The court has ruled on presidential immunity. "A former president is entitled to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his "conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority," the ruling says. "There is no immunity for unofficial acts."
So, a president is not fully immune. Personal acts aren't immune, presidential acts MIGHT be immune, but there is some presumption of immunity for official acts.
Obviously this presumption of immunity is nowhere in the Constitution. The originalists are definitely being original, and boy are we eff'ed; so much for Republican arguments that judges shouldn't legislate from the bench. The argument now is going to be about what is or is not "an official act."
I wish that the SCOTUS made it clear what is an official duty (you know, like duties as defined in The Constitution) versus everything else, but they didn't, and so here we are.
There is no way the DC trial gets underway before the election.
The decision is here. I'm reading the dissenting opinion first, and oof. Sotomayor writes that the majority's grant of immunity "reshapes the institution of the presidency" and "makes a mockery of the principle" that "no man is above the law."
We are totally eff'ed in the dark.
Justice Jackson:
The majority of my colleagues seems to have put their trust in our Court's ability to prevent Presidents from becoming Kings through case-by-case application of the indeterminate standards of their new Presidential accountability paradigm. I fear that they are wrong. But, for all our sakes, I hope that they are right.
In the meantime, because the risks (and power) the Court has now assumed are intolerable, unwarranted, and plainly antithetical to bedrock constitutional norms, I dissent.
UPDATE 1:
"You can hear the echoes of Richard Nixon saying, 'If the president does it, it is not illegal.'" — MSNBC's Katy Tur