Schumer introduces bill to strip Trump’s presidential immunity

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) led 34 Senate Democratic colleagues in introducing legislation to strip former President Trump of the broad immunity from prosecution for official acts the Supreme Court granted him last month.

The Democratic bill, called the “No Kings Act,” would clarify that presidents and vice presidents do not have immunity for acts that violate federal criminal law, and it would remove the Supreme Court’s ability to hear challenges to the constitutionality of the legislation, authorizing the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals instead to hear such challenges.

“The Founders were explicit – no man in America shall be a king. Yet, in their disastrous decision, the Supreme Court threw out centuries of precedent and anointed Trump and subsequent presidents as kings above the law,” Schumer said in a statement referring to the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States a month ago.  

The legislation has no chance of passing the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster, and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) won’t bring it to the House floor.

But Schumer unveiled the bill Thursday to protest the Supreme Court’s controversial 6-3 ruling to broadly shield Trump from prosecution for criminal acts related to official acts, which left it up to lower courts to decide whether his actions proceeding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would qualify.

“Given the dangerous and consequential implications of the Court’s ruling, legislation would be the fastest and most efficient method to correcting the grave precedent the Trump ruling presented,” Schumer said.

The bill would clarify that Congress determines who is subject to federal criminal laws, not the Supreme Court.

And while it would allow Trump or another past or future president to challenge the constitutionality of the proposed reform, they couldn’t do so to the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.

Instead, Trump or another former president would have to go to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to challenge the law.

The bill would also allow federal prosecutors to bring charges against a president or vice president in any U.S. district court or the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

And it would create a statute of limitations of 180 days for facial constitutional challenges and 90 days for “as-applied” constitutional challenges to the “No Kings Act.”