No One Is Above The Law. Supreme Court Will Decide If That Includes Trump While He Was President.

WASHINGTON (AP) — On the left and right, Supreme Court justices seem to agree on a basic truth about the American system of government: No one is above the law, not even the president.

“The law applies equally to all persons, including a person who happens for a period of time to occupy the Presidency,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in 2020.

Less than a year earlier, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, then a federal trial judge, wrote, “Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.”

But former President Donald Trump and his legal team are putting that foundational belief to the test on Thursday when the high court takes up the Republican’s bid to avoid prosecution over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump’s lawyers argue that former presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for their official acts. Otherwise, they say, politically motivated prosecutions of former occupants of the Oval Office would become routine and presidents couldn’t function as the commander in chief if they had to worry about criminal charges.

Lower courts have rejected those arguments, including a unanimous three-judge panel on an appeals court in Washington, D.C. And even if the high court resoundingly follows suit, the timing of its decision may be as important as the outcome. That’s because Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has been pushing to delay the trial until after the November election, and the later the justices issue their decision, the more likely he is to succeed.

The court typically issues its last opinions by the end of June, which is roughly four months before the election.

The election