Supreme Court’s slow roll on deciding Trump’s immunity is the opposite of politics

By Claire B. Wofford, College of Charleston

Frustration is mounting as the country waits – and waits and waits – for the U.S. Supreme Court to issue its decision in Trump v. United States, the case that asks whether the former president is immune from criminal prosecution for what he did in the wake of the 2020 election.

For those on the left, the delay appears both political and purposeful, yet another example of conservative jurists in the court’s majority helping Trump avoid the accountability that might otherwise be inevitable.

I get it. The court’s failure to take the case when Special Counsel Jack Smith first requested in December 2023; its scheduling of oral arguments for late April 2024; and the ensuing months that have passed without a decision have made it quite likely that any trial of Donald Trump for his alleged coup will not happen soon. That is consequential.

But this doesn’t mean the court should depart from its standard operating procedure. In fact, if you ask the justices to proceed at anything other than their normally plodding pace, you are asking them to be exactly what critics so decry – political.

Here’s why.

Hard questions take time

When the Supreme Court makes a decision, it is inevitably answering a very difficult legal question. If the answers were clear, the case never would have been the subject of high court litigation in the first place.

The court takes a case generally not just to decide a particular winner or loser, but to instead formulate broad legal principles that will guide lower courts, other branches of government and even American citizens. The court indicated it was thinking about the big picture when it expanded the legal question fuprerom whether a former president is immune from criminal prosecution to how far that immunity should extend. The ultimate ruling here will have implications well beyond Donald Trump.

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