New York Times gift articles

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The Supreme Court’s decision to bestow presidents with immunity from prosecution over official actions is an extraordinary expansion of executive power that will reverberate long after Donald J. Trump is gone.

It had seemed like a constitutional truism in recent years when more than one lower-court opinion addressing novel legal issues raised by Mr. Trump’s norm-breaking behavior observed that presidents are not kings.

Dismissing those worries, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, argued that presidents stand apart from regular people, so protecting them from prosecution if they are accused of abusing their powers to commit official crimes is necessary.

Executive power often acts like a one-way ratchet: It is easier to increase than to roll back again, as one president’s innovations become a base line of precedents for his successor of either party to build upon when a perceived need arises.

But the political contingencies of the Reagan era led its push to expand presidential power to be absorbed into the conservative legal movement that was also spreading in the same period, and has come to shape ambitious Republican lawyers.

Declaring that the majority invented a “law-free zone” around the president that will remain a “loaded weapon” for future occupants of the White House to wield, she listed “nightmare scenarios”:

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