On July 2, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court codified the opinion that American presidents are now above the law.

This has revived one of the hoariest shibboleths of the English legal system, the notion of “the King’s Two Bodies” – the Body Natural and the Body Politick.

Under this concept, the British monarch was not simply a specific individual – Body Natural – but was also the embodiment of the whole realm and everyone and everything in it, including its laws – Body Politick.

It was precisely this symbolic melding of king and realm which provided the most telling argument made by the Stuart monarch, King Charles I, in his struggles with a Parliament which was attempting to rein in his power in the mid-17th century. Summarized, it states that the monarch cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth because the monarch is the authority of last resort and can only be judged by God. This remains the fundamental authoritarian position (usually minus the belief in God) down to the present day in countries like China and Russia.

That the British political class did not totally buy into this notion was most dramatically demonstrated in 1649, when the Body Natural of Charles Stuart was accused of being a tyrant and a traitor to the Body Politick, and duly beheaded.

in 1688, after a horrific civil war and as part of the Glorious Revolution, a new legal formula “ King-in-Parliament “ narrowed the scope of legal monarchic activity and put an end to any ambiguity concerning the monarch’s sphere of authority in Great Britain.

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America, all of whom were very well informed about the British political experience from the previous century, wisely separated the three branches of government in order to avoid such ambiguities.

On July 2, 2024, however, the U.S. Supreme Court turned back the political clock more than three hundred years and resurrected the zombie notion of the King’s Two Bodies through their ruling on Donald Trump’s immunity from the laws that circumscribe the activities of all other American citizens.

In its ruling, the court created two categories of presidential immunity; total immunity for core actions related to presidential duties and partial immunity which includes a huge gray area which will have to be defined through litigation in the lower courts.

Criminal acts committed as a private individual lie outside this definition. King Charles I (also known as Charles Stuart) no doubt, is applauding from his grave. Here we have a revolution, indeed, but for me and many other American citizens, one that is far from glorious.

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