The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. United States that the President is immune from criminal prosecutions, if the conduct in question was performed as part of his “official” conduct. Critics consider the Court’s opinion to be a dangerous affront to the rule of law and the principle that no one, not even the President, is above the law.
I have been reading Jesse Wegman’s wonderfully researched and written book on James Wilson, the only framer of the Constitution to connect the principles espoused in The Declaration of Independence to the U.S. Constitution. I recall a class during grad school at Claremont Graduate University where the late Harry V. Jaffa said the Declaration is like the rudder to a ship, with the ship being the Constitution. With a rudder, a ship piloted by a prudent captain will continue to steer passengers towards their North Star (unalienable rights) no matter what direction the winds blow; however, without a rudder, a ship will go wherever the winds take it, even if they blow towards authoritarianism.
Jaffa considered the conservatives on the Supreme Court in the 20th century to be nihilists, so I suspect he would not be surprised with this 21st century’s Court’s recent ruling in Trump. But who knows for sure, since we cannot unfortunately ask Professor Jaffa himself about these things.
However that may be, in Wegman’s book, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution, he mentions an early Supreme Court case that Wilson (a member of the first Supreme Court) dealt with about a lawsuit between a private citizen and the State of Georgia over a contract dispute. Basically, Georgia refused to pay Chisholm what he was owed and the case was about whether States had sovereign immunity from this kind of litigation (see Chisholm v. Georgia).
In his opinion in the case, Wilson “pointed out that the word [sovereign] appears nowhere in the Constitution—and rightly so, because sovereigns generally have subjects, and under the Constitution, ‘there are citizens, but no subjects’” (Wegman, p. 241). Wilson, who wrote the Preamble to the Constitution, considered the People to be the sovereign, not the States or even, ultimately, the federal government.
Thinking about Wilson’s political philosophy that rests on the dual principles of natural equality and popular sovereignty, I am struck by the distance between Wilson—a man who signed both The Declaration and the U.S. Constitution, one of only six men with that distinction—and the majority opinion in Trump. My sense is that Wilson, a proponent of an energetic executive, would not agree that the President has immunity. But who knows for sure, since Wilson ended up at the end of his life running from the law due to his commercial debts. He abandoned his post on the Supreme Court.
Life is rather complicated for anyone who seeks to find a unified theory of politics in both a person’s philosophy and their actual behavior.