Joe Biden criticizes Supreme Court ruling on Donald Trump’s partial immunity: ‘No one is above the law, not even the president’

ANDUS President Joe Biden He promised on Monday that if he is re-elected in the November elections he will abide by the limits of the office, unlike, he said, his possible rival in those elections, former President Donald Trump (2017-2021).

“I will respect the limits of presidential power as I have done for these three and a half years, but now any president, including Donald Trump, will feel free to ignore the law,” he told reporters at the White House.

Trump scored a victory on Monday after the The conservative-majority Supreme Court has ruled that he enjoys partial immunity for his efforts as president to overturn the results of the 2020 election that led to the assault on the Capitol. The court also sent the case back to lower courts, reducing the chances of it being tried before the election.

“A former president is entitled to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive constitutional authority” and is also “entitled to at least presumed immunity from prosecution for all his official acts,” but “there is no immunity for unofficial acts,” states the consensus opinion, which was agreed upon by 6 votes to 3, those of the progressive judges.

“Now, the American people have to do what the Supreme Court should have done. The American people have to make a judgment about Donald Trump’s behavior,” Biden said, in an attempt to mobilize voters to go to the polls.

The president said Americans deserved an answer in court about what happened on January 6, 2021, when his predecessor “sent a violent mob to the U.S. Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power,” as the 2020 election results were scheduled to be certified that day.

Biden, who faced reporters for the first time after his weak performance in the June 27 debate against Trump, also said that the Supreme Court’s decision It eliminated the principle of equality on which the country and the American Constitution had been founded.

“This nation was founded on the principle that in America there are no kings, that every one of us was equal before the law, that no one is above the law, not even the president (…) but today’s decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what a president can do,” he said.

Today’s decision almost certainly means there are virtually no limits on what a president can do.

The Democrat also cited progressive Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who on Monday issued a written statement expressing her disagreement with the decision of her fellow justices and warning that the ruling could give any president the same power as a king.

“I agree with the dissent expressed by Judge Sotomayor,” Biden said. “She said that the president is now a king above the law. Out of fear for our democracy, I dissent. Should the American people dissent?”

Biden is trailing Trump in the polls by 1.4 percentage points, according to the average prepared by the FiveThirtyEight portal.

Following his confrontation with Trump in the debate, Democrats fear that his popularity will continue to decline and there are voices within the party that have publicly and privately called for him to withdraw his candidacy for re-election in order to choose another candidate for the November elections.

“Victory for democracy”

Trump on Monday called the Supreme Court’s decision a “victory for democracy.”

“Great victory for our Constitution and democracy. Proud to be an American!” the Republican wrote in a message, in capital letters, on the social network Truth Social.

Trump already had to spend several weeks this year in a New York court for a judicial process that made him the first former president in US history to be convicted of a criminal offense, in this case, the falsification of business records related to the payment he made to buy the silence of actress Stormy Daniels.

Monday’s decision could have implications for other cases facing Trump in Georgia over his attempts to invalidate the state’s election results, and in Florida for illegally storing classified material at his Mar-a-Lago mansion after leaving office.