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Page Number: 17

12 

TRUMP v. VANCE 

Opinion of the Court 

1 
The  President’s  primary  contention,  which  the  Solicitor
General  supports,  is  that  complying  with  state  criminal 
subpoenas  would  necessarily  divert  the  Chief  Executive
from his duties.  He grounds that concern in Nixon v. Fitz-
gerald, which recognized a President’s “absolute immunity 
from damages liability predicated on his official acts.”  457 
U. S.,  at  749.    In  explaining  the  basis  for  that  immunity,
this Court observed that the prospect of such liability could
“distract  a  President  from  his  public  duties,  to  the  detri-
ment of not only the President and his office but also the 
Nation that the Presidency was designed to serve.”  Id., at 
753.  The President contends that the diversion occasioned 
by a state criminal subpoena imposes an equally intolerable 
burden  on  a  President’s  ability  to  perform  his  Article  II 
functions. 

But Fitzgerald did not hold that distraction was sufficient 
to  confer  absolute  immunity.    We  instead  drew  a  careful 
analogy  to  the  common  law  absolute  immunity  of  judges
and prosecutors, concluding that a President, like those of-
ficials, must “deal fearlessly and impartially with the duties 
of  his  office”—not  be  made  “unduly  cautious  in  the  dis-
charge of [those] duties” by the prospect of civil liability for 
official acts.  Id., at 751–752, and n. 32 (internal quotation 
marks  omitted).  Indeed,  we  expressly  rejected  immunity
based  on  distraction  alone  15  years  later  in  Clinton  v. 
Jones.  There, President Clinton argued that the risk of be-
ing “distracted by the need to participate in litigation” enti-
tled a sitting President to absolute immunity from civil lia-
bility,  not  just  for  official  acts,  as  in  Fitzgerald,  but  for 
private conduct as well.  520 U. S., at 694, n. 19.  We disa-
greed  with  that  rationale,  explaining  that  the  “dominant 
concern” in Fitzgerald was not mere distraction but the dis-
tortion of the Executive’s “decisionmaking process” with re-
spect to official acts that would stem from “worry as to the
possibility of damages.”  520 U. S., at 694, n. 19.  The Court