An obstructionist Congress?
As an official act you direct the FBI to detain a portion of congres on… let’s see… suspected treason. Then you have congres vote. Isn’t this how dictators do it?
Of course that’s not how dictators work because that’s an explicitly legal action in the most democratic society on earth. No way that could be wrong.
the most democratic society on earth
Wait… do you really think the US is the most democratic society on earth?
I’m being very sarcastic. However I hear that line in earnest from politicians on the news on both sides of the aisle.
What’s stopping him now from dissolving congress? From sending them all back home and requiring governors send new representatives. This situation is the LITERAL slippery slope Republicans have cried about for decades
The thing is that they would just not dissolve and say he has no power to do so. Biden is immune from prosecution for this, but he doesn’t have power to dissolve congress and would ignore him.
What he could do is say that congress (or Trump or SCOTUS for that matter) are a threat to the nation and then have them assassinated or imprisoned. Based on this ruling, he’d be immune from prosecution for this act and would effectively dissolve them by force.
The fact that it almost incentives the president to take the most extreme and authoritarian action is the scariest part of this ruling to me.
They doubt that Biden is willing to be a murderer, and hope that Trump will be.
So what you are saying is that biden needs to pull the trigger on an assassination?
First day of the next Supreme Court term is the first Monday in October, well before election day.
Let’s have Biden call for a giant mob to show up in Washington and have them raid the place. He can promise to keep the police away, and sign a blanket pardon for all acts.
See how fast the Congress changes that law.
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Dissolving congress isn’t an executive branch power. Congress can just ignore something like that.
The president can’t just will that kind of a thing into existence.
Having the FBI arrest half of them and hold them indefinitely is within his authority, he just has to argue they’re terrorists. He could say every member of congress who made statements defending the January 6 insurrection is a terrorist and send them to gitmo. He’s more likely to come after the squad though.
Reminder that CPAC proudly declared “we are all domestic terrorists”.
Every member of congress that was part of the attempt to overthrow rhe election is an insurrectionist and should be detained or in jail by now.
Shooting a gun is well within the president’s power. If he can shoot a gun with no consequences, Congress doesn’t have the ability to ignore shit.
The President is also the ranking member of the military and could use the military to halt the Congress meeting, since he would be immune. It would also mean that they could not impeach or remove him because he is immune, and you cannot charge someone with immunity.
All this talk about Biden could do all of these administrative things that he can’t legally, but it misses the point.
Say he pushes some illegal orders. He can not get in trouble for pushing them, but they can be legally challenged and shot down quickly. Especially when you can legally “tip” helpful justices.
He would need to do things that could not be taken back.
You’re missing the point, where the president can now legally commit an illegal act, and call it an official act, before the lawyers can deliberate, he’s rounded up dissenters in the government and had them shot. No amount of lawfare raises the dead.
Dems are controlled opposition. How many times do they have to betray you before you learn that.
Of course Biden shouldn’t do anything heinous, but he definitely should do something earthshaking against either Republican party or the Supreme Court just to make a point.
Thing is, this tool the SCOTUS has given the POTUS only works for fascists. Even if Biden did house arrests it would likely blow up in our face.
Perfect opportunity to do something, get impeached (including dems) and rally behind a new canditate.
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Those aren’t things that would otherwise be crimes. He doesn’t have immunity from procedure, he has immunity for crimes. He kill the justices, or kidnap them and lock them up in some undisclosed location. He has immunity in those cases. But expanding the court would require passing a law. Passing a law is not an action that the President takes, regardless of any presidential immunity. As for felons not being able to become presidents, any law congress passed to say that would be unconstitutional, because the constitution lays out the only requirements to become a US president. The constitution also limits the ways in which the constitution could be changed, and none of that is within the powers of a president. He could kill Trump, but he can’t change the rules about who’s allowed to be president.
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He still believes that the system works. He thinks the checks and balances work. He believes that, regardless of the recent Supreme Court ruling, that he’s not immune, so he won’t commit crimes like that. The result might be that the final president of the Republic thought it was more important to follow tradition and live the values that he thought the president should hold, than to do what was necessary to prevent the Republic from becoming a dictatorship.
Yeah, that tends to happen with empires.
If he doesn’t follow procedure would that be a crime?
Exactly. So you’re saying presidents can’t do X… Meaning there’s a penalty for X? So if president did X, that would be a crime. But if crime was committed as an official act.
No. They’re saying there’s a procedure for enacting new laws, and creating them outside those procedures accomplishes nothing. It’s not a crime. It’s also not how laws are created.
Probably not.
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What stopping them is that Democrats are too weak and timid to do anything.
They are simply complicit.
The mask is off. We officially cannot trust our government anymore.
Never could
don’t mix up weakness with decency though
If you play by the rules but your opponent doesn’t, you will always lose.
yes, but only if the oponent doesn’t get penalized and gets away with it.
Not mutually exclusive…
Cowardice, the same thing that stopped him from packing the court on his first day.
To some extent, the Democrats are playing chicken with Trump’s eventual re-election. They don’t want to actually “seize” power in the same way that Republicans do. They want the pendulum to swing back and forth so they can keep getting re-elected and keep playing that old game of kickball with Republicans. Dems win some. Republicans win some. Everybody gets to complain about the opposition and do nothing. That Republicans seem to be updating their modus operandi from playing kickball to playing what seems to be “king of the hill, but with knives” has not quite dawned on the Democratic party collectively yet.
Its not absolute immunity. Its presumed immunity for official acts. Its literally the same rules as always. He can still go to jail if they can prove it.
It was basically the supreme court saying “we aint touching this, you figure it out”
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Then you get to prove it wasnt an constitutional act.
Because they would all go after Biden.
The worst part is that Biden and the Dems don’t have the balls to do anything like this or intentionally put this verdict to the test. Just clutch their pearls and not actually do anything.
Nobody in this administration actually wanted to prosecute Trump. That’s why the Stormy Daniels case had to go through NY State Court rather than the federal system. Biden’s USAs sat on these cases for nearly four years, after he took office. And they slow rolled them all through the various federal districts during the primary, with the hope that he’d lose the primary and the problem would just go away.
Everyone in the White House responsible for prosecuting Trump must have breathed a big sigh of relief when that SC verdict came down, because it gave them the perfect excuse to drop all the charges.
Nobody in this administration actually wanted to prosecute Trump
“Tonight on Hannity: Biden LITERALLY kicked down the door at the DOJ and held a gun to their heads FORCING them to attack poor poor sad innocent Donald Saint Trump for made up crimes!”
Reality doesn’t matter anymore
Neat. Then we all panic. Force the rule change back and Biden goes out a martyr hero instead of a lackluster shill who slowly shambled his way towards oppression for his constituents.
Democrats are like ‘Good Cops’. They’re not the ones actively murdering and beating and doing all the bad shit. But they do just kinda stand around while it happens and don’t do much.
We need them, for now, to at least not make things worse, but what we really need is to fucking change things from the bottom up. Unfortunately, I’m afraid it is likely too late. Such change will take two or three decades, and that’s if, in this next election, enough people actually rally together to start doing something, and continue doing something for the next thirty years.
We need them, for now
Surrounded by tigers, but don’t worry I have this rock that I was told scares away all the tigers.
Biden already said as much with his response to the ruling.
Paraphrasing: “We must respect the (self imposed) limits to the presidency and I will do so. We can’t exactly trust the next guy to do so and that’s dangerous.” (Proceeds to wag finger as if that will do fuck-all)
You know how Chamberlain ended up with a reputation for being the coward that allowed Hitler to become powerful on the world stage? Biden is gambling on this fucking election that it will prevent him from going down in history as today’s version of that.
Except it will be more deserved for Biden because Chamberlain knew the Allies didn’t have the capability to stop Hitler with force when Hitler was making his early moves and was quietly building up the UK’s military while appeasing Hitler.
Everything that is about to come is as much at Biden’s feet as it is at Trump’s and all his fascist friends’.
Well, if trump wins, Biden will still be president for a few months after, so there’s still hope
Gotta take the high road while the other side takes a road so low it undermines the foundations of everything we are!
One thing has nothing to do with the other.
Unpopular opinion: You should be allowed to run for president and be a president even with a criminal record. I don’t support trump and think the convictions are well earned. But democracy is a democracy - it’s up to the people to decide whether or not they should have a convicted criminal in office.
Agree. The fact that we have to try to think of ways to block this guy from being on the ballot is the truly sad part. It’s mind blowing that the simple gigantic list of inadequacies and reasons not to vote for him isn’t enough. I can’t comprehend what has happened to peoples brains. A pod person epidemic seems like an increasingly viable explanation.
Let’s start with letting felons work and rent apartments in the US before we move on to the presidency.
Good point
Especially given that prosecutions are often racially biased, and sometimes politically biased.
If an opponent with a criminal record can’t run, you incentivize an immoral president to have their political opponents charged with anything they can think of.
OTOH, the American electorate is filled with idiots. You would hope that people would see through a purely political conviction and not let that stop them. But, the reality is probably the opposite, a serial killer who ate his victims could run, and if the party got behind that candidate, half the electorate would not know he was a serial killer, or they’d vote for him anyhow, or they’d think his conviction was just a psy-op and his victims were crisis actors.
Your second paragraph is the main reason.
I am from the UK and a famous example is Bobby Sands MP. Was a member of the PIRA, but was in prison and got elected MP for his constituency. While I do believe the PIRA to be a brutal terrorist organisation, the people who voted him in wanted to show their support - and I agree with their right to do that as much as I vehemently disagree with their choice
I agree, but I wish there were some way to ensure that voters were making an informed choice.
In the case of Bobby Sands, I assume they were. That was a high profile case. It’s even vaguely possible to make the case that he was a political prisoner.
But, almost daily I see interviews with Trump voters who seem to have lost their connection with reality. And, it’s not even a wrong but consistent worldview. It’s just a bunch of incoherent conspiracy theories that fall apart under the most gentle questioning. Unfortunately, there’s probably no way to restrict voting to only sane and well informed voters, because any restriction you put in place could be abused.
I think the main issue was the “don’t trust the mainstream media” and “fake news” BS. It was genius if you think about it. Then people will go to him for their info.
I also understand though that the USA has less unbiased reporting, unlike the UK where unbiased is generally the standard for TV reporting, especially for the BBC.
Our newspapers, however…
Yes, I really think a major reason that the US is failing is the lack of an equivalent to Australia’s ABC, Britain’s BBC, Canada’s CBC, all the way to (I wish this were true) New Zealand’s ZBC.
Those public broadcasters anchor the news reporting space. Many people think they’re biased, and it’s probably true that they aren’t 100% neutral, and definitely have an institutional bias. But, the kinds of people who work for those public broadcasters really believe in their mission to tell the truth. Normal news consumers still end up in filter bubbles, but it’s really easy to pop out of those filter bubbles for a second and check out the public broadcaster. In the US, even the supposedly centrist for-profit broadcasters are heavily biased because they need to make money. The bias isn’t necessarily left or right, but it’s in favor of whatever’s sensationalist and will keep people glued to their TVs.
Interestingly enough, you find a lot of people claiming the BBC is biased, but those people cannot agree on who they’re biased towards 😆 so they must be doing something right.
So, Fat Orange Clown, how is “hiding documents you shouldn’t have as a non-president” an official act? How is anything done as “not the president” an official act?
RIP
That’s not what they said iirc. Now everything has to be presented to determine if it was an official act, if so immunity, if not no immunity.
It’s a very half hearted way to look like they’re backing trump but actually throwing him to the wolves since it’s not an official act and everyone knows it. It would similarly reverse clintons impeachment since lying to Congress was as president and therefore an official act.
It would similarly reverse clintons impeachment since lying to Congress was as president and therefore an official act.
No, this decision wouldn’t affect that at all. This decision covers criminal prosecution, not impeachment. Now, if Clinton had been indicted, tried, and convicted of perjury for lying to Congress after Bush was elected in 2000, then it would be unwinding that conviction, if it was determined that it was an official act as president.
I don’t think that actually matters, if a president is immune from serious criminal prosecution the same reasoning would make them immune from civil.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here.
Impeachment isn’t a criminal process. It’s also not civil. Impeachment is it’s own thing, outside of the judicial system. A prosecutor can’t impanel a grand jury and have the grand jury impeach an elected or appointed official. If Clinton had been both impeached and removed from office, this decision would do nothing to affect that.
On the other hand, if he had left office, and then had been criminally charged for lying to COngress, while he was sitting as President, and was convicted, then this decision would be unwinding it.
Impeachment is by definition civil. If I can shoot you in the face and get immunity then I can certainly lie to Congress. They’re pretty literally saying it’s absolute immunity.
“High crimes and misdemeanors” the president is immune to them all now. Criminal, civil, administrative, doesn’t matter with absolute immunity comes absolute power.
It’s not a civil or criminal matter. Impeachment is inherently a political process. This ruling has near-zero bearing on it.
It’s civil the clause even specifically refers to civil officers, it’s a civil process like every other process don’t by the government. There is no such thing as a political process.
I keep seeing post and comments like this.
You all realize it’s only immunity from criminal prosecution, right? It’s not instant dictatorship power over the nation. He’d have to order the assassination of Trump and members of SCOTUS to leverage the ruling for those goals.
You are correct. But the fact that the ruling enables those actions is batshit crazy.
Not even order it, he’d have to do it himself
Anyone who’d hypothetically take the order has an obligation to refuse it, all he’s doing there is passing the prosecution that he wasn’t going to be in for anyways.
Does a member of the military have the right to refuse the direct order of the president?
If the order is illegal, they’d be in hotter water if they didn’t.
Is that so? I thought one main staple of military ranks was that if the soldier rejects an order because of judicial concerns but the superior tells them to do it anyways the judicial blame is on that superior
Indeed this is not correct. Practically speaking, the soldier should keep refusing the order and will be relieved of duty and thrown in the brig. They will then have to hope that by the time the court martial date rolls around their name has been cleared and the officer who gave the order has been or will be court martialed in their place.
Theoretically the officer should go through every underling and find nobody willing to execute illegal orders, but practically they’d only need to go through three or four at most before they had a volunteer.
Nope, I was just following orders is no valid defence.
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Depending on the jurisdiction the assassinations are prosecuted under, and I can very well see the Judiciary hard intervening to keep that shit well out of reach of a pardon.
The precedent of sanctioned assassinations of judges might come across to them specifically as a rather especially bad one to set.
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DC has it’s own criminal court
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That’s a really good point. They’d need plausible deniability to avoid being convicted.
Kill the SC then replace them with ones to sanction anything he likes?
That’s pretty much all this ruling liberates him to do. There’s no additional executive power.
State sanctioned murder of political dissidents doesn’t seem like a significant additional executive power to you? I’m not convinced that’s enabled by this particular ruling but that’s how you’re framing it and the fact that doesn’t seem concerning to you is pretty wild.
Of course it’s concerning. It’s batshit insane.
All of the posts and comments I keep reading are making it seem like he was granted full executive control of the government. I’m legitimately almost as concerned with the literacy of people as I am the new criminal immunity of POTUS.
That’s fair. That didn’t seem like what you were getting at but I understand that point.
I wish Dems had that dog in them to fight, even if this was possible. The fact they still go around calling modern day GOP their friends and colleagues says more than enough.
They’re all on the same corporate payrolls, dems are and have been nothing more than controlled opposition.
