Harvard University's Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe unleashed a ferocious attack on the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court after the ruling in Donald Trump's immunity case Monday.
Tribe cited Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent, in which she called the decision a "five-alarm-fire for self-government under democracy. The reason is that the court was really flying the flag of the Constitution upside down."
Chief Justice John Roberts and five other justices ruled that a president has immunity for core official actions carried out while in office, though what constituted official was for a lower court to decide.
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"It is worse to use the cloak of presidential authority to commit ordinary crimes for which the rest of us would go to jail than it is to do things that are purely personal," Tribe lamented on MSNBC.
"So, the sliver that has been left to Jack Smith, that is taking the threads of this [Jan. 6] indictment, and in a hearing before Judge Chutkan, trying to show which ones, like contacts with Rudy Giuliani, or certain discussions with state officials. Which ones are truly private? That's really a fig leaf."
The professor went on to say that, by stating immunity only relates to official actions, the ruling is meant to appear like the court tapping "itself on the shoulder and [saying] we're not granting absolute immunity."
"I beg to differ. For all practical purposes, this is absolute immunity. It's dangerous, and it means we have to be even more careful, never to elect a president who would think, let alone say, he wants to be a dictator on day one."
Tribe specifically pointed out that the president could take a bribe, for example, if he claims that it is an official act as a president.
He pointed to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who "established a degree of independence" with her partial dissent on a piece of the ruling.
"You can't even use evidence of the way the president's core powers have been used," Tribe said of the ideals. "So, if, for example, a bribe is offered for the president to exercise a core power like a pardon, you might be able to show that money passed hands, but you can't introduce evidence of that, of the pardon that ultimately resulted, because that is one of the president's core powers."
"It makes no sense."
He pointed to Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Jackson, who "really rip to shred the threadbare, I'm afraid to say, almost sophomoric and foolish arguments by the chief justice of the United States fantasizing that even though all presidents in our past have assumed that they would be subject to criminal prosecution even for misconduct that was a crime in interacting with their own justice department.
"After all, that's what Nixon did and why he needed a pardon. Even though presidents have assumed that and it hasn't crippled the presidency, maybe presidents would be too cautious unless they were granted this new and unprecedented immunity."
The danger, as cited by the justices, is that presidents will not be deterred by criminal law, he said.
See the full comments from Tribe in the video below or at the link here.