The Best Way to Handle Trump's Immunity Fantasy?

The first thing I thought when I saw that the DC Circuit of the US Court of Appeals smacked down Donald Trump's broad immunity claims was "finally -- this thing is probably over."

I've seen a lot of commentary about how SCOTUS should unanimously rule against those claims when it gets to them, but my opinion was (and remains) that it should just deny certiorari with neither delay nor comment.

On yesterday's episode of Serious Trouble, Josh Barro and Ken White discussed the possibility of denial of cert, and there's some good stuff in there.

Why should SCOTUS refuse to even hear the appeal?

Well, the place to start from is the fact that Trump's claims are entirely, completely, and without exception meritless. There's simply no plausible case under the Constitution, in subsidiary law, in the surrounding facts, in history, or anywhere in the real world that the rest of us live in that getting elected president makes one subsequently immune to prosecution for crimes.

Why did Richard Nixon want a pardon from Gerald Ford? Because he didn't want to be prosecuted ... and he could have been prosecuted.

Why did Bill Clinton agree to surrender his license in a deal to foreclose the possibility of prosecution? Because prosecution was possible.

Trump is not special. The law applies to him. He's not magically immune to criminal prosecution just because he was president.

That's just a fact, and it's the only way SCOTUS could come down on the subject without applying clown makeup, rubber noses, giant shoes, and multicolored wigs before ruling. They don't want to do that ... and they probably don't even want to imply that they might do it.

The up side to SCOTUS taking the case would be that by dismantling Trump's bizarre claims in detail rather than just ignoring them, the court would be opening up the whole can of worms regarding ever-expanding presidential claims of power and authority. Over the last century or so, the president has become an absolute monarch in all but name, albeit only for four-year periods.

But the political class -- or at least the members of the political class who have ordered, justified, and carried out e.g. drone strikes on American citizens, or who hope to someday do so -- probably doesn't consider that an up side.