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      Special counsel files new indictment against Trump over 2020 election

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      The justice department filed a new indictment against Donald Trump on Tuesday over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The maneuver does not substantially change the criminal case against him but protects it in the wake of a July supreme court decision ruling saying that Trump and other presidents have immunity for official acts, but not unofficial ones.“Today, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned a superseding indictment, charging the defendant with the same criminal offenses that were charged in the original indictment,” lawyers for Jack Smith, the special counsel handling the case, said in a filing that accompanied what is known as a superseding indictment.“The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions in Trump v United States.”The document retains the same four criminal charges against Trump that were originally filed last summer. But portions of the new indictment are rewritten to emphasize that Trump was not acting in his official capacity during his efforts to try to overturn the election.The new document, for example, removes mention of Jeffrey Clark, a former justice department official who aided Trump’s attempt to try to overturn the election. Clark was the only government official who was listed as an unnamed co-conspirator in the original indictment.“Trump is therefore absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials,” the supreme court wrote in its ruling in July.The supreme court also suggested that a president could be criminally immune in connection to acts between him and the vice-president. The superseding indictment reframes Trump’s interactions with Mike Pence, emphasizing that he was Trump’s running mate.At other points in the document, prosecutors emphasize that Trump was acting outside the scope of his official duties.“The defendant had no official responsibilities related to any state’s certification of the election results,” the document says.Prosecutors also highlighted that Trump used his Twitter/X account both for official and personal acts. They noted that the rally he attended on the Ellipse, near the White House, on 6 January 2021 was a “campaign speech”.Even if the case is still unlikely to go to trial before the 2024 election in November, and even if the Trump lawyers file motions seeking to excise more parts of the indictment, the decision to pursue a superseding indictment may have been to avoid more delay.Trump has been enormously successful in delaying his criminal cases, which came as part of a broader strategy to push his legal troubles past November, in the hopes that he wins and can appoint a loyalist as the attorney general who would then drop the cases entirely.In July, the supreme court’s conservative majority ruled that former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for official actions that extended to the “outer perimeter” of their office, most notably any interactions with the justice department and executive branch officials.The framework of criminal accountability for presidents, as laid out by the ruling, has three categories: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity, and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.The court also ruled that the special counsel, Jack Smith, could not introduce as evidence at trial any acts deemed to be official, even as contextual information for jurors to show Trump’s intent. More

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      in Elections

      Supreme court immunity ruling to cause new delay in Trump 2020 election case

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      Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election is expected to be delayed by another month after special counsel prosecutors said they had not finished assessing how the US supreme court’s immunity decision would narrow their case.On Thursday, the prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team told Tanya Chutkan, the US district judge presiding over the case, that they needed her to delay until 30 August a deadline to submit a possible schedule for how to proceed with a complicated fact-finding mission ordered by the court.“The Government continues to assess the new precedent set forth last month in the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v United States, including through consultation with other Department of Justice components,” prosecutors wrote in a two-page court filing.“The Government has not finalized its position on the most appropriate schedule for the parties to brief issues related to the decision. The Government therefore respectfully requests additional time to provide the Court with an informed proposal.”The supreme court ruled last month that former presidents are entitled to some degree of immunity from criminal prosecution, marking a victory for Trump.Precisely what prosecutors are now stuck on remains unclear, although the ruling struck some of the charges against Trump and is expected to see Chutkan needing to pare back the indictment further.Trump is accused of overseeing a sprawling effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, including two counts of conspiring to obstruct the certification of the election results, conspiring to defraud the government, and conspiring to disenfranchise voters.The alleged illegal conduct includes Trump pressing justice department officials to open sham investigations, Trump obstructing Congress from certifying the election, including by trying to co-opt his vice-president, Trump helping prompt the Capitol attack, and Trump’s plot to recruit fake electors.View image in fullscreenThe supreme court decided that criminal accountability for presidents has three categories: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity, and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.The ruling meant that the charges related to core executive functions will be thrown out, and for Chutkan to determine through a fact-finding exercise if any other charges that might come under official acts must be expunged.Whether Chutkan will do the fact-finding on legal arguments or legal briefs, or will consider evidence perhaps given by witnesses, was supposed to become clearer after Trump and the special counsel jointly submitted the now-delayed scheduling brief.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s lawyers are expected to ask for few or no witnesses, the Guardian has previously reported. And in a statement on Truth Social, Trump called anew for the case to be tossed: “It is clear that the supreme court’s historic decision on immunity demands and requires a complete and total dismissal.”The deadline for the scheduling brief was the first activity in the case since December, when it was frozen after Trump asked the US court of appeals for the DC circuit and then the supreme court to consider his argument that he had absolute immunity from criminal prosecution.The supreme court issued its immunity ruling on 1 July, but the case only returned to Chutkan’s jurisdiction last week because of the court’s 25-day waiting period for any rehearing requests, and an additional week for the judgment to be formally sent down to the trial judge.Trump has already been enormously successful in delaying his criminal cases, a strategy he adopted in the hope that winning the 2024 election would enable him to appoint a loyalist as attorney general who he could direct to drop the charges.It is all but impossible now for the special counsel to bring the case to trial before election day, given Trump can make interim appeals for any decisions that Chutkan makes about the impact of the immunity decision. More

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      in US Politics

      Clarence Thomas failed to disclose more private jet travel, senator says

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      The conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose more private travel on a jet owned by the rightwing mega-donor Harlan Crow, a Democratic senator said on Monday, amid a swirling ethics scandal and demands for judiciary reform.“I am deeply concerned that Mr Crow may have been showering a public official with extravagant gifts, then writing off those gifts to lower his tax bill,” Ron Wyden of Oregon, the Senate finance committee chair, told a lawyer for Crow in a letter.“This concern is only heightened by the committee’s recent discovery of additional undisclosed international travel on Mr Crow’s private jet by Justice Thomas.”The committee, Wyden said, had “obtained international flight records showing that on 19 November 2010, Justice Thomas and his wife [the rightwing activist Ginni Thomas] flew from Hawaii to New Zealand on Mr Crow’s private jet, before flying back from New Zealand to Hawaii on the jet a week later on 27 November 2010. Mr Crow was also a passenger on these flights.“To date, Justice Thomas has never disclosed this private jet travel on any financial disclosure forms, even though Justice Thomas has amended disclosures to reflect other international travel on Mr Crow’s private jet.”Thomas was confirmed in 1991, after stormy hearings in which he was accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill, a law professor. More than 30 years later, he is the longest-serving rightwinger on a court controlled by Republican nominees, 6-3.Gifts to Thomas, undeclared and primarily from Crow but also from other sources and to other justices, have stoked an ethics crisis. Apparent political sympathies among the judges – and family members, with Ginni Thomas having participated in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election – have only added fuel to the fire.The non-profit newsroom ProPublica won a Pulitzer prize for its reporting on the issue. In Congress, the New York progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has led calls for Thomas and Samuel Alito, his fellow arch-rightwinger, to be impeached and removed – a political gambit without a realistic chance of success.Supreme court justices are nominally subject to the same ethics rules as all federal judges but in practice police themselves. An ethics code was introduced last November but remains without outside means of enforcement.Elena Kagan, one of three liberals on the court, has called for better enforcement of ethics rules. John Roberts, the rightwing chief justice, apparently remains unmoved. Despite calls from Wyden and other Democrats, Roberts has refused to testify in Congress.All the while, the Roberts court has handed down major conservative victories, including removing the federal right to abortion and saying presidents enjoy immunity for some acts.Joe Biden recently introduced reform proposals including term limits. In response to the president’s proposal, Neil Gorsuch, the first of three rightwingers appointed in four years during Trump’s presidency, used an interview with Fox News to warn: “I just say: be careful.”Thomas has said he initially believed he did not have to disclose gifts from donors. In the case of Crow, a real-estate billionaire known for collecting memorabilia associated with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, gifts to Thomas also included resort stays, a property purchase and payment of school fees.Thomas did not immediately comment about Wyden’s letter.As reported by the New York Times, a spokesperson for Crow said his lawyers had “already addressed Senator Wyden’s inquiries, which have no legal basis and are only intended to harass a private citizen”.Crow “consider[s] this matter settled”, they said.Wyden said he was “concerned that I have so far been unable to even determine the full extent of the potential tax abuse at issue”.A committee spokesperson told the Times the panel still hoped Crow would provide tax records voluntarily.Wyden said: “Neither Mr Crow nor Justice Thomas have disclosed the full scale of the Thomases’ use of the Michaela Rose [Crow’s superyacht] and private jets courtesy of Mr Crow, even as the Congress continues to uncover additional international private jet travel with Mr Crow that Justice Thomas failed to disclose on his ethics filings.”Citing filings recently updated by Thomas, “to include an eight-day voyage aboard the Michaela Rose in Indonesia in 2019”, Wyden said the justice “still has not disclosed other trips” on Crow’s yacht”.He added: “Public reports show evidence that Justice Thomas was a passenger aboard the Michaela Rose in Greece, New Zealand and elsewhere.“Additionally, a relative of Justice Thomas has stated that he personally witnessed Justice Thomas travel aboard the Michaela Rose in the Caribbean, Russia and the Baltics, with the trip to Russia also including helicopter ride(s).”Caroline Ciccone, president of Accountable.US, a group which campaigns for court reform, said: “The undue influence exerted by wealthy and powerful individuals like Harlan Crow over Justice Thomas highlights systemic corruption that cannot be ignored.”Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, said Wyden had “strengthen[ed] the case [the president] made for common-sense reforms that are backed by constitutional experts across the political spectrum – as well as the vast majority of the American people.“The most powerful court in the United States shouldn’t be subject to the lowest ethical standards, and conflicts of interest on the supreme court cannot go unchecked.” More

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      in US Politics

      US supreme court declines to halt Trump’s sentencing in hush-money case

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      The US supreme court on Monday rejected a bid by the state of Missouri to halt Donald Trump’s upcoming sentencing for his conviction in New York on felony charges involving hush money paid to a porn star and left a related gag order until after the 5 November presidential election.The decision by the justices came in response to a lawsuit by the state of Missouri claiming that the case against Trump infringed on the right of voters under the constitution to hear from the Republican presidential nominee as he seeks to regain the White House.The supreme court’s order was unsigned. Conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito indicated they would have heard Missouri’s case.Trump was found guilty in May of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she has said she had with Trump. Prosecutors have said the payment was designed to boost his presidential campaign in 2016, when he defeated Hillary Clinton.Trump, the Republican candidate in this year’s election, denies having had sex with Daniels and has vowed to appeal his conviction after his sentencing, scheduled for September.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMissouri’s Republican attorney general Andrew Bailey filed a 3 July lawsuit against New York state asking the supreme court to pause Trump’s impending sentencing and the gag order placed on him by New York state judge Juan Merchan. More

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      in US Politics

      Justice Neil Gorsuch: Americans are ‘getting whacked’ by too many laws

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      US supreme court justice Neil Gorsuch has said ordinary Americans are “getting whacked” by too many laws and regulations in a new book that underscores his skepticism of federal agencies and the power they wield.“Too little law and we’re not safe, and our liberties aren’t protected,” Gorsuch told the Associated Press in an interview in his supreme court office. “But too much law and you actually impair those same things.”Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law is being published Tuesday by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Gorsuch has received a $500,000 advance for the book, according to his annual financial disclosure reports.In the interview, Gorsuch refused to be drawn into discussions about term limits or an enforceable code of ethics for the justices, both recently proposed by Joe Biden at a time of diminished public trust in the court.Supreme court justice Elena Kagan, speaking a couple of days before the president’s proposal, separately said the court’s ethics code, adopted by the justices last November, should have a means of enforcement.But Gorsuch did talk about the importance of judicial independence. “I’m not saying that there aren’t ways to improve what we have. I’m simply saying that we’ve been given something very special. It’s the envy of the world, the United States judiciary,” he said.Gorsuch echoed that stance in an interview Sunday on Fox News, remarking: “I just say: Be careful.“The independent judiciary … What does it mean to you as an American? It means that when you’re unpopular, you can get a fair hearing.”The 56-year-old justice was the first of three supreme court nominees confirmed during Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump’s appointees have combined to entrench a conservative majority that has overturned the federal abortion rights once granted by Roe v Wade, ended affirmative action in college admissions, expanded gun rights and clipped environmental regulations aimed at climate change, as well as air and water pollution more generally.In July, the supreme court completed a term in which Gorsuch and the court’s five other conservative justices delivered sharp rebukes to the administrative state in three major cases, including the decision that overturned the 40-year-old Chevron decision that had made it more likely that courts would sustain regulations. The court’s three liberal justices dissented each time.Gorsuch also was in the majority in ruling that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution in a decision that indefinitely delayed the election interference case against Trump. What’s more, the justices made it harder to use a federal obstruction charge against people who were part of the mob that violently attacked the US Capitol on January 6 2021 in an effort to overturn Trump’s defeat by Biden in the 2020 election.Gorsuch defended the immunity ruling as necessary to prevent presidents from being hampered while in office by threats of prosecution once they leave.The court had to wrestle with an unprecedented situation, he said. “Here we have, for the first time in our history, one presidential administration bringing criminal charges against a prior president. It’s a grave question, right? Grave implications,” Gorsuch said.But in the book, co-authored by a former law clerk, Janie Nitze, Gorusch largely sets those big issues aside and turns his focus to a fisherman, a magician, Amish farmers, immigrants, a hair braider and others who risked jail time, large fines, deportation and other hardships over unyielding rules.In 18 years as a judge, including the past seven on the supreme court, Gorsuch said, “There were just so many cases that came to me in which I saw ordinary Americans, just everyday, regular people trying to go about their lives, not trying to hurt anybody or do anything wrong and just getting whacked, unexpectedly, by some legal rule they didn’t know about.”The problem, he said, is that there has been an explosion of laws and regulations, at both the federal and state levels. The sheer volume of Congress’s output for the past decade is overwhelming, he said, averaging 344 pieces of legislation totaling 2m to 3m words a year.One vignette involves John Yates, a Florida fisherman who was convicted of getting rid of some undersized grouper under a federal law originally aimed at the accounting industry and the destruction of evidence in the Enron scandal. Yates’s case went all the way to the supreme court, where he won by a single vote.“I wanted to tell the story of people whose lives were affected,” Gorsuch said.

      Guardian staff contributed. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump 2020 election interference case resumes after immunity decision

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      Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election was set to resume on Friday with narrowed charges, after the US supreme court ruling that gave former presidents broad immunity took effect and the case returned to the control of the presiding trial judge.The formal transfer of jurisdiction back to the US district judge Tanya Chutkan means she can issue a scheduling order for how she intends to proceed – including whether she will hold public hearings to determine how to apply the immunity decision.The nation’s highest court issued its ruling on Trump’s immunity claim last month. But the case has only now returned to Chutkan’s control because of the 25-day waiting period for any rehearing requests and an additional week for the judgment to be formally sent down.How Chutkan proceeds could have far-reaching ramifications on the scope of the case, and the presidential election in November.Trump is accused of overseeing a sprawling effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, including two counts of conspiring to obstruct the certification of the election results, conspiring to defraud the government and conspiring to disenfranchise voters.The alleged illegal conduct includes Trump pressing US justice department officials to open sham investigations, Trump obstructing Congress from certifying the election, including by trying to co-opt his vice president, Trump helping prompt the Capitol attack, and Trump’s plot to recruit fake electors.But the supreme court decided that criminal accountability for presidents has three categories: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.View image in fullscreenTrump’s lawyers are expected to argue that Chutkan can decide whether the conduct is immune based on legal arguments alone, negating the need for witnesses or multiple evidentiary hearings, the Guardian first reported, citing people familiar with the matter.Trump’s lawyers are expected to argue the maximalist position that they considered all of the charged conduct was Trump acting in his official capacity as president and therefore presumptively immune – and incumbent on prosecutors to prove otherwise, the people said.And Trump’s lawyers are expected to suggest that even though the supreme court appeared to contemplate evidentiary hearings to sort through the conduct – it referenced “fact-finding” – any disputes can be resolved purely on legal arguments, the people said.In doing so, Trump will try to foreclose witness testimony that could be politically damaging, because it would cause evidence about his efforts to subvert the 2020 election that has polled poorly to be suppressed, and legally damaging because it could cause Chutkan to rule against Trump.Trump’s lawyers have privately suggested they expect at least some evidentiary hearings to take place, but they are also intent on challenging testimony from people such as Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and other high-profile White House officials.For instance, if prosecutors try to call Pence or his chief of staff, Marc Short, to testify about meetings where Trump discussed stopping the January 6 certification, Trump would try to block that testimony by asserting executive privilege and having Pence assert the speech or debate clause protection.Trump has already been enormously successful in delaying his criminal cases, principally by convincing the supreme court to take the immunity appeal in the 2020 election subversion case, which was frozen while the court considered the matter.The delay strategy thus far has been aimed at pushing the cases until after the November election, in the hope that Trump would be re-elected and then appoint as attorney general a loyalist who would drop the charges.But now, even if Trump loses, his lawyers have coalesced on a legal strategy that could take months to resolve depending on how prosecutors choose to approach evidentiary hearings, adding to additional months of anticipated appeals over what Chutkan determines are official acts. More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden is politicizing US supreme court reform – and that’s a good thing | Austin Sarat

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      “Better late than never” is a useful maxim in all of life and in politics as well. On Monday, Joe Biden caught the “better late than never” bug when he unveiled a series of proposals to reform the US supreme court.Those proposals come more than two and a half years after the US president’s presidential commission on the supreme court issued its recommendations, and more than 40 years after Biden called former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to impose term limits on the court “boneheaded”.In 2020, during his quest for the White House, Biden again distanced himself from people who were pushing for significant institutional reform at the court.How times have changed. That was before the court overruled Roe v Wade, the ethics scandals of justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas came to light, and before the court gave the president almost blanket immunity from criminal prosecution.Biden announced his new thinking in a Washington Post op-ed, in which he detailed what he called “three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy”. They begin with a constitutional amendment designed to reverse the supreme court’s Trump v United States decision granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts.Biden calls it the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment”. It would “make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office”.The second of Biden’s reform proposals would impose term limits on the justices who sit on the supreme court. It would institute “a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court”.Third, Biden called for enacting “a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court”. Justices, Biden wrote, “should be required to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest”.While each of these proposals is a wise response to the current crisis of the supreme court, none of them has any chance of being enacted in the near future. Still, Biden has done a service by going public with these ideas and politicizing the court reform question.His op-ed and speech on court reform at an event commemorating the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act will help ensure that supreme court reform is a live issue during the remainder of the 2024 presidential campaign.The first of Biden’s proposals, the call for a constitutional amendment, is the most important but also the most difficult to achieve among his three ideas. Like earlier versions of the same idea, it offers an important vehicle for engaging the public in resisting yet another exercise of judicial supremacy by our increasingly rogue supreme court.America has a long history of using the amendment process to reverse repugnant supreme court decisions, like Trump v United States. But as Harvard Law’s Jill Lepore notes, over the long arc of American history, amending the constitution has “become a lost art”.In fact, Lepore noted elsewhere: “The US Constitution hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1971.”However, by supporting an amendment to reverse Trump v United States, Biden has teed up a winning issue for Kamala Harris. Polls show that 65% of Americans do not think presidents should have immunity for actions taken in office.Among independent voters, that number is 68%.Even larger majorities support 18-year term limits for supreme court justices. As the Biden commission noted: “Up until the late 1960s, the average term of service was 15 years. It has now risen to roughly 26 years, and a number of Justices have served three or more decades, spanning numerous election cycles and presidential administrations.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis may be why a Fox News Poll conducted earlier this month found that 78% of the respondents favor that idea. That is up from 66% in 2022.While term limits are popular, it is unclear whether Congress could impose them by ordinary legislation or whether this proposal would also require a constitutional amendment. Even Biden’s supreme court commission was divided on that question.As an article in Forbes explains: “Article III of the Constitution states judges ‘shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,’ which has been interpreted to mean justices have to hold lifetime appointments. The commission said Congress could get around the issue by having only the most recent justices hear most cases, which originate in lower courts, while still keeping the older ones on to hear cases that originate in the Supreme Court.”“That strategy … would create the ‘effective equivalent’ of term limits without actually violating Article III by kicking justices off the court.”What is clear is that Donald Trump is on the wrong side of the supreme court term limits idea. Earlier this month, the former president branded court reform proposals such as term limits “illegal” and “unconstitutional”.“The Democrats are attempting to interfere in the Presidential Election, and destroy our Justice System, by attacking their Political Opponent, ME, and our Honorable Supreme Court,” he posted on Truth Social. “We have to fight for our Fair and Independent Courts, and protect our Country.”Trump is even out of step with his supporters on the idea of term limits for justices. Newsweek says: “Among those who voted for Trump in 2020, 54% supported term limits, while 20% opposed them.”Finally, a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted last September showed that “three-in-four voters want the justices bound to an ethics code, the most popular reform proposal in the survey”. This figure reflects what Politico calls “a bipartisan consensus of 81% of Democrats, 72% of Republicans, and 69% of independents”.Here, too, Maga world is on the wrong side politically, as well as on the wrong side of history. Just last month, as NBC News reported, Senate Republicans “blocked a Democratic-sponsored bill that would have required Supreme Court justices to adopt a binding code of conduct”.In the end, no matter how Biden’s proposals play out in the presidential contest, by politicizing the issue, by going public with them in a high-profile manner, the president has offered the people of the United States a chance to make their voices heard about the kind of supreme court they want. It is now up to all of us to take him up on that offer and use our votes to weigh in on this most important question.

      Austin Sarat is a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College and the author of Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution More

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      in US Politics

      Biden calls for supreme court changes and decries Trump immunity ruling

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      Joe Biden, in a Monday address calling for sweeping reforms of the US supreme court, said the recent decision granting some immunity to presidents from criminal prosecution makes them a king before the law.Speaking in Austin at the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Biden said a president was no longer restrained by the law and that this was “a fundamentally flawed [and] dangerous principle”.The decision in Trump v United States, which gives broad immunity from later prosecution for a president exercising his authority in his official capacity, is one of several recent court rulings – from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to casting down Roe v Wade as the precedent on abortion rights – that stands in stark contrast to the era 50 years ago in which civil rights legislation passed, Biden said.“The extreme opinions that the supreme court has handed down have undermined long established civil rights principles and protections,” Biden said, invoking the specter of Project 2025 as a looming threat.“They’re planning another onslaught attacking civil rights in America,” he said.“For example, Project 2025 calls for aggressively attacking diversity, equity and inclusion all across all aspects of American life. This extreme Maga movement even proposes to end birthright citizenship. This is how far they’ve come.”Biden said he is proposing a new constitutional amendment that explicitly applies the criminal code to presidents. The conduct of Donald Trump demands legislative changes, he said.“No other former president has asked for this kind of immunity and none should have been given it,” Biden said. “The president must be accountable to the law … We are a nation of laws, not kings and dictators.”A constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of both the US House and Senate to agree to it, followed by the government of three-quarters of the states.Biden also said that the scandals involving supreme court justices have caused public opinion to question the court’s fairness and independence and impeded its mission.He said: “The supreme court’s current code of conduct is weak and even more frighteningly voluntary.”Biden called for a binding code of conduct for the supreme court and term limits for justices, noting that the United States was the only western democracy that gives lifetime appointments to its high court.The term limiting proposal would create staggered 18-year terms for justices, beginning with the next justice to leave the court.The idea for term limits and a binding code of ethics for the court is not new but has perhaps become more urgent. Biden’s proposal closely resembles legislation first proposed by Georgia representative Hank Johnson, the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee and the likely banner carrier for legislative movement on this issue if he regains the committee chairmanship in a Democratic House.Johnson’s Term Act would apply term limits to existing supreme court justices, giving each president appointments in the first and third year of their administration.“Right now, three justices have already served in excess of 18 years,” Johnson said. “And so, those judges would be replaced over a six-year period.”Johnson described term limiting legislation as “important foundational, structural change that will prevent the court from becoming the kind of court that this one is; one that, because of tenure, has become unaccountable, arrogant, and destructive to our democracy.”Johnson also has proposed the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act, legislation binding supreme court judges ethically.But what if the court rules that this legislation itself is unconstitutional?“There would be nothing that would stop them from ruling it unconstitutional,” Johnson said. “But if we get to that point, we could have we would say goodbye to the rule of law in this country.”Johnson likened the prospect to the reaction of President Andrew Jackson rejecting a supreme court ruling on Native American removals in Georgia nearly two centuries ago, with a federal government effectively ignoring the court. Ruling “something that’s clearly constitutional was unconstitutional would really be the end of our democracy, because there would no longer be respect for the rule of law”, he said. More