You Can’t Sue the President (or a King)

From The West Wing (Season 3, Episode 8, “The Women of Qumar”)

Categories:

Run time: 0:45

Clip Description: In this The West Wing episode (Season 3, Episode 8, “The Women of Qumar”), President Bartlet is blamed for an automobile death after making a joke about seatbelts and faces a civil lawsuit in Colorado.

American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is good for introducing the doctrine of sovereign immunity and the difference between presidents and kings.

Possible Uses in Classroom: This clip can be used to show how the governing as a president differs greatly from a king.

Discussion Questions

A sitting president is not immune from a civil suit over unofficial conduct — Clinton v. Jones (1997) held that, and also rejected the argument that such suits should simply wait until the president leaves office. But Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982) gives absolute immunity from civil damages for acts within the outer perimeter of official responsibility. A president’s public remarks about a national safety policy sit awkwardly between those two. Where does official capacity stop, and who should draw that line — the president, the trial judge, or the Supreme Court?
Sovereign immunity — the older idea that the sovereign cannot be sued without its own consent — descends from the principle that the king can do no wrong. The United States has waived much of it by statute so that people injured by federal employees can sue the government. Why would a republic keep any of the doctrine at all? Give the practical reason rather than the historical one, and then say whether that reason has any limit.
The scene trades on an intuition that suing the president is somehow improper — that the office should sit above it. Check that against the other intuition you almost certainly hold, that nobody is above the law. One of them has to give. Which do you drop, and in what situations? Describe the specific case where you would let a president’s schedule beat a plaintiff’s day in court.

Assignment

Read Clinton v. Jones (1997). The opinion is readable and its reasoning about burdens on the presidency should be taken at face value: the Court predicted that allowing the suit was highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of the president’s time. In two pages, say whether the following decades bore that prediction out, and then make the harder argument — if the Court’s forecast was wrong, does that mean it got the law wrong? Separating a factual prediction from a legal holding is the entire skill here.

Clip hosted on Critical Commons.