Does This Count? Trump v. United States and the Role of the Vice President on January 6th
Decent paper by Andrew Martin Fay in Albany Law Review.
ABSTRACT:
>The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States drastically changed the landscape of presidential powers, all but creating a new level of presidential immunity for criminal offenses, so long as the actions giving rise to those criminal offenses are within the core official acts of that President. At the time, the Biden Administration’s Justice Department was prosecuting then-former President Trump for his actions seeking to encourage his Vice President to overthrow the lawful 2020 election results on January 6, 2021. The Court adopted this new official acts doctrine, but did not exactly describe the standard of review for it, nor did the Court apply this new doctrine to President Trump’s January 6 case. In the wake of Trump v. United States, Trump’s subsequent re-election, and the lack of prosecution thereafter, the intersection of the new official acts doctrine and the Vice President’s role at the January 6 ceremony remains unclear. This Note argues that any relevant interactions between a President and Vice President wherein the President seeks to pressure the Vice President to overthrow the results of a lawful election would more likely than not be outside the scope of a President’s core official acts, thereby not qualifying for the presumptive immunity described by the Court in Trump v. United States.