Until I read this.
Trump v. United States Didn't Make the President Above the Law. Nothing Ever Has.
Most Americans have come to believe that Donald Trump is effectively above the law because he is the sitting president. Not because they want him to be, but because they think the Supreme Court made it that way. They point to Trump v. United States and say the Court gave him immunity; they point to impeachment and the 25th Amendment and say those are the only two remedies. They've concluded, reasonably but inaccurately that until Congress acts with a supermajority, nothing can touch him. They're wrong. And the people who benefit from that confusion have every reason to keep it going.
Trump v. United States created a partial shield in federal court for official acts. But the Court never defined what an official act actually is, and no court has ever held that bribery, selling pardons, child molestation, or sex trafficking qualify. More importantly, the ruling explicitly did not weigh in on state prosecution. This wasn't the result of an oversight or a loophole, but a core doctrine in US law.
The dual sovereignty doctrine, which has been the law of this land since the founders wrote it into the architecture of the republic, gives every state independent authority to prosecute crimes committed within their borders; a presidential pardon cannot touch a state conviction. Congress doesn't have to act. No supermajority is required. If the president commits a crime, a prosecutor with jurisdiction can charge him, and that's how it has always worked. This article is going to prove that, doctrine by doctrine, objection by objection, because you deserve to know the truth that not even the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court, has ever argued that a president is completely above the law until removed from office through political means.
The founders weren't subtle about why they built it this way. They'd watched a king operate above the law, and they designed a system with two parallel sets of courts, two parallel sets of prosecutors, two parallel sets of criminal codes, and two parallel sets of criminal statutes specifically so no single actor could capture the whole machine. The dual sovereignty doctrine wasn't a legal technicality they left lying around; it was the design. States retain independent authority to prosecute crimes committed within their borders because the founders understood that the day would come when the federal government couldn't be trusted to police itself. That day has a name now. It's today.
I highly recommend following Christopher Armitage and subscribing to his Substack, "The Existentialist Republic." He combines Public Policy analysis and proposals and Investigative Journalism.
"Most tell you what's wrong. I try to tell you what works. Originator of the soft secession framework. Cited by Brookings. Covered by Mother Jones, NPR, and PBS."
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