You are asking about Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), the final decided case of October Term 2023 (decided on July 1, 2024, the same day as this Q&A).
These judgments are meant to speak for themselves, and they do include a fairly readable "syllabus" to avoid having to read 100+ pages.
The holdings
The legal holdings are as follows.
- For acts within the President's "exclusive sphere" of constitutional authority (also referred to as "conclusive and preclusive" authority), the President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution (pp. 6-9).
- For "official" acts that are not within that central core, (“acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress,” or in a “zone of twilight” where "he and Congress may have concurrent authority"), the President does not have absolute immunity. Instead, here the President only has presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution (pp. 9-15). For such acts, the President is immune from criminal proseuction "unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no 'dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch'" (p. 14).
- For unofficial acts, "there is no immunity" (p. 15).
The Court does not say precisely how to distinguish "official from unofficial actions," but it gives some guidance (pp. 17-19):
- the immunity will extend to the "outer perimeter" of the President's official responsibilities "covering actions so long as they are 'not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority'" (p. 17);
- courts are not to inquire about motives when dividing official from unofficial conduct (p. 18);
- mere alleged violation of a generally applicable law does not make an action an unofficial action — such an approach would "deprive immunity of its intended effect" (p. 18-19).
This is new law, and differs from the law applied by the courts below
This was not already understood. This is new law. And it was contested law. It's also different law than the District Court and D.C. Circuit applied in this case so far.
Thus, we, and the District Court, know more now than we did before this holding. In its initial decision, the District Court "declined to analyze the actions described in the indictment to determine whether they involved official acts" (p. 5). This is because it was operating on a different understanding of the law. For the District Court and the D.C. Circuit, there simply was no immunity for official acts allegedly in violation of an act of Congress. The District Court had said:
[f]ormer Presidents enjoy no special conditions on their federal criminal liability
and the D.C. Circuit had said:
Because we conclude that former President Trump is not
entitled to categorical immunity from criminal liability for assertedly
“official” acts, it is unnecessary to explore whether executive
immunity, if it applied here, would encompass his expansive
definition of “official acts.”
The courts below did not divide the acts into official and unofficial acts, nor did they give the Government a chance to justify the piercing of any presumptive immunity. This is because the law as they understood it did not require that analysis to be conducted.
The question presented
You say you "thought we expected them to answer is what counts as an official act, and whether the actions he's being accused of are included." But look at the question presented (as phrased in the grant of certiorori and identically by both Donald Trump and the United States in their briefs):
Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.
Neither party expected the Court to definitely say whether the particular alleged acts should be considered official acts or not. The question was whether there was any immunity for official acts.
Comparisons to Bush v. Gore
Without attempting to justify the timeline that the Court took to hear and decide this appeal, here are some distinguishing features from Bush v. Gore:
- in Bush v. Gore, there was an impending "safe harbor" deadline and a meeting of the Electoral College;
- in Bush v. Gore, there was no attempt to provide principles for lower courts to follow regarding how to further proceed with the case (the court even attempted to contain its precedential value, saying that its holding was limited to "present circumstances") — here, in Trump v. United States there is at least ostensibly an attempt to announce some principles that can apply going forward, in this particular case, and in others.
