Federalist judges claim to loathe judicial activism. To preserve the separation of powers, federalist judges restrict their rulings to the narrow set of facts and laws in front of them, and go not an inch further, lest their rulings impinge on the executive or legislative function. Yet to find criminal immunity for Donald Trump, the Supreme Court’s federalist majority bucked all traditional and supposed originalist leanings, announcing instead that the court would be “writing a rule for the ages,” and dealt an astonishing blow to the U.S. Constitution.
After overturning Roe v. Wade for the sin of imposing “on the entire country a detailed set of rules for pregnancy divided into trimesters, much like those that one might expect to find in a statute or regulation,” the Court did the very thing it just ruled unconstitutional: it imposed on the entire country a detailed set of rules for presidential immunity, divided into three stages, exactly “like those one might expect to find in a statute or regulation.”
