金博先生這篇文章介紹「『美國的民主政治』研討會」。他的主旨在批評美國左翼人士的觀點；可以視為一種「狗咬狗」行為。我轉載金博先生大作的原因在於：該文討論到「民主政治」一些內在「困境」，以及由它們衍生的流弊。

為了幫助大家閱讀，我做了分節的編輯工作，並加上子標題。對美國政情沒什麼興趣的朋友可以略去第0、1、6等三節。願意進一步了解「民主政治」的朋友，則不妨仔細玩味第2、3、4、5各節。

做為文、藝評論家，金博先生顯然有舞文弄墨的癖好，我只得花點時間做些註解；希望小有幫助。

索引：

ad hoc：特別的，專門的，為了特定需要的
Alinsky, Saul：
apostrophize：apostrophe為「所有格」符號；此「動詞」形式指「加上『所有格』符號」；除了看得出諷刺意味外，我並不很清楚金博先生此處的「用法」。
assiduously：勤勉地，不懈地，周到地，用盡吃奶的力氣地
chaperon：監護，監護者，貴族或富家社會中陪伴未婚少女出現在公共場所的年長女伴
circumscribing：限制，限定，約束，畫界線，
co-opt：推舉…爲新成員，強行拉進，吸收，拉攏，籠絡，據為己有，借用(別人的觀點)；此處：收編
coda：結尾，尾聲；此處：跋
de Tocqueville, Alexis：法國學者、外交官，以《美國的民主政治》一書聞名
dhimmitude：順民
diktats：強加於失敗方的法律、處罰、或處分；強制命令
dysfunctional失衡的，不正常的，機能障礙的，無法運作的
Electoral College：選舉人團
epithet：表示特徵的修飾詞；(褒貶人時使用的)渾名，綽號，稱號
ergo：所以；笛卡爾的名句：Cogito, ergo sum (「我思，『故』我在」)
extralegal：非法定的，無法源的
eulogistic：(原指悼詞中)稱頌的，頌揚的，贊美的；此處為諷刺意，相當於我常常說的：「擦脂抹粉」(見此字後作者接著用的 ”advertising”)
franchise：此處：公民權，選舉權；公民，選民
genuflect：(尤指進出天主教教堂時)下跪，跪拜；引申為：跪拜，屈服，卑躬屈膝
Lewis, C. S.：
Madison, James：
nomenklatura：(共產黨術語)指經過篩選可出任黨職或地方官員者的名單；相當於共產黨文宣中的的「無產階級先鋒隊」；引申為：掌權集團，權力核心，新階級
nota bene：請務必注意下面說的
ochlocracy：暴民政治
Potter, Stephen：
quaint：別緻的，(尤指)古雅的(觀點、信仰或行為方式)，奇怪的，不合邏輯的，過時的，老式的，古早味的
Quod erat demonstrandum：證明完畢，簡寫為QED
remonstrate： 抗議，反對，進諫，告誡，表達異議
secession：從國家或團體中分離出去，另行建立一個獨立國家或新的團體。
The Narrative：主流論述，流行思潮；請參見「大論述」(我有時將此概念譯為「鬼話」、「神話」)
The New Criterion：《新標準》，一份有保守主義傾向的文學/藝術評論雜誌；請參考The New Criterion -- Bias and Credibility；金博先生為該刊主編兼發行人。
the Swamp：請參見：Swamp
visceral：內臟的；此處：出自內心深處的


Democracy in America: an introduction

Roger Kimball, October 2024

On the trouble with democracy in America.

Editors’ note: “Democracy in America: a symposium” examines the status of popular sovereignty in the United States today, nearly two centuries after the seminal work of the political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville. Other participants include Victor Davis Hanson, Daniel J. Mahoney, James Piereson & Glenn Ellmers.

Almost all the rulers who have tried to destroy freedom have at first attempted to preserve its forms. This has been seen from Augustus down to our own day.

— Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856)

0.  前言

Democracy in America: what is it? Whatever it is, we know that it is under siege. Barely a moment goes by these days without tocsins sounding about various threats to “our democracy” (I’ll come back to that plural possessive below). It used to be that the biggest, baddest threat to “our democracy” was Donald Trump (I’ll come back to that, too). Then a curious thing happened. Trump still gets prominent billing, ex officio, as it were, but when it comes to “threats to our democracy,” he seems to have been overshadowed somewhat by a curious new threat: the Constitution.

How can that be, you ask? Isn’t the Constitution of the United States, in addition to being our founding document and the arbiter of what is lawful and what isn’t, the fundamental guarantor of “our democracy”? That was yesterday. Today, if you are truly up-to-date, you know that the Constitution, while venerable, is basically at odds with democracy. “We Had to Force the Constitution to Accommodate Democracy, and It Shows,” reads one headline in The New York Times. “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution,” reads another. “The U.S. Lacks What Every Democracy Needs,” reads a third, whose column goes on to lament “the high cost of living with an old Constitution.”

1.  左派對美國憲法的批判

The fact that the U.S. Constitution is—by far—the world’s longest-serving constitution used to be a point of pride. Now, for some activists, that longevity is an embarrassment as well as an affront. The New York Times may have long since abandoned its pretensions to bringing its readers the news, preferring instead to batten them on whatever The Narrative demands. But, considered as a barometer of the vacillating pressures of left-wing political fashion, the paper has grown ever more sensitive. The culmination of its campaign against the Constitution came on August 31 with a column by Jennifer Szalai entitled “The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” According to Szalai, the answer is Yes. “One of the biggest threats to America’s politics,” we read in its subtitle, “might be the country’s founding document.” Really?

It wasn’t so long ago that organs like the Times complained that Donald Trump was “a menace to the Constitution.” (Another headline from the Times: “maga Turns Against the Constitution.”) But the new memo blames the Constitution for giving us Trump. Hence the new hotness is the contention that “Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution, making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.” The Constitution allowed Donald Trump to become president. Ergo the Constitution is “dysfunctional.” Quod erat demonstrandum.

Szalai leans heavily in her column on the left-wing law professor Erwin Chemerinsky and his new book No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States. ¹ It is almost too good to be true, but it is true that Chemerinsky is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Accordingly, there is no left-wing piety—about women, blacks, immigrants, January 6, Donald Trump, Republicans, and many other things—to which he neglects to genuflect or remonstrate, as the case requires. He even gives the thoroughly discredited Russia-collusion hoax another go-around and argues that, in the age of the internet, “false speech poses a serious threat to democracy.” And who gets to decide what counts as “false speech,” Professor?

Chemerinsky’s basic argument is that the Constitution, inadequate in 1787 when it was first adopted, has totally outlived whatever dubious usefulness it once had. He lavishes special animus on the Electoral College (which makes it possible for a candidate to win the popular vote but lose the election), the provision of two senators for every state, regardless of its size or population, and the Supreme Court, which also, he says, “undermines democracy” because it’s too independent and life tenure insulates justices from public opinion. (Wasn’t that precisely what the framers had in mind with Article III?) In conclusion, Chemerinsky predicts, “the time will come when Americans will realize that the Constitution itself is endangering democracy and they will start thinking of replacing it.” And if that doesn’t work, he says, there is always secession. Most legal scholars believe that the 1869 decision Texas v. White declared secession unconstitutional. But that doesn’t faze Chemerinsky: he disputes the common reading of the decision and argues that, regardless, secession can mean many things and can take a variety of forms.

Chemerinsky begins the brief coda to his book with the declaration: “Our government is broken and our democracy is at grave risk.” Again, what is that “democracy” of which he speaks? When Benjamin Franklin, emerging from the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was asked what sort of government he and his colleagues had forged, he famously said “A republic, if you can keep it.” A republic, nota bene, not a democracy. The difference is critical.

2.  「民主制度」及其流弊 -- 1

As Victor Davis Hanson notes below in his essay on “Our Athenian American Democracy,” “republics inevitably face an innate and radically democratizing opposition, which always seeks,” via “court edicts, referenda, or internal coups,” to “alter ‘mixed’ constitutions and restore the unchecked power of the people, or at least of its often-tyrannical leaders and institutional advocates.”

Among the many reasons that it is difficult to keep a republic going is the constant pressure to transform one party into the party of the regime. This indeed was the primary reason that the founders were suspicious of political parties. They worried that the growth of political parties would lead to what they called “faction,” and faction was a standing invitation to corruption. It works like this: A portion of the voting populace is in effect co-opted by politicians who promise and deliver favors in exchange for votes, which fosters a culture of corruption. You scratch my back and I bequeath you the legislative apparatus of the state, till bankruptcy do us part, and maybe not even then. This is the origin of “the Swamp.”

Originally, as Hanson also notes, “democracy” meant rule by “the demos,” the people. But as George Orwell pointed out in his novel Animal Farm, there is a moral or political entropy at work in human affairs that, unchecked, regularly perverts “the people” into “some people.” All animals are equal, you see, but some are more equal than others. As an aside, it is worth mentioning that the prevalence of this degeneration in the human heart is one reason that most political theorists, from Plato and Aristotle on down, have been profoundly suspicious of “pure,” direct, unchaperoned democracy. Aristotle thought it the worst form of government, leading almost inevitably to ochlocracy, or mob rule. James Madison, in Federalist 10, warned that throughout history most democracies have been as “short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” “Theoretic politicians,” he wrote—and it would be hard to find a more contemptuous deployment of the word “theoretic”—may have advocated democracy, but that is only because of their dangerous and utopian ignorance of human nature. It was not at all clear, Madison thought, that democracy was a reliable custodian of liberty.

Nevertheless, nearly everyone wants to associate himself with the word “democracy.” Totalitarian regimes like to describe themselves as the “Democratic Republic” of wherever. Conservatives champion the advantages of “democratic capitalism.” Central planners of all stripes eagerly deploy programs advertised as enhancing or extending “democracy.” Columnists for The New York Times and Berkeley law professors attack the Constitution because it stands in the way of certain democratic impulses. “Democracy,” in short, is a eulogistic word, what the practical philosopher Stephen Potter in another context apostrophized as an “OK word.” And it is worth noting, as Potter would have been quick to remind us, that the people pronouncing those eulogies delight in advertising themselves as, and are generally accepted as, “OK people.” Indeed, the class element and the element of moral approbation—of what some sage has summarized as “virtue signaling”—are key.

3.  聯邦論者的「『民主制度』護欄」

It was part of Madison’s genius, supported by Alexander Hamilton and the other founders, to have forged a species of popular rule that carefully modulated the passions of the masses in such a way that protected individual liberty in the face of the imperatives of democracy. Hence the Electoral College, which is a primary mechanism for preserving federalism. Hence, too, two senators to every state: why should Wyoming, say, be swamped by the ethos of California? Such expedients are not bugs but features of a dispensation whose aim is to preserve a canvas for individual liberty. You may have noticed that the loudest voices among Democrats chanting about “our democracy” aren’t much interested in preserving individual liberty. They’re interested instead in the acquisition and retention of power, on the one hand, and the exercise of social control, on the other.

There is a sense, then, in which Chemerinsky and like-minded critics are right about the Constitution being “antidemocratic.” It is antidemocratic in the sense that it is pro-republic. Which is to say that the Constitution is primarily about circumscribing the coercive power of the government. As Madison famously put it in Federalist 51, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” The limits on federal power set forth in the Constitution make it a bulwark against many sorts of abuse, including that most constant temptation of democracies, the tyranny of the majority.

To some extent, “democracy” is a positive but empty epithet. When Chemerinsky complains that the Constitution is “antidemocratic,” the democracy he has in mind is not the same democracy that Ronald Reagan invoked when he observed that “democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive: a system,” Reagan continued, “of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith.”

Whether what Reagan says is true of democracy itself is something that we might, with Tocqueville, and with sadness, want to question. Too often democracy has been prey to deformations that encourage rather than retard the growth of government, as Daniel J. Mahoney demonstrates in his essay below. That indeed was part of what the founders had to conjure with as they combed through the graveyard of history’s failed democracies in their efforts to frame a more robust and long-lasting system of government.

Can anyone read what Madison said about the Constitution delegating to the federal government only powers that are “few and defined” without a smile? How quaint it all sounds to our ears. And what do we make of the observation, from Federalist 57, that the people would never tolerate a law that was “not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people”?

4.  「民主制度」的內在困境

Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in the Congress. But for many decades now, Congress has been assiduously avoiding that duty. As the political philosopher James Burnham noted back in the 1940s in The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World, laws in the United States were, even then, increasingly being made not by Congress, but by an alphabet soup of executive-branch agencies. And note that Burnham wrote decades before the advent of such monstrosities as the epa, hud, the cfpb, the Department of Education, and the rest of the administrative agglomeration that governs us in the United States today. More and more, we are ruled not by laws but by ad hoc diktats emanating from semiautonomous and largely unaccountable quasi-governmental bureaucracies, many of which meet in secret but whose proclamations have the force, though not the legitimacy, of law.

Indeed, Americans today find their lives directed by a jumble of agencies far removed from the legislature and staffed by bureaucrats who make and enforce a vast network of rules that govern nearly every aspect of our lives. Who defines the scope of those rules? It is difficult to say. This is the puzzle that James Piereson underscores below in “The Washington octopus.”

What is “discrimination” under the Civil Rights Act? What is the definition of “clean air” or “pollution” under the Clean Air Act? How do we define “sex discrimination” under Title IX—indeed, how do we define “sex” or “gender”? How do we define “ballot access” under the Voting Rights Act? What is the definition of “transparency” under the mandate of the Securities Exchange Commission (sec)? The laws as passed by Congress do not answer these questions in any detail. As a consequence, civil servants have latitude to define those terms, and to issue regulations that follow from them, with little oversight from Congress. Laws may be congressional in origin, but they are now mostly administrative or bureaucratic in content.

We have entered the vertiginous realm of the “administrative state,” what Glenn Ellmers below calls the “nonconsensual rule of America’s managerial class.”

One of the most disturbing features of this phenomenon was exposed by Philip Hamburger in his work on the history and evolution of the administrative state. As Hamburger notes, the expansion of the franchise in the early twentieth century went hand in hand with the growth of administrative, that is to say, extralegal, power. For the people in charge, equality of voting rights was one thing. They could live with that. But the tendency of newly enfranchised groups—the “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” of yore—to reject progressive initiatives was something else again. That was unacceptable.

5.  「民主制度」及其流弊 -- 2

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected in a free, open, and democratic election. But the nomenklatura screamed that his election was illegitimate, a challenge to democracy, because—why? Because the wrong person won. That was Trump’s tort: he was a threat to “our democracy” because he won, because people voted for him.

Woodrow Wilson, a standard-bearer for an earlier incarnation of the progressive juggernaut, epitomized this elitist spirit. “The bulk of mankind,” he noted sadly, “is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.” What to do? The solution was to shift real power out of elected bodies and into the hands of the right sort of people, enlightened people, progressive people, people, that is to say, like Woodrow Wilson. Therefore, Wilson welcomed the advent of administrative power as a counterweight to encroaching democratization. And thus it was, as Hamburger points out, that we have seen a transfer of legislative power to the “knowledge class,” the managerial elite—the “new ruling class” that James Burnham anatomized.

A closer look at the so-called knowledge class shows that what it knows best is how to preserve and extend its own privileges. Its activities are swaddled in do-gooder rhetoric about serving the public, promoting democracy, looking after “the environment,” helping the disadvantaged, fighting racism, and similar performative kindnesses. But what they chiefly excel at is consolidating and extending their own power.

Who staffs this new elite? That, too, is a difficult question to answer. Elsewhere, I have called the governing entity “The Committee.” I do not know exactly who populates it. Vivek Ramaswamy touched on the sponginess of the situation when he noted that with Kamala Harris, Republicans are “not running against a candidate. We’re running against a system. They require a candidate they can control, which means having original ideas is a disqualification.” But who is “they”? Exactly who, for example, told Joe Biden that he had to go, the voters be damned? Whoever it was, you can be sure that they’re on The Committee.

C. S. Lewis touched on the broader psychological or moral dimension of this phenomenon in a lecture called “The Inner Ring.” In every social organization, Lewis wrote, there exist two hierarchies. One is an official and public hierarchy. The other is covert. The names of its members are “not printed anywhere.”

Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it. . . . It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline.

6.  結論

Many commentators have noted the profoundly undemocratic maneuver with which The Committee erased Joe Biden and installed Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee. After all, nearly fifteen million people voted for Joe Biden in the Democratic primary. He won, hands down, because those who inhabit the Inner Ring of The Committee made certain that other candidates—including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—were shunted to one side. They had done the same thing to Bernie Sanders years before. All, of course, in the name of “democracy.”

Which brings me to the distinction between “democracy” and “our democracy.” The latter poaches on the authority and prestige of the former. But what it really means is “their oligarchy,” “their prerogative.” As I have noted elsewhere, honestly parsed, the phrase “our democracy” means “rule by Democrats.” Accordingly, to such questions as “Was the election fair?,” what you first need to know in order to answer is, “Who won?” If it was the Democrats, then the election was fair. If the Democrats lost, then the election was stolen.

There are further things worth bearing in mind as we contemplate the political distempers of the times. One concerns the hardening of the Left. Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, followed by the incomprehensible victory of Donald Trump, has radicalized and emboldened the Left.

Today, the Left says things they would hitherto only have thought and does things that they would hitherto only have said. It used to be that there was a certain latitude accorded to opposing views. That’s all over now. What we see is the triumph not just of political correctness but also of visceral intolerance that nurtures a “by-any-means-necessary” attitude. Every issue is an existential emergency for which the Left’s shock troops are willing to go to the wall. Every loss demands that people scream at the sky. We win or we threaten to burn everything down. At least since Trump’s victory, the dominant attitude has been that only the Left is allowed to win. Any conservative victory is by definition illegitimate, a blow to “our democracy.”

It seems to me that conservatism has three main choices. One is outright surrender. One is the dhimmitude of the well-pressed but housebroken Right that exchanges its pampered place on the plantation for political irrelevance. The third choice is the perhaps paradoxical option of what we might call Alinskyite conservatism, after the canny left-wing activist Saul Alinsky. This option eschews the quietism of surrender for the activism of what Donald Trump calls “winning.”

How is this to be accomplished? As Piereson suggests below, one major goal must be to downgrade the place of Washington, the city as well as the spirit it entails, in the metabolism of American political life. Piereson is quite correct—it is an important insight—that notwithstanding its overwhelmingly Democratic coloration, the capital has developed into a kind of “political party in its own right.” Its triumph stands behind the real threat to the republic bequeathed to us by the founders. That threat is not the Constitution but subservience to the faceless managerial elite that exercises the real power in our society. Legitimacy is draining out of our governing institutions at an alarming rate. Stanching that debilitating flow requires that we redirect our attention away from the greedy puppet show in Washington to the true source of legitimacy, which is with the people.

1.  No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, by Erwin Chemerinsky; Liveright, 240 pages, $29.99 


Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. His latest books include The Critical Temper: Interventions from The New Criterion at 40 (Encounter Books) and Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter Books).

A MESSAGE FROM THE EDITORS

New to The New Criterion?

Become a subscriber to receive ten print issues and gain immediate access to our online archive spanning more than four decades of art and cultural criticism.
Subscribe

本文要點已經見於《聯邦上訴法院裁定：川普無免責權》(該欄2024/02/07)。三位法官裁定意見書中，對「三權分立」與「權力制衡」兩個原則有所闡述，可資借鏡；故轉載於此欄。此外，三位法官駁回川普律師主張「免責權」論述的詳細理由，則請參考此文。

Federal Appeals Court Rejects Trump’s Claim of Absolute Immunity

The ruling answered a question that an appeals court had never addressed: Can former presidents escape being held accountable by the criminal justice system for things they did while in office?

Alan Feuer/Charlie Savage, 02/06/24

A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he was immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to subvert the results of the 2020 election, ruling that he must go to trial on a criminal indictment accusing him of seeking to overturn his loss to President Biden.

The unanimous ruling, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, handed Mr. Trump a significant defeat. But it was unlikely to be the final word on his claims of executive immunity: Mr. Trump, who is on a path to locking up the Republican presidential nomination, is expected to continue his appeal to the Supreme Court.

Still, the panel’s 57-page ruling signaled an important moment in American jurisprudence, answering a question that had never been addressed by an appeals court: Can former presidents escape being held accountable by the criminal justice system for things they did while in office?

PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY

The Times analyzed and annotated the ruling by a federal appeals panel rejecting former President Donald J. Trump’s claim of absolute immunity.

The question is novel because no former president until Mr. Trump had been indicted, so there was never an opportunity for a defendant to make — and courts to consider — the sweeping claim of executive immunity that he put forward.

The panel, composed of two judges appointed by Democrats and one Republican appointee, said in its decision that, despite the privileges of the office he once held, Mr. Trump was subject to federal criminal law like any other American.

“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” the panel wrote. “But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects him against this prosecution.”

The three judges cast Mr. Trump’s immunity claims as a danger to the nation’s constitutional system.

“At bottom, former President Trump’s stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the president beyond the reach of all three branches,” they wrote. “Presidential immunity against federal indictment would mean that, as to the president, the Congress could not legislate, the executive could not prosecute and the judiciary could not review. We cannot accept that the office of the presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.”

A spokesman for Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the case against Mr. Trump, declined to comment on the decision.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said the former president “respectfully disagrees” with the decision and would appeal it.

“If immunity is not granted to a president, every future president who leaves office will be immediately indicted by the opposing party,” Mr. Cheung said. “Without complete immunity, a president of the United States would not be able to properly function.”

The panel’s ruling came nearly a month after it heard arguments on the immunity issue from Mr. Trump’s legal team and from prosecutors working for Mr. Smith. While the decision was quick by the standards of a normal appeal, what happens next will be arguably more important in determining not only when a trial on the election subversion charges will take place, but also on the timing of Mr. Trump’s three other criminal trials.

In addition to the federal indictment charging him with seeking to overturn his election loss in 2020, he faces similar charges brought by a district attorney in Georgia. In a footnote, the panel stressed that its decision did not address the separate question of whether state prosecutors could charge a former president over official actions.

Mr. Smith, the special counsel appointed to oversee the federal prosecutions, has also brought a case in Florida accusing Mr. Trump of mishandling highly sensitive classified documents after leaving office and obstructing efforts to retrieve them. And Mr. Trump is scheduled to go on trial next month in Manhattan on charges related to hush-money payments to a porn star during the 2016 campaign.

When Mr. Trump first sought to have the federal election case dismissed on grounds of immunity, it was an attempt to expand the protections the Supreme Court had already granted to sitting and former presidents against civil lawsuits concerning their official actions.

While not accepting that Mr. Trump’s actions were official — the panel noted that presidents have no constitutionally prescribed role in counting electoral college votes — the judges rejected his arguments about being immune from criminal charges.

“We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a president has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power — the recognition and implementation of election results,” the judges wrote. “Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and to have their votes count.”

The unsigned decision was issued by all three judges: Karen L. Henderson, an appointee of former President George H.W. Bush, and two appointees of President Biden, Judges Florence Y. Pan and J. Michelle Childs.

During the arguments last month, the judges signaled particular concern after Mr. Trump’s lawyer argued that a former president could avoid criminal prosecution even for ordering SEAL Team 6, an elite group of Navy commandos, to assassinate one of his political rivals unless the Senate had first convicted him at an impeachment trial.

The panel rejected the Trump legal team’s arguments about the necessity of an impeachment conviction before bringing criminal charges.

And in another significant part of their decision, the three appellate judges also circumscribed Mr. Trump’s ability to use further appeals to waste more time and delay the election case from going to trial — a strategy the former president has pursued since the indictment against him was filed in August in Federal District Court in Washington.

The panel said that Mr. Trump had until Monday to ask the Supreme Court to get involved in the case and continue a stay of all the underlying proceedings. The case was initially put on hold by the trial judge in December.

But the panel imposed a rule designed to discourage Mr. Trump from making an intermediate challenge to the full court of appeals. It said that if Mr. Trump instead took that route, trial preparations could begin again after Feb. 12.

If the question does reach the Supreme Court, the justices will first have to decide whether to accept the case or to reject it and allow the appeals court’s ruling against Mr. Trump to stand.

If they decline to hear the issue, the case would be sent directly back to the trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan. She scrapped her initial March 4 date for the trial last week, but has otherwise shown every sign of wanting to move the charges toward trial as quickly as possible.

If, however, the Supreme Court does accept the case, the crucial question will become how quickly the justices act in asking for briefs and in scheduling arguments. Should they move rapidly to hear the case and issue a decision, there remains the chance that a trial on the election charges will occur before the general election in November.

But if the justices take their time, it is possible a trial could be delayed until after the election. If that were to happen and Mr. Trump were to win, he would be in a position to ask his Justice Department to dismiss the case or even seek to pardon himself.

Even though Mr. Trump put three of the justices on the bench, the Supreme Court has not shown much of an appetite for wading into issues related to his efforts to tinker with the mechanics of American democracy.

But the question of how to handle Mr. Trump’s immunity claim is heading the Supreme Court’s way as it prepares for arguments on Thursday about another momentous question related to the former president: whether he can be disqualified from the ballot for having engaged in an act of insurrection by encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.  More about Alan Feuer
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. More about Charlie Savage

相關閱讀：

Four charges for the former president. Former President Donald Trump was charged with four counts in connection with his widespread efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The indictment was filed by the special counsel Jack Smith in Federal District Court in Washington. Here are some key takeaways:

The indictment portrayed an attack on American democracy. Smith framed his case against Trump as one that cuts to a key function of democracy: the peaceful transfer of power. By underscoring this theme, Smith cast his effort as an effort not just to hold Trump accountable but also to defend the very core of democracy.

Trump was placed at the center of the conspiracy charges. Smith put Trump at the heart of three conspiracies that culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to obstruct Congress’s role in ratifying the Electoral College outcome. The special counsel argued that Trump knew that his claims about a stolen election were false, a point that, if proved, could be important to convincing a jury to convict him.

Trump didn’t do it alone. The indictment lists six co-conspirators without naming or indicting them. Based on the descriptions provided, they match the profiles of Trump lawyers and advisers who were willing to argue increasingly outlandish conspiracy and legal theories to keep him in power. It’s unclear whether these co-conspirators will be indicted.

Trump’s political power remains strong. Trump may be on trial in 2024 in three or four separate criminal cases, but so far the indictments appear not to have affected his standing with Republican voters. By a large margin, he remains his party’s front-runner in the presidential primaries.