'Dripping with disdain': Witness says Sotomayor didn't try to hide her contempt in court
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's voice was "dripping with disdain" Monday as she read her dissent against Chief Justice John Roberts' decision granting immunity to former President Donald Trump for "official acts," legal analyst Joan Biskupic told CNN's Kaitlan Collins on Monday.
Biskupic was in the Supreme Court when the justices issued the landmark decision making a federal trial for the former president all but impossible before the election and granting the executive unprecedented new powers, legal experts say.
Biskupic said Monday this is highly revealing because it's a sharp departure from how the court normally handles cases like this.
"Past chief justices had worked very hard to get unanimity on these kinds of separation-of-powers cases," she said. "You know, in the Nixon case, in the Bill Clinton case, the Supreme Court had been able to do that."
The legal analyst noted this appeared not to be the case in the Trump ruling.
"But here it was so painful about how splintered they are and how divided they are, not just down ideology, but on politics," Biskupic said. "So the chief tried to make the best case possible that this was the only way out ... he stressed that the separation of powers protects the office of the presidency in a way that would certainly prohibit any kind of prosecution for official acts, and he said there has to be that presumption for official acts and you know, he stressed that that fear and that that idea that presidents should not have to hedge in any way."
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Despite his best attempt to unite the court, Biskupic added, "boy was he met by dissenters" — chief among them the most senior liberal justice.
"When Justice Sotomayor began her dissent from the bench, her voice is really dripping with disdain, and she talked about how the majority was making a mockery of the notion that no man is above the law," said Biskupic. "And she, at several points, even addressed the audience and said, how hard could this be to resolve it with a way that really comports with history? Do you think it's hard?"
Sotomayor's tone stunned Biskupic, she said.
"She was just quite impassioned and, as I said, has this mocking tone in her voice in the end," Biskupic added. "She talked about what a law-free zone the majority had drawn around the president with this kind of a ruling. You know, as I said, just a very riveting set of back-and-forth between these two that pointed up what you see there on the printed page."
Watch the video below or at the link here.
Joan Biskupic on Sonia Sotomayor's immunity dissent www.youtube.com