Delays, hand-wringing, and likely dismissals as courts and prosecutors grope with complications of criminal proceedings against a soon-to-be sitting president.

While we are waiting to see what Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg will tell Judge Juan Merchan today regarding whether and how the criminal case against Donald Trump should proceed now that he is about to become the sitting president of the United States, there’s news from Georgia.

In Fulton County DA Fani Willis’s 2020 election-interference prosecution against the president-elect, an appeals court has canceled until further notice arguments it was to hear next month. At issue is whether Willis should be disqualified from further proceedings in the case. Recall that the trial judge (incoherently, in my opinion) ruled that Willis could stay on if the lead prosecutor withdrew — that prosecutor being Nathan Wade, whom Willis retained and with whom she had a romantic affair, after which they both gave dodgy testimony.

Meanwhile, as we’ve also related in recent days, Biden-Harris DOJ special counsel Jack Smith appears poised, on December 2, (a) to seek dismissal of the pending 2020 election-interference case against Trump in Washington, D.C., and (b) to drop his appeal of the South Florida district court’s dismissal of his Mar-a-Lago documents indictment against Trump in the Eleventh Circuit.

I don’t think there’s any unifying scheme going on among these prosecutors. It’s more like an unprecedented conundrum they and the presiding judges all find themselves in: What, if any, authority do we have to continue criminal proceedings against a defendant who is about to be sworn in as president?

For Smith, the legal obstacle is longstanding Justice Department guidance (promulgated by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel) that forbids indicting or prosecuting a sitting president. The practical obstacle is that, even if one tried to ignore the guidance (which the DOJ would not do), Trump and his appointees are going to be running the DOJ in two months — they’d fire Smith and dismiss the cases if he didn’t do it on his own.

For the state prosecutors, the problem is the Constitution’s supremacy clause and the jurisprudence arising out of it – in particular, and notwithstanding the (rebuttable) presumption that federal courts will not intrude on state criminal proceedings, the principle that state governments may not take actions that impede the federal government in the performance of its legitimate constitutional functions. Obviously, that is what a criminal prosecution of the president, the repository of all federal executive power, would do.

Then there is another practical problem. These legal principles are not supposed to put the president above the law but to pay due deference to the president’s awesome responsibilities and public trust. Therefore, they require that proceedings be suspended during the presidency, not that they be dismissed as if the presidency were a defense. Yet, Trump is at the beginning of his four-year term, not the end. And assuming he serves out the full term, he would emerge in 2029 as an 82-year-old, twice-elected former president.

If it proceeds, Bragg’s case may be on the cusp of a complex immunity appeal that could delay sentencing and judgment for a long time. Meantime, none of the other three criminal cases is anywhere close to commencing — it would take years to get them to trial. By the time decisive action could be taken, the events in question would be ancient history, and — even allowing that the underlying conduct is unsavory — notice must be taken of the facts that (a) the voters elected Trump despite these allegations, and (b) tens of millions of Americans are convinced that the prosecutions were politically motivated. Plus, even if you could finally convict Trump of something six or seven years from now, his status as a former president and the heightened security concerns that implies would make imposing a criminal sentence — on a by-then 85-year-old — nightmarish.

So naturally, everyone involved in one of these cases has to ask: Is this really worth pursuing at this point?

I believe that explains the delays, hand-wringing, and likely dismissals we’re witnessing — or are about to witness. It’s an unprecedented situation — something the country will hopefully never have to deal with again. The lawyers and courts are groping with the complications.