about their constitutional obligations, they would have been much quicker to establish that Trump was an insurrectionist (or not) on legal grounds, and found a way to hasten legal proceedings in that matter and the election tampering in Georgia. As it stands, they appear to be trying to time things to spoil Trump's election attempt. They are playing into his hands. [bold added]

There is plenty of commentary from both political tribes in America to the effect that Trump and Biden need each other to run in order to have a chance to win.

It bad enough that the Democrats, forgetting that Trump knows how to play the victim, decided it would help their figurehead win an election by saddling Trump with lawsuits during the campaign.

It's much worse that they would play around with such serious charges in the process. If they believe the charges, they should have prosecuted earlier. If not, they shouldn't have leveled them at all.

-- CAV

Link to Original

[Boydstun]

As opposed to slow-walking the decision to hear the appeal on absolute immunity for ex-presidents, the Supreme Court could very well have been in an interval of trying get enough Justices to agree to hear the appeal from the appellate court decision and opinion, with some Justices initially undecided and open to persuasion. We don't know. But Gus neglects comparison of the speed of the Supreme Court (and them slowing things down by earlier throwing the appeal back to the DC appellate court for decision) with the Supreme Court speed in the Nixon case* and in the Bush v. Gore case. Unless the Court gives their decision in this coming week, it will look very like the political-party alignment of the Court in Bush v. Gore. Delaying until end of June to give their decision and opinions could very well say all Yes to the lengthy opinion of the lower appellate court, say that ex-Presidents are not immune from criminal prosecution, while, having slow-walked the time-sensitive case, made the ruling de facto inapplicable to the one case that has ever come up.

(Although, I must admit, it is not clear that most American voters would not vote for Trump even knowing that he was convicted in the pending criminal cases. I've apparently in the past credited the American people with too much valuation that America be a constitutional democratic republic. Now they just deny it ever was such a thing, rationalizing their own instigation of its downfall.) 

On the slowness of the prosecution bringing the DC case and the Georgia case, that could easily be a matter of the time needed to gather sufficient evidence to have a high chance for conviction, even when the accused is a rich litigant and a former President.

Edited March 4 by Boydstun