MTG on Sen Padilla: "If he's attacking police officers and he's aggressively attacking the Secretary of Homeland, yes he should be arrested. No one is above the law."
— Ron Smith (@Ronxyz00) June 12, 2025
She's fúcking horrible! pic.twitter.com/TSnS542M1U
If Senator Alex Padilla "is attacking police officers and he's aggressively attacking the Secretary of Homeland," he should be arrested. However, Padilla did not attack the officers at Kristi Noem's news conference on Thursday, nor did he attack the Homeland Security secretary, let alone do so aggressively. And if he did so- which he did not- it would be a case of the past tense: "if he attacked the individuals" rather than is attacking. Literally, Representative Greene is being fairly liberal here; her hypothetical posits that Padilla is doing so fairly regularly rather than only once. You might even say that she is soft on crime.
Ironically, Noem is incorrect only when she asserts "no one is above the law."
We know one person who is above the law. The Supreme Court told us so in Trump v. United States. You will recall
A federal grand jury indicted former President Donald J. Trump on four counts for conduct that occurred during his Presidency following the November 2020 election. The indictment alleged that after losing that election, Trump conspired to overturn it by spreading knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the collecting, counting, and certifying of the election results.
Trump moved to dismiss the indictment based on Presidential immunity, arguing that a President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities, and that the indictment’s allegations fell within the core of his official duties.
The District Court denied Trump’s motion to dismiss, holding that former Presidents do not possess federal criminal immunity for any acts. The D. C. Circuit affirmed. Both the District Court and the D. C. Circuit declined to decide whether the indicted conduct involved official acts. Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.
Or as the ACLU explained eleven months ago
In Trump v. United States, the court’s Republican-appointed justices — including the three Trump appointees — announced a brand new constitutional immunity from criminal liability for presidents’ “official acts,” or anything a president may do using the powers of the office. The court’s decision ensures that future presidents — including Trump himself should he win reelection in November — will know that they can escape criminal accountability for blatantly criminal acts, no matter how corrupt. Even acts that strike at the heart of our democracy, like resisting the peaceful transition of power, could not be prosecuted.
The court tried to cast its opinion as restrained, emphasizing that it rejected former President Trump’s most extreme claim: that presidents can only be prosecuted for crimes for which they had already been impeached. But as Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in a powerful dissent, there is nothing measured about the opinion or its consequences. The court grants absolute immunity against criminal prosecution for any of a president’s “core” executive acts, which the court went on to define as including any use of the Justice Department—an ostensibly and traditionally independent agency–for criminal investigation. And it grants “presumptive” immunity for any acts within the “outer perimeter of his official responsibility.” While the latter immunity is in theory rebuttable, the court set such a high standard for rebutting it that it may be effectively absolute as well.
It gets worse because
... the court also held that official acts cannot even be used
as evidence to support a crime committed in the president’s personal capacity,
making it even more difficult for prosecutors to indict a president even for
purely private criminal acts. The court purports to leave much of the work of
hashing out the details in Trump’s case to lower courts. But the standards it
announced will make holding any president criminally accountable
extraordinarily difficult.
In the case of one of those crimes Donald Trump might commit in a personal capacity, such as raping a woman or engaging in massive financial fraud, it might be nearly impossible to gain a conviction without referring to an official act as evidence of the personal crime committed.
In the most extreme- maybe- example of a crime arguably committed in an official capacity, President Trump orders Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political opponent. (Just kidding- Trump lacks the courage to allow his fingerprints on anything, so he would simply give the boys a nod and a wink and send them on their way.}
After the deed is done and there is clamor for prosecution, the President would claim it was an official act. In response to recent anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, Trump complained "You know, if we didn't attack this one very strongly, you'd have them all over he country but I can inform the rest of the country, that when they do it, if they do it, they're going to be met with equal or greater force." If a political opponent who protested a foreign policy of the federal government is killed, President Trump would argue that the assassination was necessary to protect the troops. He would call it a national security issue, that the morale of the "troops" was undermined, and dare courts to defy him.
"No one is above the law" is a myth. Ironically, the insistence of media personalities to repeat this shibboleth, commonly met with no pushback, increases the likelihood that when President Trump clearly and inarguably violates the la-, in an official or unofficial capacity- there will be widespread acceptance in the public. And the courts might then be completely submissive to the man who alternately claims to be a king, and complains that he is not treated as one.
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