Will Donald Trump ever face justice for the events surrounding the January 6th attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol? Or will justice be delayed so long that justice will eventually be denied? These are now open questions, after the Supreme Court has injected more months of delay into the process.

There is plenty of blame to go around here. America's judicial system itself is a good start, where judges are not constrained by any clock and are free to set schedules far off into the future if they feel so inclined. Consider that Trump was indicted on the third of August last year, but even without all the appeals and delays the trial was initially scheduled for March 4th (next week, in other words). That's seven months of delay right from the get-go. The prosecution had suggested the start of January for the trial to take place, but the judge tacked on an extra two months right from the start.

All of that is considered normal. It's actually a fairly fast-paced schedule, in terms of the usual pace of the federal courts. The courts also defer to the appeals process, which resulted in Trump's case being halted in its tracks at the beginning of December, when Trump filed his presidential immunity claim with the appellate court. The case has remained frozen ever since.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, to his credit, has been trying to avoid delays as much as possible. Right after Trump filed with the appellate court, Smith petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case immediately, which would have skipped the appellate court level altogether. The Supreme Court declined to do so. So a three-judge panel of the appeals court heard the appeal on January 9th. They took almost an entire month to issue their ruling, which shot down every argument Trump's lawyers had made. Their ruling also effectively shut down one further avenue of delay for Trump (appealing to the entire circuit court rather than just the three-judge panel) and instead forced him to appeal directly to the Supreme Court within a week's time (which he then did).

The Supreme Court then took weeks to decide to hear the appeal, but they didn't schedule the oral arguments until the end of April -- in effect, wasting another seven weeks. And then they can take however much time they wish to rule on the case. The Supreme Court likes to hold back big important decisions until the very end of their term, so we might have to wait until the end of June to hear what they have decided. That'll be another two months wasted.

The judge in the original case has indicated that the defense will get almost three months more to prepare, once all the appeals are over and the clock starts ticking again (assuming Trump loses his appeal and the case still goes forward). This means no trial will even be scheduled to start until the end of the summer, at the very earliest. And that might not leave enough time to try the case before the election. The net result: justice delayed, while politics marches on.

There is plenty of blame to go around for this sad state of affairs. There simply has not been enough urgency from the very start. The Democratic House didn't even move to start an investigation into the events until July of 2021 -- six full months after it had happened. The House Select Committee didn't begin its landmark public hearings until June of 2022. It issued its final report in December of that year, just before Republicans took back control of the congressional chamber.

That's almost two years after the insurrection attempt was made, obviously. But while the final report did make recommendations to the Justice Department for charges, the real centerpiece of the House Select Committee were their televised hearings, which happened half a year earlier. These hearings were instrumental in lighting a fire under the Justice Department. The Justice Department didn't even open an investigation into the events of January 6th until March of 2022 -- over a year afterwards -- and this investigation didn't really get rolling until the House Select Committee began laying out its case to the American people.

This is where the lion's share of the blame truly belongs, in my opinion. President Joe Biden named Merrick Garland to be his attorney general, kind of as a consolation prize for him being cheated out of a Supreme Court seat. Garland has a rather judicial outlook on the law, when Biden would have been a lot better served by appointing someone with a more prosecutorial viewpoint. Garland felt no pressure to move on investigating an attempted insurrection until the House of Representatives led the way and ramped up the public pressure. Garland wasted over an entire year -- and that is at the heart of why the case is being pinched for time now. Imagine if we were at this exact point in the legal process last year. Imagine if the original court case had been scheduled to begin in early March of 2023, in other words. If that were true, the Supreme Court would have plenty of time to hear Trump's appeal and rule, and there would still be plenty of time left on the calendar afterwards for the court to hold its trial. The election would be more than a year away, and wouldn't even really be a big factor in the scheduling. Merrick Garland didn't even appoint a special counsel until November of 2022. If he had done so immediately after he had taken office, almost two years could have been saved.

Special Counsel Jack Smith is one person in this whole chain of events who doesn't deserve any blame for the delays. He has moved about as fast as he could -- which is one reason why he was chosen for the position. Once the House Select Committee goaded the Justice Department into actually acting (an effort that Republican Liz Cheney deserves most of the praise for, in fact), Smith has been pushing forward relentlessly on multiple fronts.

But Donald Trump is an absolute master at delaying legal proceedings. He's certainly had lots of practice, and he's gotten very good at it. A normal defendant who was completely innocent would, of course, want their trial to happen as soon as possible so they could clear their name -- and that's without them even being a candidate for the presidency. Trump, thought, does not want a speedy trial and will drag every roadblock available to him across the path of the courts.

Never before in American history have we had a court case that could be completely upended by an election the way this one could. If Trump wins, he will appoint his own attorney general, who will then immediately drop all charges against Trump. If Trump's already been convicted, he will pardon himself. Since no U.S. president has ever been criminally charged after leaving office previously, we've simply never had to face such a situation before.

It was inevitable that Trump would attempt every delay tactic available to him. And he is now within a stone's throw of this tactic working so well that he won't even face a trial until after the election. The Supreme Court certainly bears a lot of blame for its lackadaisical schedule, but it's not entirely their fault. If they had been presented with the same appeal an entire year earlier -- if Merrick Garland hadn't wasted so much valuable time, in other words -- then the Supreme Court's delay would have only a limited effect on the timing of the court case with respect to the election. If that had been true, justice might have been delayed a bit, but it wouldn't have been completely denied. However, since that is not true, the possibility that Donald Trump will never have to face charges in a court of law for his attempt to overturn an American presidential election is now an open one.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant