Supreme Court Turns Blind Eye To 'crazy' Trump Idea Because Justices Devised It: Report

President Donald Trump has the Supreme Court to thank for his ability to accept a $400 million luxury jet from the government of Qatar at the same time he's inking diplomatic and business agreements in the Middle East, legal analyst Leah Litman wrote for Salon.

Trump has always faced allegations of violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits leaders from accepting foreign gifts to shield them from corrupt influence. And he was deluged in lawsuits the first time around, alleging he took cash from foreign dignitaries who stayed at his D.C. hotel.

When the Supreme Court finally heard the matter, after former President Joe Biden was elected, they "opted to dismiss the cases as moot, saying they no longer mattered because Trump was no longer president. Equally importantly, the court vacated the underlying decisions—it wiped the precedents off the books such that there’s no longer any established case law holding that people can, indeed, sue the president for violating the foreign emoluments clause."

However, the Supreme Court's role in all this goes a lot deeper than just turning away Trump's prior Emoluments Clause cases, Litman wrote — the right-wing bloc of the court has spent decades chipping away at public corruption laws, to the point that Trump being gifted a Boeing 747 isn't even clearly illegal by their precedent.

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For one, the court curtailed the ability to pass laws limiting expenditure on elections in a series of cases, the most famous being Citizens United v. FEC, ruling that it wasn't corrupt simply for independent entities who spend more to have more access to presidents. Then they threw out the conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell for giving meetings to a CEO who gave him $200,000 in loans and gifts, saying that was just ordinary representative government, and in United States v. Snyder they ruled local officials can accept tips for political acts, as long as there isn't an explicit quid pro quo agreement.

In essence, Litman wrote, the Supreme Court has established that it's perfectly fine for politicians to take gifts and then do things of value for the benefactor, so long as there isn't an explicit agreement that one was for the other. Which is pretty close to what justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have done themselves by accepting extravagant gifts and vacations from entities, some of whom had business before the court.

"So if you’re wondering, where did Donald Trump and his apologists get the crazy idea that Trump could accept luxurious gifts from someone who probably wanted to gain the president’s ear, look no further than the Supreme Court," Litman concluded. "As they say, a fish rots from the head (of the judicial branch). Many people, myself included, have come to think of the Supreme Court as, in part, a MAGA court. It just so happens that that includes the Make America a Grift Again part of the MAGA agenda."