Though they refer indirectly to the 1982 SCOTUS case of Harlow V Fitzgerald, this law applies to politicians and judges as well as police. They just haven’t upheld it in over 150 years, because someone illegally changed the law in 1874, and it wasn’t noticed until last year.
Ulysses S Grant referenced section 1983 of the federal code when he was pulled over, for the third time in his life, in 1872, while sitting as president, for “speeding on a horse in the city limits of Washington DC.” The officer tried to let him go, and he said that Congress had just passed a law about that, and no one, not even a sitting president, is above the law. He paid the ticket. The other two times he was pulled over he was only a general, and it was in the early 1860s while a minor bit of treason and insurrection was going on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-immunity-supreme-court.html
Though they refer indirectly to the 1982 SCOTUS case of Harlow V Fitzgerald, this law applies to politicians and judges as well as police. They just haven’t upheld it in over 150 years, because someone illegally changed the law in 1874, and it wasn’t noticed until last year.
Ulysses S Grant referenced section 1983 of the federal code when he was pulled over, for the third time in his life, in 1872, while sitting as president, for “speeding on a horse in the city limits of Washington DC.” The officer tried to let him go, and he said that Congress had just passed a law about that, and no one, not even a sitting president, is above the law. He paid the ticket. The other two times he was pulled over he was only a general, and it was in the early 1860s while a minor bit of treason and insurrection was going on.