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      What is affirmative action designed to do – and what has it achieved?

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      The US supreme court could be poised to ban the use of affirmative action policies in college admissions as soon as Thursday. The court, which is expected to deliver its ruling either this week or next, will determine whether race-conscious admissions violate the equal-protection clause under the US constitution.Envisioned as a tool to help remedy historical discrimination and create more diverse student bodies, affirmative action policies have permitted hundreds of colleges and universities to factor in students’ racial backgrounds during the admissions process. That consideration is supplementary, and taken in tandem with other factors such as applicants’ test scores, grades and extracurricular activities.Even with race-conscious admissions, however, many selective public and private colleges and universities struggle to enroll diverse student populations that accurately reflect society. At the University of North Carolina, for example, in a state where 21% of people are Black, just 8% of the school’s undergraduates are Black.Opponents of affirmative action, such as the advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, argue that considering race as a factor in the admissions process amounts to racial discrimination – particularly against Asian Americans. SFA has brought cases against Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private university, and UNC, the nation’s first public university, to challenge their affirmative action policies, which the group contends favors Black and Latino students. Ultimately, it hopes that race considerations will be nixed from the admissions process entirely, and replaced by race-neutral or “color-blind” policies.What is affirmative action designed to do?The concept of affirmative action originated in 1961 when President John F Kennedy issued an executive order directing government agencies to ensure that all Americans get an equal opportunity in employment. President Lyndon Johnson took it one step further in 1965, barring public and private organizations that had a federal contract from discriminating based on race, color, religion and national origin. The prohibition was added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.In 1969, President Richard Nixon’s assistant labor secretary, Arthur Fletcher, who would eventually be known as the “father of affirmative action”, pushed for requiring employers to set “goals and timetables” to hire more Black workers. That effort, known as the Revised Philadelphia Plan, would later influence how many schools approached their own race-conscious admissions programs.The practice was challenged when Allan Bakke, a white man who was twice denied entry to the medical school at the University of California at Davis, sued the university, arguing that its policies, which included allocating seats for “qualified” students of color, discriminated against him. In 1978, the supreme court narrowly rejected the use of “racial quotas”, but noted that colleges and universities could use race as a factor in the admissions process. Justice Lewis Powell noted that achieving diversity represented a “compelling government interest”.What has affirmative action in college admissions actually achieved?After generations of near total exclusion of Black students and other students of color, colleges and universities began admitting more diverse groups in the 1960s and 70s, and soon thereafter incorporated race-consciousness into their admissions policies.Data shows that the rise of affirmative action policies in higher education has bolstered diversity on college campuses. In 1965, Black students accounted for roughly 5% of all undergraduates. And between 1965 and 2001, the percentage of Black undergraduates doubled. The number of Latino undergraduates also rose during that time. Still, the practice of factoring race into the admissions process faced repeated attacks. In 1998, during an era of conservatism, California voters approved Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in any state or government agency, including its university system. Since then, eight more states have eliminated such race-conscious policies.What could happen next?The end of affirmative action at those state levels shows just how impactful the consideration of race in admissions has been: a UC Berkeley study found that after the ban in California, the number of applicants of color in the UC system “sharply shifted away from UC’s most selective Berkeley and UCLA campuses, causing a cascade of students to enroll at lower-quality public institutions and some private universities”. Specifically, the number of Black freshmen admitted to UC Berkeley dropped to 3.6% between 2006 and 2010 – almost half of its population before the ban.In an amicus brief in the Harvard case, attorneys for the University of Michigan, which had to stop considering race in admissions in 2006, argued that despite “persistent, vigorous and varied efforts” to achieve diversity, it has struggled to do so without race-consciousness. The number of Black and Native American students has “dramatically” dropped since the end of affirmative action in the state.Though students of color remain underrepresented at selective colleges and universities today, institutions argue that their presence helps shape students’ on-campus experiences. The possible removal of race consideration from college admissions would set a precedent for a less diverse school system, which stands in stark contrast to an increasingly diverse world. More

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      in US Politics

      George Santos mystery bail guarantors to be revealed on Thursday

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      The two people who guaranteed bail for George Santos will have their names publicly revealed, a federal judge ruled, rejecting the indicted Republican congressman’s claim that the disclosure could threaten the guarantors’ safety.Joanna Seybert, a US district judge in Central Islip, New York, said the names would be made public on Thursday at 12pm ET.Seybert said Santos could in the meantime try to modify the terms of his release if his guarantors, who he has suggested are family members, withdraw their $500,000 guarantee.Santos, 34, has expressed a willingness to go to jail rather than release the names.The first-term congressman has pleaded not guilty to a 13-count indictment accusing him of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.Following his election, Santos drew huge criticism, including bipartisan calls that he resign, after reports that he had lied about much of his personal and professional background.Amid numerous stories detailing a picaresque political rise, Santos has denied wrongdoing but admitted to fabricating large parts of his résumé.Republican leaders in the House have not pushed Santos to quit. As he took his seat in Congress in January, he supported Kevin McCarthy of California through 15 votes for the position of speaker. McCarthy must rely on a narrow majority, prey to the far right of the party.Joseph Murray, a lawyer for Santos, did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the order to reveal the identities of the guarantors.Santos appealed a 6 June ruling by a federal magistrate judge to identify the guarantors.At least 11 media organizations sought the names, citing public interest. According to a court filing, the House ethics committee also wants the names, to determine whether Santos violated rules on gifts.Murray has said Santos and his staff have been subjected to a “media frenzy and hateful attacks” since the congressman’s indictment became public on 9 May, and it was “reasonable” to believe his bail guarantors might face the same treatment. More

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      The supreme court made a surprising ruling for Native American rights | Nick Estes

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      A white couple in Texas felt racially discriminated against when facing barriers to adopting a Navajo child. Backed by powerful corporate interests and other non-Native families, the Brackeens brought their grievance to the US supreme court and attempted to overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. The “rights” of individuals thereby stood against the collective rights of entire nations of people who were here first in a legal system not of their own making. The Brackeens argued that the law privileges Indians as a race over others, including white families, and is, therefore, unconstitutional. The argument reeked of “reverse racism”, a bogus notion that measures taken to protect marginalized people end up harming white people.The ICWA, however, was designed to reverse a sordid history of Native family separation that benefited white families seeking to adopt Native children. More importantly, the law guarantees that federally recognized tribes have a say in their children’s futures by keeping them with Native families. Those determinations are not based on race but on the political status of tribes and the rights of their members.Indian country blew a huge sigh of relief on Thursday when the rightwing-majority court ruled against the Brackeens and upheld the ICWA. A decision otherwise would have had dire consequences for tribes. Beyond removing protections for their children, it could have changed tribes’ status, which precedes the existence of the United States and its constitution, to that of racial minorities whose remaining lands, histories and identities would, without thought, be absorbed into the American melting pot.The 7-2 decision should be celebrated as a clear sign that not only is tribal sovereignty a constitutional reality, but it is also here to stay. Sadly, the supreme court, throughout its history, has more often done harm to Native sovereignty than protected it. “Often, Native American tribes have come to his court seeking justice only to leave with bowed heads and empty hands,” admitted Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, in his concurring majority opinion. His opinion offers a rich history of Indian child removal, examining the transition from federal Indian boarding schools to state welfare systems and adoption agencies that engaged in Native family separation.Gorsuch also writes of a 19th-century court that created the foundations of federal Indian law, upon which today’s justices draw. The court made those decisions during a time of great horror for Native people – often providing legal justification for Indigenous genocide and land seizures. In the 1823 case Johnson v M’Intosh, Chief Justice John Marshall argued that the United States inherited its right to Native lands from previous European powers. “Conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny,” he wrote. The right to take lands from non-Christians and non-Europeans derived from 15th-century papal bulls known as the “doctrine of discovery”.That principle of racial and civilizational superiority hasn’t gone away and today infects the minds of jurists of all stripes. As recently as 2005, the supreme court invoked the doctrine in a ruling against a land claim by the Oneida Indian Nation. Writing against tribal sovereignty, the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned against “rekindling embers of (tribal) sovereignty that long ago grew cold”.Last March, after the tireless advocacy of Indigenous peoples, the Vatican “repudiat(ed) those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery’”. That rejection, however, didn’t undo the centuries of terror against Indigenous peoples and their children taken from them to be “civilized” according to Christian principles. It didn’t return the land or property the Catholic church stole from Indigenous peoples. And it didn’t overturn the fundamental premise upon which federal Indian law still rests – European conquest.In his concurring opinion in Haaland v Brackeen, Gorsuch makes a strong case defending tribal sovereignty against the overbroad powers of Congress to curtail tribal sovereignty and the overreach of states in his concurring opinion. Liberal justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor joined Gorsuch in his opinion. But they didn’t concur with his assertion that the principle that Congress has “plenary power” to divest tribes of their sovereignty conflicts with the original understanding of the constitution. Gorsuch argues that the constitution doesn’t grant the authority to limit tribal sovereignty. Yet Congress has used its powers to terminate federally recognized tribes and divest tribes of criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians.Gorsuch’s concurring opinion shows he is the most serious about engaging federal Indian law and history. How far his call for aligning Indian law with original understandings of the constitution will go is anyone’s guess. His sympathies with tribal sovereignty also show that getting good legal outcomes for tribal nations is like rolling the dice with unelected judges who hold so much sway over the survival and existence of tribal nations.But the victory in keeping ICWA and upholding tribal sovereignty doesn’t lie with Gorsuch. Leading up to this decision, tribes and activists led an effective political campaign to teach the public. Since ICWA’s passage in 1978, 14 states passed their own state versions of the law. In anticipation of ICWA being overturned, several states (including several Republican-majority state governments) recently passed protections to uphold it.The popular sentiment is on the side of tribal sovereignty. It’s now a question of what actions must be taken to ensure the collective rights of tribes are guarded against the individual and corporate desires to lay claim to Native lands, identities and children.
      Nick Estes is a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an assistant professer of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is a journalist, historian and the host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance More

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      Missouri student loan provider baffled by inclusion in supreme court debt relief challenge

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      Newly released emails obtained by the Student Borrower Protection Center reveal employees at a student loan service provider in Missouri expressed confusion over the state’s attorney general placing the provider at the center of a lawsuit filed to block the Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.The United States supreme court is expected to issue a ruling on a legal challenge to the president’s student debt forgiveness of up to $20,000 in the coming weeks. That challenge – filed by the Missouri attorney general and five other Republican-led states – and another challenge filed by the conservative advocacy organization, Job Creators Network, made it to the supreme court.The Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority – or Mohela – is at the center of the challenge by the GOP-led states, claiming the loan service provider would lose revenue and face negative impacts over its financial obligations to Missouri. Consumer advocates, meanwhile, have pointed out that Mohela stands to gain revenue from Biden’s cancellation plan.In court hearings on the challenges earlier this year, US supreme court justices questioned why Mohela did not bring its own legal challenges to Biden’s debt cancellation plan and how the Republican-led states could claim harm on their behalf.Emails released since establish that Mohela employees expressed similar confusion.“The [Missouri] state AG needed to claim that our borrowers were harmed for standing, so they’re making us look bad by filing this not only with [Missouri] on it, but especially bad because they filed it in [Missouri],” wrote a Mohela employee in September 2022.Another Mohela employee asked in an October 2022 email: “just out of curiosity, is MOHELA apart of the lawsuit going on to prevent the loan forgiveness? Are we the bad guys?”A fellow employee responded, “Mohela isn’t technically a part of that lawsuit, the Missouri AG is suing on their behalf. However, it’s all about the [Family Federal Education Loans] stuff, and since they changed the rules, that lawsuit should be ruled as lacking standing.”Ella Azoulay, a Student Borrower Protection Center research and policy analyst, argued the emails confirmed the “partisan hack job” of Missouri’s lawsuit to block student debt relief.The legal challenges have paused Biden’s student debt relief plan announced in August 2022. The relief plan would grant up to $20,000 in student debt relief for Pell grant recipients and up to $10,000 in student debt forgiveness for all other borrowers with annual incomes under $125,000. Nearly 26 million Americans had applied for relief under the plan by November 2022. More

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      in US Politics

      Nusrat Jahan Choudhury confirmed as first Muslim woman to be federal judge

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      The US Senate has confirmed the former American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Nusrat Jahan Choudhury as the first Muslim woman to serve as a federal judge on Thursday.Choudhury, 46, is also the first Bangladeshi American to serve in this lifetime position. She will serve as a judge on the US court for the eastern district of New York.All federal judges must be approved by the Senate, which confirmed her appointment in a narrow 50-49 decision.The conservative Democrat Joe Manchin voted against her confirmation because he said he believed some of her past comments made her biased against law enforcement.“As a staunch supporter of our men and women in uniform, I opposed Ms Choudhury’s nomination,” Manchin said in a statement.Manchin also opposed the confirmation of two other Biden-nominated federal judges: Dale Ho, a judge on the southern district of New York, and Nancy Abudu, a judge on the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit. They were confirmed without his support.Once the deputy director of ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, Choudhury has a track record for fighting racial profiling and unequal treatment of the poor.Her bio on the ACLU’s website says: “Nusrat helped secure the first federal court ruling striking down the US government’s no-fly list procedures for violating due process.“She filed litigation to challenge the NYPD’s unjustified and discriminatory profiling of Muslims for surveillance, which resulted in a court-ordered settlement agreement, and to secure public records about the FBI’s racial and ethnic mapping program.”In a virtual ACLU event in March 2021, Choudhury said: “As a Muslim young girl of color here in the Chicago area, race was a part of my reality. It led to police stops that shouldn’t have ever happened; it led to family members facing problems at airports; and led to what I saw around me, which was dramatic residential segregation and different opportunities for people of color than for white people in the city of Chicago.”The US’s first Muslim federal judge ever appointed was Zahid Quraishi in 2021. More

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      in Elections

      Ex-NSA employee sentenced to two weeks for US Capitol attack

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      A former National Security Agency employee was sentenced to two weeks imprisonment for storming the US Capitol on January 6, with associates described by authorities as fellow followers of a white nationalist movement.Paul Lovley, 24, lived in Halethorpe, Maryland, and was an NSA information technology specialist before the riot on 6 January 2021, prosecutors said.On Tuesday US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced Lovley to 14 days behind bars, to be served over seven weekends, and three years of probation, a spokesperson for the US attorney for the District of Columbia said.Lovley pleaded guilty in February to parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building, a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum six-month sentence.He was charged with four other men who prosecutors described as “members” of America First, a group led by the antisemitic internet personality Nicholas Fuentes, whose followers often call themselves “Groypers” or members of a “Groyper Army”.Joseph Brody, Thomas Carey, Jon Lizak and Gabriel Chase were the other men charged. The five, all in their early 20s, gathered at Lovley’s Maryland home on 5 January 2021 then went to Washington to attended Donald Trump’s “Save America” rally, at which the then president advanced his lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.After other rioters breached the Capitol, the five men entered the building through the Senate wing, joined the mob in pushing past police officers and went into a conference room for the office of the then House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, prosecutors said. Brody broke off from the group and entered the Senate chamber while Lovley and the others remained outside.After leaving the Capitol, Brody lifted a metal barricade and appeared to use it to obstruct or assault an officer, prosecutors said. Before leaving Capitol grounds, the group went to an area where rioters destroyed and looted media equipment.“I am certain that I would not have even shown up if I had known that the day was going to turn into what it did beforehand,” Lovley wrote in a letter to the judge.Carey, Lizak and Chase pleaded guilty to the same misdemeanor offense. Last Tuesday, Kollar-Kotelly sentenced Carey to three years of probation and 14 days of jail time. Chase is scheduled to be sentenced in July. A sentencing hearing for Lizak is set for October. Charges against Brody have not been resolved.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Tuesday, David Walls-Kaufman, a 66-year-old DC-based chiropractor was sentenced to two months in jail by another US district judge, Jia M Cobb, for the same misdemeanor offense, the Washington Post reported.Walls-Kaufman faces a wrongful-death civil lawsuit filed by Erin Smith, the widow of the Capitol officer Jeffrey Smith. The lawsuit accuses Walls-Kaufman of assaulting Smith, who later killed himself.According to the Post, the suit says video footage shows Walls-Kaufman beating Smith with his own baton, resulting in a traumatic brain injury that eventually led to Smith’s suicide.More than 530 people have been sentenced for crimes related to January 6 and more than 1,000 arrests have been made. More

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      The Shadow Docket review: how the US supreme court keeps sunlight out

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      Only a quarter of Americans have confidence in the supreme court. As the country strives to navigate a post-Roe v Wade world, the right to abortion removed, regard for the right wing of the court is scarcer still. Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito have negative ratings with the public. Kavanaugh and Thomas are underwater by double-digits.Being perceived as a predator – Kavanaugh – engenders disdain or worse. Taking undisclosed gifts from a Republican mega-donor and being married to an election-denier who trades on her spouse’s judgeship – Thomas – triggers demands for renewed oversight.When Ginni Thomas visited the White House “you knew your day was wrecked”, said a senior Trump aide, according to the Daily Beast. This week came news that Clarence Thomas and Alito have not yet filed their financial disclosures and have received extensions. The circus rumbles on.Against such a backdrop, Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas law school and CNN commentator, delivers The Shadow Docket.Under the subtitle “How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic”, Vladeck offers a well-researched indictment of how the supreme court has grown to rely on using procedural orders rather than rulings to make new law, escaping scrutiny while delivering major victories to the political right.The term “shadow docket” was coined in 2015, by William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor. In Vladeck’s words, it was “a catch-all for a body of the supreme court’s work that was, to that point, receiving virtually no academic or public attention”.Strictly speaking, the shadow docket is a vehicle for addressing issues that demand urgent attention, usually injunctions and orders to preserve the status quo. But it has morphed into a fraught topic. The court has adjudicated cases involving abortion, voting rights and Covid policy by means of the shadow docket. The docket also became the prime location for the elevation and reordering of religious rights, under the free exercise clause of the first amendment.Almost by definition, docket rulings are sparse. They are often unaccompanied by reasoning, Vladeck writes. “Invariably”, they lack “identification of how (or how many of) the justices voted and can be handed down at all times of day or, as has increasingly become the norm, in the middle of the night.”Vladeck knows his subject. In September 2021, he testified to the Senate judiciary committee about “Texas’s Unconstitutional Abortion Ban and the Role of the Shadow Docket”.He has also said: “What’s remarkable is that the court repeatedly acquiesced and acquiesced [to the right] … and almost always without any explanation.”On the page, he observes that few such Trumpian wins have resulted in actual binding precedents. Rather, shadow docket triumphs mainly satisfy political needs. Vladeck credits Noel Francisco, the solicitor general under Trump, and his deputy, for hatching the legal strategy that for example salvaged the Muslim travel ban and efforts to “build the wall” on the southern border without express congressional appropriation.SB-8, the Texas six-week abortion ban, provides a stark illustration of how the process continues to work. In September 2021, the supreme court did not formally opine on the constitutionality of the draconian Texas law. Instead, in an unsigned shadow docket order, a bare majority allowed the statute to slide into effect. It read:
      The application for injunctive relief or, in the alternative, to vacate stays of the district court proceedings presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the court is denied.”
      The text made no mention of Roe, the 1973 ruling then in place, safeguarding federal abortion rights. But everyone could see what was coming.John Roberts, the chief justice, a George W Bush appointee, would have stopped the Texas law from going into effect, pending a decision on the merits. The statutory rubric was “unusual” and “unprecedented”, he wrote. “The legislature has imposed a prohibition on abortions after roughly six weeks, and then essentially delegated enforcement of that prohibition to the populace at large.”Months later, Roberts voted with the three liberals to save Roe. No matter. The court struck it down.Not everyone welcomes the attention Vladeck and others have brought to the use of the shadow docket. Alito publicly twitted the media for portraying it as something “sinister”, and depicting the court as “having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways”.On the other hand, Thomas’s friendship with the mega-donor Harlan Crowe should surely give any observer clear reason to pause.Elsewhere, Coney Barrett has denied that the court engages in results-oriented decision-making, urging an audience at the Reagan Library in April 2022 to “read the opinion” instead.Vladeck is unswayed: “It’s essential context to point out that, just two days later, she joined a 5-4 shadow docket ruling with no opinion for the public to read. It’s all part of the story – or, at least, it should be.”“The rise of the shadow docket … has negative effects on public perception of the court – and of the perceived legitimacy of the justices’ work,” Vladeck writes.The legitimacy of the court erodes.The Shadow Docket is comprehensive and sensitive to nuance, written for concerned audiences. Members of Congress, the bar, the press and engaged non-lawyers come to mind. Vladeck covers more than two centuries of legal history, together with the transformation of the court into a visibly co-equal branch of government.On Thursday night, news broke of 37 federal criminal counts against Donald Trump. The next election is 17 months away. The legitimacy and resilience of all US institutions stands to be tested like never before.
      The Shadow Docket is published in the US by Hachette More

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      Trump’s latest indictment: what do the charges mean and what’s next?

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      Donald Trump has been indicted for illegally retaining classified government documents after leaving office in 2021.What happens next and what do the charges mean for the former president and the 2024 election campaign?What is Trump accused of doing?Trump is being charged with 37 criminal counts, including mishandling classified documents and obstruction of justice, according to an indictment unsealed on Friday afternoon.He had proclaimed his innocence on Thursday evening.According to the indictment, Trump stored classified documents in “a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room” at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.It also added that Trump directed Walt Nauta, his valet and aide, to deliberately move boxes of records to “conceal them from Trump’s attorney, the FBI, and the grand jury”. Nauta also faces a count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, said the indictment.In January 2022, Trump agreed to return 15 boxes of records to the US National Archives and Records Administration, and officials discovered in them more than 700 pages of records marked as classified.In August last year, the FBI conducted a search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, and seized approximately 13,000 more records, about 100 of which were marked as classified, including some marked top secret.What charges does Trump face?The most serious charge is being brought under the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the unauthorized possession of national defense information. It is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.The first world war-era law predates classification of documents but makes it a crime to willfully retain national defense information that could be useful to foreign adversaries.According to the indictment, documents possessed by Trump “included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack, and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack”.Trump is also charged with several counts of obstruction of justice, which criminalizes any “intent to impede, obstruct, or influence” an investigation and is also charged with making false statements to investigators.“The purpose of the conspiracy was for Trump to keep classified documents he has taken with him from the White House and to hide and conceal them from a federal grand jury,” the indictment said.What happens next?Trump said he had been summoned to appear in court on Tuesday afternoon in Miami. It was not immediately clear what the procedure would look like. When he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney in the New York Stormy Daniels case (a state case rather than federal), Trump surrendered to authorities, where he was booked behind closed doors and appeared in the courtroom, sitting with his lawyers at the defense table.In the Mar-a-Lago case, Trump is likely to surrender himself to the FBI, which has a field office in Miami some distance from the federal court. Normally, a defendant would be fingerprinted by prosecutors and have a mugshot taken. It is not known yet if Trump will have his picture taken and whether he will be processed in the FBI office or at the courthouse, before appearing before a judge to formally hear the charges against him read for the first time. He is expected to plead not guilty. After that arraignment, he would probably be released pending his next court appearance.Does an indictment prevent a candidate from campaigning or taking office?None of the charges expected to be unsealed would bar Trump from office if he became the Republican party nominee and then won the presidency at the 2024 election, even if convicted.A trial would take place many months from now, and Trump can freely campaign during this time. The US constitution only requires that presidential candidates be natural-born US citizens who are at least 35 years old and have lived in the country for 14 years.Trump said on Thursday on his Truth Social platform that he is innocent. He would be free to campaign even if he is convicted and sent to prison, and legal experts say there would be no basis to block his swearing-in as president even if he is incarcerated, though this would pose extraordinary logistical and security questions.What would happen if Trump took office while the Mar-a-Lago case is pending?It is unlikely that the prosecution would proceed if Trump won the November 2024 election.The US Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, and presidents are the top federal law enforcement officers in the country. Federal prosecutors generally serve at their pleasure. The justice department has a decades-old policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. The department can deviate from policy in “extraordinary circumstances” with the approval of the US attorney general.Could Joe Biden pardon Trump?Yes.Could Trump, as president, pardon himself?Maybe. Many scholars have said a self-pardon would be unconstitutional because it violates the basic principle that nobody should be the judge in his or her own case. Others have argued that a self-pardon is constitutional because the pardon power is very broadly worded in the constitution. However, Trump could not pardon himself for a conviction in state court. He is currently under indictment in New York state court for allegedly using falsified records to conceal hush-money payments he paid to Stormy Daniels, and Georgia prosecutors are investigating his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in that state.Reuters contributed reporting More