Trump's court

[E]ven though we don’t know for sure, there’s a very good chance that we’re getting the ruling in the Colorado ballot disqualification case.

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That would mean a decision in Trump v. Anderson just 25 days after oral argument—which would be the shortest turnaround in a merits case since 2016, when the Court moved even faster in Welch v. United States—where a quick ruling was necessary so that a small subset of federal prisoners could meet a statutory deadline for particular challenges to their convictions or sentences that was about to expire. We’ll find out soon enough, but it seems quite likely that the consensus coming out of the February 8 oral argument will be borne out—with most (if not all) of the justices signing onto an opinion that holds that states can’t unilaterally disqualify presidential candidates under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Either way, it sure seemed all along that the Court had expedited the briefing and argument because it wanted to resolve the dispute before the Colorado primary (which is tomorrow). In the abstract, hustling like that would be entirely understandable—especially since, had it gone into effect, the ruling that the justices are reviewing would’ve kept former President Trump off of that ballot. But it’s not an ideal look for the Court to be handing down such a ruling without even taking the bench (which was probably a result of nothing more substantive than the Court not having been previously scheduled to sit tomorrow). And more significantly, the issue with the Court’s accelerated timing is how it looks (and will look) when compared to…

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On Wednesday afternoon, the Court issued a one-page order in which it granted certiorari to review the D.C. Circuit’s ruling that former President Trump is not immune from the January 6 criminal prosecution.

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Although former President Trump had asked only for a stay while he appealed the D.C. Circuit decision (which he would have had months to do had the justices acquiesced), the Court “treated” his stay application as if it were the appeal itself—which allowed it to move much faster than usual in taking up the case. Ditto the expedited briefing, without which the case would not have been ready for argument until at least October.

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To be sure, I would have preferred if the Court had just denied Trump’s application and allowed the January 6 prosecution to proceed forthwith. But, and I say this as someone who does not tend to give this Court the benefit of the doubt, taking this case up is eminently defensible. And, at least in the abstract, so is the abbreviated timeline on which the Court is doing so. Although folks have been quick to point to cases in which the Court has moved even faster (including Bush v. Gore, which seems like an … odd … example to extol in this respect), this is still a pretty fast by the Court’s standards.

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In any event, as valid a political consideration as the timing of the trial vis-à-vis the election might be, it’s hard to see the legal argument for why the Court had to move even faster—in contrast to cases in which, e.g., a law is about to go into effect; a prisoner is about to be executed; or, as in Colorado, voters are about to go to the polls. As Dahlia Lithwick and I wrote for CNN on Thursday, just because we think a case is an emergency doesn’t mean we should expect the Court to think it is, too.

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It may not feel this way, but the Court is actually way behind in getting rulings out the door even in cases that have already been argued—the slowest pace of any term since Chief Justice Roberts joined the Court.

  Steve Vladeck

Whose fault is that? They aren't required to take up any case, much less so many they don't have time for them. Taking up a case like presidential immunity that is obvious to most people and has already been adjudicated and argued to a T by the district court is unnecessary and suspicious.

And Vladeck makes that very point further on...

If we start from the proposition that the Court has finite resources (and, indeed, that those resources were overextended even before former President Trump filed his application in the January 6 case), it’s worth at least indulging the possibility that, given everything else that’s on its plate, the Court isn’t currently capable of moving much faster—a problem, again, that is to some degree of its own making. After all, although many of these cases were disputes that the justices arguably had to hear if for no other reason than what the lower courts did, it’s not clear why, for example, the EMTALA case had to be rushed onto the April calendar (especially once the Supreme Court issued a stay of the district court’s injunction), to say nothing of the Oregon homelessness case, which the justices just agreed to take up in January and could easily have set for argument this fall. Instead, the Court backloaded its docket with a flurry of major, labor-intensive cases long before the Trump immunity case came along—thereby limiting its own ability to react to merits cases that needed to be resolved on expedited timelines.

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[T]he Court’s own (putatively inconsistent) prior behavior is the true basis for the sharpness of the critique—and the strongest response to folks, like me, who are inclined to defend it, so that we end up debating which emergencies justified even speedier decisions, and why. [...] When you don’t trust the Court to begin with, even compromises like this one have a way of looking nefarious.

Yep.  Originally scheduled for March 4.  Ridiculous "absolute immunity" claim should have been laughed off the map.  Instead, Supreme Court is holding it in a safe place for Trump.  Nixon is fuming in Hell that he didn't get such king's treatment.  "If the president does it, that means it's not illegal.  That's what I said!"

And, Tom Tomorrow offers this:

Also, the court, in an unusual move, announced that they'd be handing down (some) opinion today.  Why?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.