U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said her conservative colleagues are risking the court's legitmacy with decisions affording President Donald Trump broad immunity and overturning longstanding precedents on other issues.
In her first public comments since Trump began his second term in the White House, Sotomayor told a Kentucky audience that the court has gone too far, too fast on a range of issues. She cited the Trump case during a lengthy response to a question about sagging public confidence in the court.
Sotomayor issued a stinging dissent in that case, and she didn't hold back Wednesday night in discussing public perceptions of the court following its historic 6-3 decision on the immunity question. The court’s conservative majority, with three justices appointed by Trump in his first term, ruled for the first time that former presidents have broad immunity from prosecution.
If we as a court go so much further ahead of people, our legitimacy is going to be questioned," Sotomayor said during the event in Louisville. “I think the immunity case is one of those situations. I don’t think that Americans have accepted that anyone should be above the law in America. Our equality as people was the foundation of our society and of our constitution.”
In her dissent last year, which she read aloud in the courtroom, Sotomayor said the court's majority allowed a president to become a “king above the law” in its ruling that limited the scope of criminal charges against Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and efforts to overturn the election.
She renewed her objections while discussing the case to the Louisville audience.
“Our constitution itself has provisions not exempting the president from criminal activity after an impeachment,” she said. "So I had a hard time with the immunity case. And if we continue going in directions that the public is going to find hard to understand, we’re placing the court at risk.”
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