California Dem asks if SCOTUS immunity ruling means Biden could dispatch military to 'take out' conservative justices
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.,reacted to the Supreme Court ruling Monday that a former president has substantial immunity from prosecution for official acts committed while in office, but not for unofficial acts.
A California lawmaker questioned if President Biden could send in the military to "take out" conservative Supreme Court justices and be immune from punishment in light of Monday's presidential immunity decision.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., floated the theory as a hypothetical scenario while on MSNBC reacting to the Supreme Court decision handed down in Trump v. United States.
The ruling that a president has substantial immunity from prosecution for official acts committed while in office has infuriated Democrats. The decision has significant implications for former President Trump, whose prosecution on charges related to Jan. 6 and alleged 2020 election interference spurred the Supreme Court to hear the case.
Lofgren referenced past controversial comments from Trump to suggest that the ruling could give him "wide range" to make changes to the Constitution, incite mob violence and not accept the results of the election.
Former President Trump lauded the Supreme Court's decision on Monday, which gave a former president substantial immunity from prosecution for official acts while in office. (Getty Images)
"So we’ve got a problem here. If he cannot be accountable — if any president cannot be held accountable under the laws that exist, that’s a complete departure from our history," she argued.
"I guess, you know, theoretically, President Biden, acting within the scope of his official duties, could dispatch the military to take out the conservative justices on the court, and he’d be immune," she continued, posing the question to Andrew Weissmann, MSNBC legal analyst and former top prosecutor in the Mueller investigation.
This followed other startling theories in the dissenting opinion from the liberal members of the court in Monday's ruling.
"The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote. "Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."
President Biden said the Supreme Court's Monday ruling on presidential immunity "undermines the rule of law of this nation." (Getty Images)
Another shocking scenario was posed by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a footnote from a separate dissent.
Noting that the president's removal of a cabinet member would constitute an official act, Jackson said that "while the President may have the authority to decide to remove the Attorney General, for example, the question here is whether the President has the option to remove the Attorney General by, say, poisoning him to death."
She added, "Put another way, the issue here is not whether the President has exclusive removal power, but whether a generally applicable criminal law prohibiting murder can restrict how the President exercises that authority."
However, constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley called out those on the left for "misleading the public" on the ruling.
"[W]hat these people ignore is that there are checks and balances on a president. He can be impeached. He can be removed. There are federal courts that can enjoin him. There are all of these protections. Just because the president can't be criminally charged doesn't mean that a president can't be stopped," he said Tuesday on the "Brian Kilmeade Show."
When reached for comment by Fox News Digital, Lofgren denied she was calling for violence and said her comments were taken out of context by social media users.
"Yesterday, when reacting to the Supreme Court’s radical decision that goes against what our country’s founders envisioned after overthrowing a king, I posited a hypothetical scenario mirroring Justice Sotomayor’s dissent for the sake of discussion with a panel that included fellow lawyers on MSNBC. Unfortunately, some people, on social media and elsewhere, have omitted the word ‘theoretically’ that I clearly used to start my sentence to make it seem or read like I was calling for the military to assassinate conservative justices," Lofgren said in a statement.
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"I did not call for political violence against the justices or anyone else. I merely offered a legal hypothetical, partially posed as a question, in the context of a conversation about the Supreme Court’s broad immunity ruling. I do not condone nor call for political violence, nor do I condone any president abusing power in any way (the latter of which the Supreme Court, sadly, made allowable under law)," she continued.
Fox News' Brianna Herlihy contributed to this report.
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