Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said the U.S. Supreme Court should be moved “over to” the Republican National Committee (RNC) headquarters, after some conservative justices suggested being open to arguments in favor of presidential immunity from prosecution for Donald Trump.
“They’re politicians who are not even subject to popular election unlike me,” Raskin said during his Thursday appearance on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut.” “They should move the Supreme Court over to the RNC headquarters because they’re acting like a bunch of partisan operatives.”
Raskin’s assessment comes as D. John Sauer, the attorney representing Trump in Thursday’s arguments regarding the former president’s immunity, suggested his client could hypothetically order a military to eliminate his political rival and still be covered by presidential immunity.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Sauer if “fundamentally evil” actions like having the military get rid of a political foe would be protected from criminal prosecution.
The attorney, who heard various scenarios from judges serving on the nation’s highest court, said most of those scenarios could fall under the protection.
“That well could be an official act,” Sauer said.
Raskin, a member of the the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, slammed Justice Samuel Alito’s assertion that if Trump were to be criminally prosecuted, it could encourage supporters to “stage more violent coups” to keep the former president in office.
The Maryland lawmaker said Alito’s remarks “buy” into the former president’s “narcissistic criminal worldview.”
“The most astonishing thing for me today was Justice Alito’s question he actually asked whether holding the president criminally accountable for actual crimes committed whether murder or coup or you name it, whether holding them accountable would actually encourage them to stage more violent coups to stay in office to avoid prosecution, which buys completely into Donald Trump’s narcissistic criminal worldview,” he said.
“I mean, for all of American history, we’ve said presidents are subject to criminal prosecution if they commit crimes,” he continued.
“Now they say, well, if you’re really mean to Donald Trump, and you hold him accountable the way every other American citizen is accountable, then he’ll really overthrow the government. He’ll really bring out the big guns, and we can’t afford that.”
Raskin called the line of thinking a “masochistic capitulationism to Donald Trump’s authoritarianism.”
“Of course you’ve got to hold the president accountable to the law — it’s the basic premise of our law that no one is above the law, including the president,” the House Democrat said.
“Now we’ve got a bunch of justices who are asking questions that indicate that they are as corrupted as members of Congress who I served with,” he later added.
