'How's this supposed to work?' Ex-cabinet official says court adds new chaos to government
July 02, 2024
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling that grants partial immunity to Donald Trump introduced new chaos into White House governance, according to a former cabinet official.
The conservative court ruled 6-3 to grant the former president — and presumably future commanders-in-chief — immunity for official acts, which Chief Justice John Roberts wrote would include conversations with federal officials.
And former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that could open the door to confusion and lawlessness.
"First of all, from the perspective of a cabinet officer, how is this supposed to work?" Johnson said. "Suppose the president says to the secretary of homeland security, 'I am ordering you to order the border patrol to go shoot at migrants swimming across the Rio Grande.' The cabinet official would rightly say, 'Well, you have immunity, but I don't — you go do it yourself. I'm not telling the border patrol to do that.'"
"How is this supposed to work?"Johnson added. "I don't understand how the implementation of this ruling is going to work. Just the process of separating out what's an official act, what's a quasi-official act, what is a non-official act. In the court will be a trial in and of itself, then an appeal following that. This is a real setback."
Johnson explained that the chain of command in the executive branch is currently set up so each official can be individually held accountable, but he said the court's ruling upends that arrangement.
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"When the executive branch is functioning like it should, you have a legally controversial action, such as [a] counterterrorism action," Johnson said. "The action works its way up through the chain of command. Every person in the chain of command has a lawyer, it's signed off by the general counsel of the Department of Defense, the general counsel of the CIA, the office of the department of the legal counsel. By the time it gets to the lawyer, everyone has signed off on it. Therefore, the president is acting consistent with law. There are built-in safeguards for that."
"It is only because, now, 235 years in, we have a past and possibly future president who engages in criminal conduct that we have to have this debate," Johnson added. "At least five justices on the Supreme Court feel the need to try to protect him. This is, to me, an unbelievable decision. In my view, it is a setback to our constitutional order."
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