The Supreme Court’s majority ruled this week in favor of at least partial immunity in the case of the actions of the president of the United States, being limited to what can be construed (with a ton of legal actions coming on that) as official, but not personal, acts.

The 6-3 ruling that came down Monday has been aptly described as “an imperial court defending an imperial presidency.”

In reality, as one legal expert has intoned, SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) “has made a mess of the government,” her assessment based on having practiced federal administrative law for 30 years. “Executive orders are presidential orders,” she notes. “With a king’s immunity they are powerful and dangerous.”

So, in the hands of Trump, they would be lethal to our democracy. But wait, Trump is not the president. Biden is. So those “king’s immunity” powers are now his, in fact, are they not? How much use of them can Biden make to advance a democratic agenda in the more than six months, at a minimum, he will be in the White House?

How much can he now do, thanks to the SCOTUS ruling this week, to cancel student debt, lock up Trump, raise the minimum wage, ensure LGBTQ+ equality, protect the reproductive rights of women, and (it has been suggested) give generous grants to qualifying newspapers in the effort to preserve our democracy?
As commentator David Flum has noted on X, with this week’s SCOTUS ruling, “Today’s U.S.A. offers the weird spectacle of lawyers who claim to honor ‘original intent’ while disdaining the actual history of origin and intention. When James II tried to self-pardon, the English of 1688 got rid of him. That’s how constitutions are preserved, then and now.”

For the rest of us, the lessons of the last week make it abundantly clear: our course of action must focus on what we have the power to do at the ballot box in November.

All the hubbub over last week’s debate has begun to abate, to an extent at least, in the context of the overriding realities of Trump’s predictable stream of outrageous lies, racist tropes and threats, and the now-highly discredited SCOTUS duplicity in its brazenly partisan political decisions. The Biden support base is coming around to realize that it must put its best foot forward in this campaign, and that any suggestion to open the convention to find an alternative would be an unmitigated disaster.

As former two-term president Obama has reminded us, he had his bad days on the artificial debate stage, too. It is not on a phony debate stage that a presidential hopeful demonstrates his or her capacity to lead, but in day-to-day decisions made in the Oval Office on matters of policy.

Weak-kneed erstwhile Biden supporters need to grow a pair, and learn, if nothing else, from their favorite “Karate Kid” movie or the equivalent, that taking it on the chin in the first round is not the end of the match. The enemy is desperate to get you to give up as soon as that happens, and the challenge, on the other hand, is to suck it up and jump right back into the ring to eventually punish your adversary.

We truly are in a critical match for history. If Democrats were to switch candidates at this stage, it would only demonstrate that they are on the run, and the Trump forces would leap all over that to railroad a victory atop a pathetic opposition put on the defensive.

For whatever reason Biden was not his true self in the opening moments of the debate last week, he rebounded during the exchanges and put his record in the White House against what Trump had which was only lies, racism about immigrants, his disastrous four years in the presidency, and his promises of draconian measures if he gets to go back, in which case the Supreme Court’s ruling this week will make life more than miserable for each one of us.

Our job is to show America that anything is better than Trump, and in Biden we have a man with a proven record of success.