WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday listened to arguments in Donald Trump's bid to avoid prosecution in a case charging him with efforts overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

The Supreme Court seemed highly skeptical of his claim of absolute immunity from prosecution, but it’s less clear that the justices are headed for a quick resolution.

The hearing started at 10 a.m. and lasted for over 2 1/2 hours; it was the only case scheduled to be in session Thursday. No cameras are allowed during Supreme Court sessions, but the court does make a live audio stream available from hearings.

“This case will have effects that go far beyond this particular prosecution,” Justice Samuel Alito said.

Trump’s lawyers argue that former presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for their official acts. Otherwise, they say, politically motivated prosecutions of former occupants of the Oval Office would become routine and presidents couldn’t function as the commander in chief if they had to worry about criminal charges.

Lower courts have rejected those arguments, including a unanimous three-judge panel on an appeals court in Washington. And even if the high court resoundingly follows suit, the timing of its decision may be as important as the outcome. 

That’s because Trump, the former president and now the leading Republican presidential nominee, has been pushing to delay the lower court's trial until after the Nov. 5 election. The later the Supreme Court justices issue their decision, the more likely he is to succeed in that schedule.

The high court typically issues its last opinions for the session year by the end of June.

During the hearing, Justice Neil Gorsuch suggested that if presidents fear they could be prosecuted after they leave office, they could begin preemptively pardoning themselves.

“We’ve never answered whether a president can do that. And happily, it’s never been presented to us,” he said.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett took issue with a key argument of the Trump team — that under the Constitution, former presidents must be impeached and convicted before the Senate before they can be prosecuted in court.

Barrett said no one has ever suggested the justices would need to be impeached and convicted before they could be prosecuted. Trump lawyer D. John Sauer responded that under the Constitution, the sequence is only mandatory as it relates to former presidents.

Shortly before arguments were slated to begin, Trump fired off a few posts Thursday on his social media network.

In one, he declared in all caps, “WITHOUT PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY, IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR A PRESIDENT TO PROPERLY FUNCTION, PUTTING THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN GREAT AND EVERLASTING DANGER!”

Trump also said that without immunity, a president would just be “ceremonial” and the opposing political party “can extort and blackmail the President by saying that, ‘if you don’t give us everything we want, we will Indict you for things you did while in Office,’ even if everything done was totally Legal and Appropriate.”

That being said: Trump was not in the audience at the Supreme Court. He was required to be in New York for a criminal trial currently in progress involving hush money allegations.

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