Turning to other excellent public scholarly writing from the week, check out Holly Brewer’s thread on the misleading use of a Ben Franklin quote at the Supreme Court (h/t Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR)):

twitter.com/earlymodjustic…

Justice Department Files Statement of Interest Supporting Private Citizens’ Right to Sue Under Voting Rights Act of 1965

🔗: justice.gov/opa/pr/justice…

.@earlymodernjustice told @salon that Ben Franklin would have been 'horrified' last week at #SCOTUS when Trump's lawyer quoted him out of context and implied that Franklin supported immunity from prosecution for presidents. He did not. salon.com/2024/04/30/his…

Holly Brewer figures prominently and deservedly in this devastating account of John Sauer's absurd misuse of history in the recent SCOTUS presidential immunity hearing. Brennan Center
salon.com/2024/04/30/his…

The only deliberate leak of news from the Constitutional Convention: “Tho we cannot, affirmatively, tell you what we are doing; we can, negatively, tell you what we are not doing—we never once thought of a King.”
--Pennsylvania Herald, August 18, 1787.
(from Jill Lepore)

At Trump's immunity trial, his lawyer quoted Ben Franklin out of context, completely distorting the meaning. To set the record straight:

Interesting thread:

Paging Jack Black

Listen to Holly. Read this thread, and also check out her Law Dork conversation here: lawdork.com/p/law-dork-vid…

Thread.

Debunking yet another example, among many, of a defense of unlimited Presidential immunity that rests on a cherry-picked, badly out of context, version of original intent. Sauer's intellectual dishonesty is staggering.

Great thread from my colleague, coadjutor, and friend Holly Brewer, demonstrating (yet again) the rank nonsense of attorney Sauer's argument. One hopes the C.J. (possibly the swing vote on the Court), a sometime history major, will get the point.

Thank you to b-boy bouiebaisse for spotlighting the historians’ brief in Trump’s immunity case…

(We strike again!)

Cc: Holly Brewer Rosemarie Zagarri Jack Rakove Jonathan Gienapp Gautham Rao (same username on bsky) Jane Manners Alex Keyssar Dr. Joanne Freeman (@jbf1755 on lots o’ platforms)

Hip Hop Is The Last Genre.

In his takedown of Trump's immunity claim, b-boy bouiebaisse refers to the historians' brief we filed with #SCOTUS - 15 top scholars explain that American history doesn't support presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.

Watch: Chris Hayes and b-boy bouiebaisse talk about how wildly ahistorical and just wrong it is for the former president to claim immunity, citing as proof the brief we filed on behalf of 15 top U.S. historians

WATCH: b-boy bouiebaisse joins Chris Hayes after writing in his NYT opinion column, 'Trump has asked the Supreme Court if he is, in effect, a king. And at least four members of the court, among them the so-called originalists, have said, in essence, that they’ll have to think about it.'

Thank you to b-boy bouiebaisse for spotlighting the historians’ brief in Trump’s immunity case…

(We strike again!)

Cc: Holly Brewer Rosemarie Zagarri Jack Rakove Jonathan Gienapp Gautham Rao (same username on bsky) Jane Manners Alex Keyssar Dr. Joanne Freeman (@jbf1755 on lots o’ platforms)

“Trump’s claim that he has absolute immunity for criminal acts taken in office as president is an insult to reason, an assault on common sense and a perversion of the fundamental maxim of American democracy: that no man is above the law,” b-boy bouiebaisse writes. nyti.ms/4bdxh2E

AHA members Carol Anderson, Orville Vernon Burton , and Alexander Keyssar, along with J. Morgan Kousser, authored an amicus curiae brief challenging Georgia’s claim that individuals and community groups cannot bring lawsuits to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.