{"id":19818,"date":"2024-07-03T00:38:54","date_gmt":"2024-07-03T07:38:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/kermitzarleyblog\/?p=19818"},"modified":"2024-07-16T00:42:08","modified_gmt":"2024-07-16T07:42:08","slug":"scotus-ruling-on-presidential-immunity-catholicism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/kermitzarleyblog\/2024\/07\/scotus-ruling-on-presidential-immunity-catholicism\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent SCOTUS Ruling is Due to Its Belief in Catholic Pope"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
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Photo U.S. Supreme Court 2022. Credit: Fred Schilling<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>
[In the above photo, standing justices from left-to-right are Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and sitting from left-to-right are Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts Jr., Samuel Alito, and Elena Kagan. These are still the present justices.]<\/p>\n
Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOUS) issued its long-awaited ruling about the U.S. presidency. The decision was 6 to 3 in saying the president, while in office, has \u201cabsolute immunity\u201d for all \u201cofficial acts,\u201d no matter if they would be deemed criminal if done by any other American. This ruling affects a federal prosecution of former President Donald F. Trump which is being conducted under the auspices of the Department of Justice by outside special counsel Jack Smith. He has charged the ex-president with inciting an insurrection against the U.S. Capitol and its members of Congress on January 6, 2021 while they were attempting to make a peaceful transfer of power. This ruling favors Trump. It now appears this case will not go to trial before the election this November, and it may never do so. Yet, most Americans believe Trump committed crimes that day, mostly inciting insurrection, and they wanted its outcome before the election.<\/p>\n
This Supreme Court Ruling Extends Further<\/h2>\n
This ruling by SCOTUS goes further than Smith\u2019s indictment of Donald Trump. It may set aside the Manhattan jury\u2019s determination that he committed 34 felonies in his 2016 election interference to become president in the first place. Weeks before that election, Trump paid off a porn star to keep her quiet about an alleged one-night stand they had, and he hid the payment which was a violation of election campaign laws.<\/p>\n
But this SCOTUS ruling has far greater implications than just making it easier for Donald Trump to regain the White House soon and use his renewed powers to exercise vengeance on his political enemies. For, that is what he has been stating publicly this year that he intends to do if he becomes president again. How so?<\/p>\n
Sotomayer\u2019s Dissenting Opinion Is Right<\/h2>\n
This ruling is being explained by all sorts of legal experts, including the SCOTUS leading dissenter and liberal Catholic Justice Sotomayer. In her dissenting, written opinion, in which she was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson (all three of them women I\u2019d like to point out), it says, \u201cThe court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding\u201d of our nation.\u00a0 She continued, as she read her opinion out loud, \u201cIronic isn\u2019t it? The man in charge of enforcing laws can now just break them.\u201d She concluded that this ruling makes the U.S. president \u201ca king above the law.\u201d That is exactly what the colonists fought against in the American Revolution which resulted in the formation of the United States of America. Justice Jackson called this ruling, which favors authoritarianism against democracy, \u201ca five alarm fire.\u201d<\/p>\n
Justice Sotomayer concluded in her dissenting opinion, \u201cThis majority\u2019s project will have disastrous consequences for the presidency and for our democracy. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.\u201d Congrats to this liberal Catholic justice who I believe sees correctly into the future of the United States of America regarding this issue.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s Due to the Authoritarianism of the Papacy<\/h2>\n
Why has our Supreme Court gone so astray from its very foundation\u2014the concept of government of the people, for the people, and by the people\u2014by making our president like a king who is above the law? The U.S. has always been a nation of laws in which every citizen is deemed equal before the law, including the president. It has been a democratic republic that eschews such a king who is not subject to the laws to which everyone else is subjected. However, this viewpoint began to change in our nation in the latter part of the last century. For one thing, the Office of Legal Counsel in 1974, in the aftermath of President Nixon\u2019s resignation, stated that the president cannot commit a crime. But this opinion was never challenged, especially in our courts.<\/p>\n
I submit that a major reason why the U.S. Supreme Court so ruled yesterday, regarding presidential immunity, is that five of those majority justices, in this 6 to 3 decision, are conservative Roman Catholics who likely have been influenced by the authoritarianism of their Church\u2019s papacy<\/em>! As for the religious affiliation of these nine justices, the five Catholics in the majority are Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. The three who dissented are Catholic Justice Sotomayor, and Justice Kagan a Jew, and Justice Ketanji Brown a Protestant. All of the six Catholic justices were raised Catholic.<\/p>\n
Roman Catholicism exhibits the height of authoritarianism in Christianity by having a pope, whereas just about all other church denominations reject its office of the papacy. The Roman Catholic Church in its history has pretty much asserted what it calls papal infallibility<\/em> even though this was not made an official doctrine of the Church until 1870. It basically means the pope can do no wrong, just like SCOTUS has now ruled that the U.S. president cannot commit a crime.<\/p>\n