Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she hopes the Supreme Court will "take back some of the crazy things that it's done," naming the Court's 2024 presidential immunity ruling — the decision that shielded President Donald Trump — as one she wants overturned in her lifetime, at a civics event at George Washington's Mount Vernon on Saturday.
"I dissent a lot. I'm hoping that the court will take back some of the crazy things that it's done. I'm only joking — maybe not," she said. "No, seriously. You know, I've spoken openly about this, there's some opinions that I hope in my lifetime will get overturned. The immunity case is one of them."
The ruling she means is Trump v. United States, decided 6–3 on July 1, 2024, which held that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. Sotomayor wrote the liberal justices' dissent, warning that the majority had made the president "a king above the law." On Saturday she told the audience at the George Washington Symposium — an hourlong conversation on civics education with iCivics chief executive Louise Dube — that reversing rulings like it is now her open hope for the Court she serves on.
She tied that hope directly to the voters who had just handed Democrats the House and Senate. "We saw the outpouring of voters on Tuesday," she said. "I tell people all the time, there's no excuse for not voting. There just isn't. Apathy is not acceptable." And she predicted the Court itself would change course in time: "There have been some systemic changes in my court's jurisprudence in many areas of law. We'll settle down, too. Not quite sure when. But we will. And a new order will be established that people will begin to understand."
"There are some norms we may have lost forever," she added. "But I don't think that we will fail as a democracy. But I think we're going to have a hard patch figuring out what that means."
For ordinary Americans the stakes she is pointing at are concrete: the immunity ruling decides whether a sitting or former president can ever be prosecuted for acts done in office, and it stands until a future Court takes a new case and five justices vote to undo it. Who those justices are is set by elections — Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are both in their late 70s, and a Democratic-controlled Senate would have to confirm, or can block, any Trump nominee to replace them. That is the chain Sotomayor was spelling out at Mount Vernon: vote, and the Court eventually follows.
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