Trump v. United States as Roe v. Wade

Mark Graber

Conservatives who claim to hate Roe v. Wade apparently repeat all the relevant "mistakes" when deciding Trump v. United States or so I argue in Verfassungsblog.

For a whiff of the argument, 

For half a century, conservatives complained to anyone who would listen that the Supreme Court’s decision protecting abortion rights in Roe v. Wade (1973) was “egregiously” wrong. The Constitution, they shouted in party platforms, on the campaign trail, and in law reviews, does not mention abortion, the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend to protect abortion, and Americans did not consider abortion a right when the Fourteenth Amendment was framed. Roe, they continued, confused discrete textual protections for some rights related to privacy with a constitutional commitment to privacy rights generally that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. Roe’s majority opinion supposedly dramatically overextended dubious precedents protecting other privacy rights when protecting abortion under that umbrella and invented three legal categories of pregnancy when putting in place a regulatory scheme that smacked more of legislation than constitutional law.

Two years after overruling Roe, the Roberts Court’s conservative super-majority justified limiting the capacity of the American people to bring Donald Trump to justice for numerous crimes by employing the very legal technique they condemned when employed to advance women’s reproductive rights. Trump, Trump rules, is largely immune from criminal prosecution, even though the Constitution does not mention presidential immunity, no person responsible for any constitutional provision intended to grant immunity from the criminal law to the president, and no evidence exists that Americans living in 1787 thought presidents enjoyed criminal immunity. Trump confuses particular constitutional practices that facilitate some separation between the different branches of the national government with a constitutional commitment to the separation of powers generally that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. The majority opinion dramatically overextends dubious precedents immunizing presidents from civil liability to encompass criminal liability and invented three categories of presidential action when putting in place a regulatory scheme that, coincidentally, smacks more of legislation than constitutional law.

Hit the above link for the rest.