Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a separate dissent that the majority’s ruling “breaks new and dangerous ground” by granting immunity “only to the most powerful official in our Government.”
She said that her conservative colleagues were “discarding” the nation’s long-held principle that no one is above the law.
The liberal justice described the impact of the court’s ruling in dark terms, saying that “even a hypothetical President who admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals or critics or one who indisputably instigates an unsuccessful coup, has a fair shot at getting immunity under the majority’s new Presidential accountability model.”
“In the end, then, under the majority’s new paradigm, whether the President will be exempt from legal liability for murder, assault, theft, fraud, or any other reprehensible and outlawed criminal act will turn on whether he committed that act in his official capacity, such that the answer to the immunity question will always and inevitably be: It depends,” Jackson wrote.
