Orzeczenie Supreme Court of the United States w sprawie immunitetu Prezydenta USA jako wyraz sporów o funkcje sądów i prawa w demokracji konstytucyjnej

Abstrakt

The criminal liability of the President for acts committed in the exercise of his office covers a complex of issues related to all areas of the legal system. Indeed, the criminal law aspects of the grounds and manner of criminal liability are complemented by constitutional elements. The special position and powers of the President co-determine the scope of responsibility. The President’s actions that fall within the limits of his powers and duties remain, for obvious reasons, outside the scope of repressive responsibility. The scope of presidential responsibility is also co-determined by institutions categorised as instruments of corrective justice, including states of necessity and circumstances excluding fault. This issue can be analysed from a purely penal perspective or it can also take into account elements of constitutional regulation. The US Supreme Court’s approach was based on yet another perspective. The elements that determine the limits of the President’s criminal liability for acts committed in the exercise of his office are sought by the Supreme Court in its reconstruction of the principle of separation of powers. Pointing to the presidential powers set out in Article II of the US Constitution, it assumes that they delimit the area of independent and exclusive powers, within the scope of which Congress may not interfere by means of legislation.

By virtue of the will of the legislature thus reconstructed, Congress lacks the authority to enact laws providing for the criminal liability of the President in this respect. Consequently, the courts also lack the competence to oversee such cases.

The above assumptions form the basis for the US Supreme Court to reconstruct from the US Constitution the absolute immunity of the President in terms of the exclusive and preclusive competences set out in the US Constitution. In addition, the Supreme Court also derives from the US Constitution the construction of presumptive immunity, which covers presidential actions in the area of shared powers with Congress. Although, in this respect, the Constitution does not deprive Congress of the power to legislate, including the power to define the grounds for the President’s criminal liability, the bring to criminal charges against the President is contingent on a demonstration that this will not unduly interfere with the efficiency and authority of the executive branch. By locating the grounds for the reconstruction of presidential immunity at the level of constitutional provisions relating to the principle of separation of powers, the approach presented by the Supreme Court transforms criminal law analyses into systemic constitutional considerations.

In this way, the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity is part of the debates concerning the nature of the constitutional principle of the separation of powers, the court’s competence to rule on constitutional issues, the delimitation of the scope of competences of the authorities, and, finally, the disputes concerning the scope of the Court’s cognition in the sphere of matters that are strongly entangled politically and morally.

The US Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity was based to a significant extent on the jurisprudential concept (doctrine) of the separation of powers. The essential line of argumentation is based on the Supreme Court’s reconstruction of the content, meaning and function of the principle of separation of powers, which forms the basis for the position relating to the scope and type of presidential immunity. At the same time, in the sphere related to absolute immunity, one can see in it a reference to the concept (doctrine) of the republican separation of powers. The exclusion of the possibility of the courts’ interference in the area of competence regulated by Article II of the US Constitution means that the assessment of the President should take place at the level of constitutional responsibility in the impeachment procedure. In the area covered by the construction of impeachment, by confirming the competence of the courts to carry out a criminal assessment, it supplements the prerequisites for liability with elements reconstructed from the Constitution. It thus expresses restraint in the sphere of judicial competence on matters relating to constitutional and political aspects. It does not decide the question of immunity unequivocally, leaving a considerable area of discretion, leaving a space that can be filled by subsequent decisions of the federal courts on this issue.