Supreme Court Order Allows President To Assassinate Rivals With Navy Seals

In her dissent to Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor painted a grim portrait of a commander-in-chief now “immune, immune, immune” from criminal liability and free to exploit official presidential power against political opponents.

“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?” she wrote.

“Immune.”

As extraordinary as that prospect might sound, constitutional law experts say she’s right: The court’s decision in Trump v. United States really does appear to immunize a hypothetical president who directed the military to commit murder, though a president might be hard-pressed to find someone to carry out such an order.Cycling Community Comes Together in Aftermath of TornadoesSPONSORED BY RUNWAY GROUPSelfless. Strong. Resilient. Resolute. Compassionate. When tornadoes struck Bentonville and the surrounding areas on May 26, the cycling community came together to help. #nwastrongSee More

The crux of the issue, legal scholars said, is that the decision granted total immunity for any actions a president takes using the “core powers” that the Constitution bestows on the office. One such power is the authority to command the military.“The language of the Supreme Court’s decision seems to suggest that because this is a core function of the president, that there is absolute immunity from criminal prosecution,” said Cheryl Bader, a criminal law professor at Fordham Law School and a former federal prosecutor. “If Trump, as commander in…   chief, ordered his troops to assassinate somebody or stage a coup, that would seem to fall within the absolute immunity provision of the court’s decision.”

The hypothetical about a president deploying the Navy SEALs to assassinate a political opponent has come up before — including during a lower-court hearing on Trump’s immunity litigation and during the Supreme Court’s own oral arguments in the case. It was raised as an absurdity to illustrate that the most sweeping version of Trump’s immunity theory could not possibly be right.

In fact, when Justice Samuel Alito broached the scenario during oral arguments, he drew laughter in the courtroom.