‘A bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune’: Justices Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson sketch out ‘nightmare scenarios’ in Trump immunity dissents

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, on the left, and Kentanji Brown Jackson, on the right

Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson pose at a courtesy visit in the Justices Conference Room prior to the investiture ceremony of Justice Jackson, Sept. 30, 2022, in Washington, DC. (Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Getty Images)

Near the end of her fierce dissent from the opinion granting Donald Trump vast immunity from criminal prosecution, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor employed repetition to clarify her point about the broad-based nature of the ideological 6-3 majority’s decision.

“Immune,” she writes. “Immune, immune, immune.”

The opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts in Trump v. United States briefly sketches out a never-before-ventured legal concept: when the “core constitutional powers” are exercised by a president, their immunity from criminal prosecution “must be absolute.”

The impact of what absolute immunity means, in real terms, for the use of those core powers is explored by Sotomayor and, to a lesser degree, in a separate dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

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