Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) suggested that the Republican National Committee headquarters could house the Supreme Court after conservative justices appeared open to recognizing some form of presidential immunity as it heard from former President Donald Trump’s lawyers on Thursday.
Raskin, in an appearance on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut,” weighed in after Trump lawyer D. John Sauer argued that the president could order an assassination of a political rival or order the military to stage a coup without facing prosecution for those actions.
Host Joy Reid, who noted that Trump’s federal election interference case could be remanded back to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and thus further delay the trial past Election Day, called the Supreme Court majority “so clearly politicians” before looping in Raskin.
“Well, they’re politicians who are not even subject to popular election unlike me. They should move the Supreme Court over to the RNC headquarters because they’re acting like a bunch of partisan operatives,” Raskin said.
He went on to refer to a question from Justice Samuel Alito, who suggested democracy could be at risk if a president could be criminally prosecuted by a political opponent after leaving office.
Raskin called that the “most astonishing” observation from the hearing and the question buys into Trump’s “narcissistic, criminal worldview.”
“I mean, for all of American history, we’ve said presidents are subject to criminal prosecution if they commit crimes,” noted Raskin, who pointed to Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton agreeing to give up his law license for five years to avoid criminal prosecution.
He continued, “Now they say, ‘Well, if you’re really mean to Donald Trump and you hold him accountable the way every other American citizen is accountable, then he’ll really overthrow the government, he’ll really bring out the big guns and we can’t afford that.’ And that’s a kind of masochistic capitulationism to Donald Trump’s authoritarianism.”