The Supreme Court agreed to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request today that it move quickly to weigh President Trump’s claim for presidential immunity for his actions on and around January 6. These questions — they limn the scope of the presidency —  are some of the most important elements of separated powers. They have been only lightly litigated, and now Mr. Smith wants to short circuit their disposition. 

Mr. Smith’s turn to the Nine marks the first time the high court is being asked to hear a matter relating to a criminal trial of the 45th president. To reach the justices, Mr. Smith is bypassing the United States Appeals Circuit for the District of Columbia, a forum that has proven to be friendly confines for Mr. Trump’s foes. Even that home field advantage, though, could not persuade Mr. Smith to make his case there.

The reason, it appears, is timing. Mr. Smith’s case is scheduled to begin on March 4, the day before Super Tuesday. If that date holds, the trial will conclude in advance of the 2024 election, which could return Mr. Trump to the White House. The 45th president has filed notice that he intends to appeal Judge Tanya Chutkan’s denial of presidential immunity, and has indicated that he will not participate in the proceedings while the question is pending. 

While Mr. Smith disputes that such a wildcat strike would be in order, the alacrity of his appeal betrays concern on this head. The entire case, after all, could be said to turn on the immunity question. Mr. Smith wants no delay. Even a ruling favorable to the government would take time. The special counsel himself acknowledges to the justices that the case is “suspended” until immunity is decided. That puts him in a procedural pickle.  

Mr. Smith allows that he is making “an extraordinary request” in petitioning the court prematurely. His defense is that this is an “extraordinary case.” That strikes us as strange, given how ardently the attorney general has been claiming that no one is above the law. The ruling by Judge Chutkan denying immunity was won by Mr. Smith. It dilated on how Mr. Trump is now a regular citizen and is no longer entitled to the prerogatives of the office he once held.

So how will the Nine see it — as an ordinary case or an extraordinary one? Mr. Smith urged the justices not only to take the case, but to expedite it though it’s at the “apex of public importance.” It appears to us that this is something like Mr. Trump’s position for why the trials against him should be stayed until after ballots are cast. It seems the special counsel wants a radical dispensation on a question that has not matured.

If Mr. Smith — and for that matter, Attorney General Garland — aspires to rebut Mr. Trump’s accusation that the cases against the 45th president are naked exercises in political power, he could consider prosecuting it in regular order. That would meaning meeting Mr. Trump at the court of first appeal, the D.C. Circuit. Yet the government is racing ahead to the Supreme Court in hopes of cutting off Mr. Trump before the election.

We carry no brief for Mr. Trump. We do carry a brief for due process. If Mr. Smith has one eye on the electoral calendar, that would telegraph a mixture of politics and prosecution that is the abuse against which Mr. Trump has been railing to all who will listen. The more Mr. Smith departs from the ordinary, the greater grows the impression that what is happening to the 45th president is happening because he could be the 47th.

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This editorial was updated from the bulldog.