On the final day of a significant Supreme Court term, and in one of its most consequential cases, Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a stunning rebuke to our ruling regime for its disingenuous effort to legitimize the republic-eviscerating lawfare inquisition against Donald Trump.
Thomas took to a concurrence in the landmark Trump v. United States case not so much to affirm the majority’s view regarding former President Trump’s immunity from prosecution, but to question whether the Biden Justice Department’s prosecution of Trump itself was legal.
“In this case, there has been much discussion about ensuring that a President ‘is not above the law,’” Thomas wrote. “But, as the Court explains, the President’s immunity from prosecution for his official acts is the law.”
By contrast, the associate justice asserted, “I am not sure that any office for the Special Counsel has been ‘established by Law,’ as the Constitution requires.”
“If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people,” Thomas wrote.
Thomas wants the lower courts to weigh in on whether Special Counsel Jack Smith is in fact “duly authorized.”
Under the Constitution’s appointment clause, which is key to ensuring the separation of powers, Congress creates offices, and either presidents fill them with the advice and consent of the Senate or, if Congress delegates them the authority, the president, “Courts of Law,” or “Heads of Departments” may appoint “inferior officers.”
This represented a break from and corrective to the
