President Biden slammed the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity in a short address from the White House on Monday evening.
“This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America,” he said from the White House. “Each of us is equal before the law. No one is above the law, not even the President of the United States.”
Biden added that “for all practical purposes,” that idea “fundamentally changed” after the judges’ ruling.
“Today’s decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits to what a president can do.
“It’s a fundamentally new principle and it’s a dangerous precedent,” he added.
Biden said if the ruling holds, the president would be outside even the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction.
![President Joe Biden speaks in the Cross Hall of the White House Monday, July 1, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)](http://vigedon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Biden-rips-Supreme-Court-over-dangerous-Trump-immunity-ruling.jpg)
The opaque decision says presidents have an absolute immunity from prosecution for core official acts.
Biden said that means only the president can put limits on his own power and that Donald Trump would pose a grave risk if re-elected.
He added that the decision has made it unlikely that Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, will stand trial for criminal charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection before the election.
“I know I will respect the limits of the presidential powers I’ve had for three-and-a-half years, but any president — including Donald Trump — will now be free to ignore the law,” Biden said.
Coming off a widely panned performance in last week’s presidential debate, he argued that the ruling marks the latest example of the Supreme Court undermining “a wide range of long-established legal principles” in recent years, further heightening the stakes of the November contest.
“The American people must decide if they want to entrust … the presidency to Donald Trump, now knowing that he’ll be even more emboldened to do whatever he pleases whenever he wants to do it,” Biden added.
“I concur with Justice Sotomayor’s dissent today. Here’s what she said — she said, ‘In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law. With fear for our democracy, I dissent,’ end of quote. So should the American people dissent. I dissent.”
The president did not take any questions and left immediately after delivering the five-minute speech.
Biden’s warning was measured compared to the response from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who described the ruling as “an assault on American democracy” and pledged to remove the “corrupt” conservative judges behind the ruling.
“It is up to Congress to defend our nation from this authoritarian capture. I intend on filing articles of impeachment,” she wrote on social media.