Trump’s immunity case live: supreme court to hear arguments

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Supreme court 'engineered one of history’s most egregious political interventions' by hearing Trump immunity case - legal scholar

The supreme court has not yet even heard arguments in Donald Trump’s claim that he is immune from charges related to attempting to overturn the 2020 election because his alleged actions were taken while serving as president. But legal scholar Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said the conservative-dominated body has already done the ex-president’s bidding by agreeing to hear the case – and therefore delaying the start of a trial that could prove pivotal to his chances of returning to the White House.

“The justices have already done great damage,” Waldman wrote recently. “They engineered one of history’s most egregious political interventions – not with an ugly ruling, at least not yet, but by getting ‘the slows’. At the very least they should issue this ruling in three weeks. That would give trial judge Tanya Chutkan enough time to start the trial [before the election], if barely.”

Here’s more on why Waldman thinks the high court erred, and what we can expect in today’s arguments, from the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly:

Supreme court to hear arguments in Trump's immunity claim as ex-president hopes to disrupt election subversion case

Good morning, US politics blog readers.

It’s another big day at the supreme court – perhaps the biggest of its term so far. Beginning at 10am ET, the nine justices will hear arguments over whether Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for acts done while he was in office. The former president has made the claim as part of a bid to blunt special counsel Jack Smith’s case against him for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election, and while there’s no telling how the court will rule, it has already had one concrete effect: delaying his trial in Washington DC, potentially until after the November election, and therefore preventing a potential guilty verdict that could have damaged his campaign.

The supreme court is composed of a six-justice conservative supermajority – three of whom Trump appointed – and a three-justice liberal minority, and the fact that they took this case up at all has raised eyebrows among some legal scholars. A ruling in his favor could lead to at least some of the charges Smith has brought to be dropped. If the court rejects arguments from Trump’s attorneys, his trial may be cleared to proceed – but there is still no telling when it will actually kick off.

The former president will not be in Washington DC for today’s oral arguments. He’s in New York City, where his trial is underway on charges of falsifying business documents related to hush money payments made before his 2016 election victory, the first of his four criminal cases to go before jurors. We have a separate live blog covering all that.

Here’s what else is going on today:

• Joe Biden is heading to Syracuse, New York to tell the tale of how the 2022 Chips act and other policies are helping turn around the local economy, then heading to New York’s ritzy suburbs for a campaign event.

• Arizona has indicted 18 former top Trump officials, including Mark Meadows, his ex-chief of staff, and attorney Rudy Giuliani for their attempts to overturn Biden’s victory in the state four years ago, the AP reports.

• And in Michigan, a state investigator said he considered Trump and Meadows as unindicted co-conspirators in a plot to interfere with Biden’s victory there in 2020, according to the AP.