During the 1970s, attorney Philip A. Lacovara, now 82, had a front-row seat during a major political scandal: Watergate. Lacovara served as counsel to Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox; when U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson defied President Richard Nixon’s order to fire Cox, it set off the infamous Saturday Night Massacre of Saturday, October 20, 1973.
Lacovara also served as deputy solicitor general under Nixon. And on July 8, 1974, he gave 35 minutes of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the United States v. Nixon.
Many years later, Lacovara is even more critical of President Donald Trump than he was of Nixon half a century ago.
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In a scathing article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on July 29, Lacovara argues that history will judge the Trump administration harshly — as well as Trump’s “six enablers” on the U.S. Supreme Court.
“In regularly voting in favor of President Trump — often in extraordinary interventions that short-circuit traditional judicial processes — those six justices are racking up a rap sheet of constitutional abuses of staggering import,” Lacovara writes. “Most appalling was the textually unfounded 2024 decision creating immunity for a president to commit federal crimes. But so much more followed.”
The six U.S. Supreme Court justices that Lacovara considers “enablers” were appointed by GOP presidents: Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Trump appointees Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.
“In the term that closed out last month,” the former Watergate counsel says, “the pro-Trump majority — over the passionate but impotent objections of three justices — summarily overturned the 90-year-old precedent that had upheld the authority of Congress to create bipartisan and independent federal regulatory agencies to protect the health and safety of the American public. The Court has repeatedly brushed aside lower courts’ efforts to protect the livelihoods of thousands of career public servants whom Trump’s erstwhile chum Elon Musk arranged to have thrown out on the street with little warning.”
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Lacovara adds, “Not content with sustaining the most bombastic assertions of presidential prerogative, the majority even emasculated the power of federal judges to enjoin such concededly unconstitutional action. In perhaps the cruelest pattern of indulging presidential brutality, the majority has consistently licensed the Trump Administration to treat thousands of human beings like cattle, to be evicted from the country and penned up and shipped off, simply because they are ‘undocumented.’”
Decades from now, Lacovara predicts, the Trump Administration and the Roberts Court will receive scathing condemnation from historians.
“History has a way of reckoning with mendacity, corruption, and recklessness,” Lacovara emphasizes. “Time may delay the verdict, but eventually, the verdict will be returned. Donald Trump and his administration will have to face the verdict of history. And so will his six enablers on the Supreme Court who have been complicit in eroding the constitutional ideal of constrained executive power and creating a virtually omnipotent presidency…. The six pro-Trump Supreme Court justices won’t someday be forced to account for the damage their decisions are inflicting on both the principles of American constitutionalism and on the lives of tens of thousands of victims of the Trump Administration. They won’t have to answer for the damage that will be inflicted by future presidential administrations emboldened by their decisions.”
Lacovara adds, “It would not be realistic or appropriate to anticipate the justices hauled before some tribunal to answer for their rulings. Rather, the verdict will come, as it more often does, in the harsh and uncompromising light of history.”
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Former Watergate counsel Philip A. Lacovara’s full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.