Currently, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has sued President Biden and two of his cabinet members. We filed a story on this but didn’t have an opportunity to quiz them on this and what they hope to achieve.
One thing is for certain, the president can be sued but not just for anything, we’ve discovered. Biden, as the sitting president, according to some experts, is immune from liability in a personal capacity when acting within his executive power or when completing official acts.
Those last three words beg the question: Does the complaint filed against him and his cabinet members fall within the jurisdiction of “completing official acts,” even if those acts violate human rights?
Our research reveals that there has been a long history of lawsuits against a sitting president, and most of them ended up going nowhere with the Supreme Court rendering the final decision, which makes this lawsuit dead on arrival.
Two cases are usually referenced in this discussion: Nixon v. Fitzgerald in 1982 and Clinton v. Jones in 1997. In the former, Mr. Fitzgerald brought a lawsuit against several government officials, including Nixon. The Supreme Court decided that presidents are not immune to criminal charges while in office. In the other case, the court decided that a sitting president [Clinton] could not be charged in a civil suit for official actions until the conclusion of his term. When he was no longer in office, Paula Jones resumed her lawsuit.
How this lawsuit will end is about as complex as predicting when the war between Israel and Hamas will end. But at least in the legal issue, perhaps with a response from the CCR, we can get a better understanding of what the organization is seeking to gain from the complaint. To be sure, they’ve got our attention and that’s one positive result.
