More dangerous was the claim made earlier this week by an attorney for President Trump in a federal appellate court that if Trump were to fulfill his 2016 musing about standing “in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot[ing] somebody,” the president could not even be investigated by local authorities — indeed, “nothing could be done.” It was bad enough for a former president to espouse in a TV interview unfounded views of executive immunity, but it’s far worse for a lawyer actively representing a sitting president in a solemn court proceeding to do so. This is a reprehensible and un-American view. It would make Trump not a president but a king — utterly beyond the reach of the law.

Trump is increasingly becoming addicted to his claims of legal immunity. The analogy is intentional — like an addict, he seeks higher and higher doses to reach legal oblivion. His first foray was to assert that he could not be indicted as a sitting president, relying on two long-standing Justice Department opinions, which is how he escaped consideration of criminal charges by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. But it has since escalated. Trump has argued that his current advisers can’t be required to testify before Congress; that his former White House advisers can’t be required to testify before Congress; that executive privilege protects even former advisers who never worked in the White House from testifying before Congress; that his administration needn’t comply with congressional subpoenas seeking documents; and that he needn’t provide his tax returns in response to state law requiring them. But he has now gone beyond that, too, claiming — most astonishingly — that he needn’t participate in any way, including letting government witnesses testify, in the impeachment inquiry undertaken by the House of Representatives to scrutinize his actions.

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One way to think about the constraints on presidential wrongdoing is using the three I’s: investigation, indictment and impeachment. Any constitutional scholar who thinks one is not available, like indictment, argues to increase the power of the other two to make up for the distortion. So scholars who believe a sitting president cannot be indicted couple that view to a belief that investigation and impeachment must be readily available. And vice versa. No serious person contends that all three are not available.

That is why Trump keeps losing court cases, including one earlier this month in a major rebuke handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. But Trump’s argument this week took things to another level. He was in court to block a subpoena issued by New York prosecutors to Trump’s accounting firm seeking financial records relating to hush-money payments made before the 2016 election — that is, when Trump was a private citizen, before he was president. One of the judges hearing the case, testing just how far Trump’s claim of presidential immunity from investigation reached, asked whether, if Trump really did shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue as he’d proposed hypothetically on the campaign trail in 2016, “local authorities couldn’t investigate.”

“That is correct,” Trump attorney William Consovoy replied.

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That is actually not correct — not by the Justice Department’s own logic, which has been the underlying rationale for many of Trump’s claims of immunity up to now. It’s true that the Justice Department continues to take the position that a sitting president can’t be criminally prosecuted or even indicted, based largely on the notion that the Constitution provides a different remedy for scrutinizing a president while in office: impeachment. But the department’s opinion on this issue doesn’t say that a president can’t be investigated. Indeed, it says precisely the opposite, explicitly recognizing that a “grand jury could continue to gather evidence during the period of immunity” a sitting president enjoys, “even passing this task down to subsequently empaneled grand juries if necessary.” That’s critical, the opinion says, for “securing and preserving evidence” — thus laying the groundwork for charging and prosecuting a president after he or she has left office.

Consovoy’s claim also runs headlong into the legal position espoused earlier this month by Trump’s own White House counsel. The central argument against allowing a sitting president to be charged and prosecuted is that impeachment offers the appropriate, alternative mechanism for considering whether a president has engaged in improprieties. But Trump’s top White House lawyer wrote to Congress claiming that the president “cannot participate” in the impeachment inquiry. That argument rested, in part, on the fact that impeachment doesn’t offer all of the procedural protections available in the criminal context.

Trump wants to have it both ways: He rejects a criminal investigation because impeachment is available, and he rejects an impeachment inquiry because it’s not a criminal investigation.

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Ultimately, Trump was in court this week to defend a single premise: Donald Trump is above the law — not just as president but as a person and a businessman. His central argument for resisting the subpoena issued by New York prosecutors was that there is no way to distinguish any of Trump’s activities, even his financial activities before becoming president, from the office Trump now holds, an office that furnishes him with certain immunities. L’etat, c’est moi, as Louis XIV would have it: I am the state.

That’s a plausible position for a king (though even for monarchs, it has been out of fashion for several centuries). But it’s an outrageous one for a president. It’s in direct conflict with the views of the president’s own Justice Department and White House counsel. And it should be rejected in court — swiftly — to ensure that, in the United States, no one is above the law.