THE STINGING DISSENT TO TRUMP IMMUNITY RULING

BE you ever so high, the law is above you.

- NARASIMHAN VIJAYARAGHAVAN

That adage recently yielded to the dictum that Donald J Trump is above it all. On July 1, the last day before the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) rose for summer recess and three days before the US celebrated its 248th year of independence, the justices delivered an epochal verdict. It was a severe blow to the democratic principles revered in the oldest democracy—it rendered POTUS (President of the US) an emperor of all he surveyed.

The judgement is worth reading-not for the words of the conservative majority of six Republican-appointed justices, who went beyond providing a protective cover to Trump in an election year-but the brilliant dissent from the only Latino justice in SCOTUS's 234-plus years' history, Sonia Sotomayor.

In her scathing dissent, Justice Sotomayor accused the SCOTUS majority of making Trump a "king above the law" for limiting the scope of criminal charges against the former president for his role in the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol and efforts to overturn the election. Sotomayor called the majority verdict "utterly indefensible". She wrote in a sharp language rare from the judicial pulpit: "The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding." Other liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Sotomayor-all three Democratic appointments-with Jackson referring to the ruling's consequences as a "five-alarm fire".