The most recent Supreme Court decision concerning the court case around Trump and January 6 is disheartening. I can see some narrow legal basis for granting Presidential immunity for official acts, but I would imagine we really want that for situations like in 1978 when the Carter administration was secretly negotiating with the People's Republic of China to recognize it and grant it full diplomatic status. That was all done very secretively. I don't know if it was technically illegal. If it was, I think Carter did a good thing. Since then and since Deng presided over the opening of China more people have exited poverty than at any other time in world history. Having China as a counterweight also expedited the fall of the Soviet Union. The subsequent rise of Xi Jinping complicates matters for sure, but we were never gong to be alone on the world stage.
If the President has immunity for actions carried out as part of his official duties, what about people acting on Presidential orders? Are they also immune? This opens up an enormous can of worms.
And it elevates the role of the press. Just because the President has immunity it doesn't mean we have to approve of everything the President does. There needs to be ever more vigorous debate on what are appropriate actions of the state.
As I said right after the 2020 election, the Biden administration should have been a time when we focused as a nation on the limits of Presidential power and putting guardrails in place. Instead, we keep removing them, including by Biden continuing to look for ways to extend it by doing things like forgiving student debt (a worthy goal if it could be targeted and authorized properly) by fiat (a bad thing). This has been a huge wasted opportunity.
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