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You would think that somebody that called themselves a journalist would actually have journalistic integrity. Nothing the ‘journalist’ claimed was in the SCOTUS ruling. SCOTUS ruled that the president has immunity for many of his presidential actions and none for personal actions such as going on a murder streak
Why should we listen to you and not Sotomayor?
Perhaps Biden could firmly establish precedent for that…two birds, etc.
As President my FIRST OFFICIAL ACT is to get a 3 Kill Streak UAV!
SCOTUS ruled that the president has immunity for many of his presidential actions and none for personal actions such as going on a murder streak
Right, that’s literally the point. All a malfeasant president would need to do is declare that assassinating political rivals is an official presidential action. If the president argues that it’s an official act of their office and not of their own personhood, there’s little room to hold them accountable for it.
It may seem like an absolutely ridiculous argument, and that’s because it is. What constitutes an “official” presidential action was left intentionally un-defined by the court, so that such ridiculous arguments could be treated as legitimate if the immunity is challenged.
The only remedy the current court’s ruling really allows is impeachment. It essentially means that (absent a later ruling specifying exactly what counts as a President’s “official acts,”) the President can do literally anything he wants and never suffer any consequences. Don’t agree that what he was doing was an official act? Impeach him or stfu. He’s not going to jail for breaking any law, ever.
Who’s going to impeach him? They will file the articles of impeachment then get waxed that night on their way home.
The article starts with ‘welp.’
Under this ruling the president has absolute immunity for their use of any powers granted by the constitution, and that includes use of the military, pardon powers, and appointing and firing of executive department officials.
The whole “official” vs “non official” acts things only comes into play for powers not explicitly granted by the constitution. And even then the president gets presumptive immunity.
Go read the actual ruling and the dissents and stop spreading misinformation. The journalist and the headline is accurate.
Quoting from Sotomayer’s dissent (pp 29-30, paragraphing my own):
This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Kore- matsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting).
The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world.
When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.
Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to as- sassinate a political rival? Immune.
Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune.
Takes a bribe in ex- change for a pardon?
Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
They go on with an incisive critique of the majority’s reasoning:
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trap- pings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
Sotomayor is behind the times.
They’re not “bribes” anymore, they’re “donations” now.
That’s not true. Criminal acts are not protected, nor can they be made in an official capacity. Furthermore, the ruling says the court that determines official acts is the trails court. Not the supreme Court. Stop spreading misinformation.
The ruling doesn’t even allow unrelated trials to use evidence that might be from official presidential business. Trump just requested his conviction in NY to be overburdened based on this ruling. So how it would not protect criminal acts when you can see in your own eyes this being used to get away from criminal acts. The other trials are also in jeopardy.
As for the “decision made by trials court” that is insignificant as SCOTUS can override them.
You cannot commit criminal acts in an official capacity, full stop. It is not possible. The moment your actions are criminal you are no longer upholding the oath you have taken and the action is not official. Obviously.
“When the president does it, it is not illegal”
This has been a long time coming and the presumption is that he is allowed to until that is somehow challenged.
Again, incorrect. Stop reading headlines and making decisions. Read the ruling. You are spreading misinformation.
Oo, nice try turning this around on them. But nah, man, you’re refusing to acknowledge the ruling itself explicitly telling you you’re wrong. You’re not arguing in good faith. Go away.
Direct from the decision (page 31):
If official conduct for which the President is immune may be scrutinized to help secure his conviction, even on charges that purport to be based only on his unofficial conduct, the “intended effect” of immunity would be defeated.
What’s a criminal act when your highest court gives you a free pass? Laws mean nothing if they are not enforced.
The highest court didn’t give any president a free pass. If the president is carrying out a function of the constitution there is immunity. For everything else they enjoy no immunity. Like for instance breaking a law.
And the courts bought by Trump and Co. will see to it that every criminal behavior is considered official and constitutional. You are a bit blind if you see this having any positive effect. The president, and anyone else for that matter, should have zero immunity. Immunity only invites abuse. Just look at qualified immunity for a great example of how it is a failed idea.
Never once have I said I’m for this.
True, but your defense of it does give the appearance that you at the least do not mind it. You don’t seem to find it problematic, and to others that itself is also problematic. Please feel free to contradict me if I’m wrong, but from what you’ve said so far you really, as I mentioned, do seem to not see the issues or repercussions this will have.
Please tell me what capacity any court has to enforce a ruling against a sitting President. I’ll wait.
As that bastard Andrew Jackson once (allegedly) said “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”
I would take this at face value except for the fact that the president is the commander in chief of the largest, best equipped, most lethal, official killing organization in the planet.
Killing is, and has always been, a possible official act.
I heard a good argument that while these justices are appointed for life to be judges, it doesn’t specify which branch. Reappointment them to a lower court and appoint new justices. They voted for this let them reap the consequences. Outline enforceable ethics standards.
Move them to Florida or Alabama.
The rules of the Senate, as undermined by McConnell and inexplicably tolerated by Schumer ensure it won’t happen.
That co-equal branches thing was nice while we had it.
Just dismiss the senators as official business. What still stands in the way of a total power grab by a US president?
As long as it’s official business and they keep it official by officially removing all obstacles, they are legally perfectly in the clear. IANAL obviously, but total power seems just a matter of being audacious enough to grab it now.
The president can’t dismiss them. That’s adding executive power. They took away criminal liability. He’d need to kill/kidnap/imprison them. And who knows if they’d rule that as an official act. They didn’t actually outline what counts and what doesn’t. So maybe for Biden that wouldn’t count and for Trump it would.
I think the more viable option is just packing the court but biden would have to get two Republicans to flip and all Democrats to agree. It’s embarrassing he didn’t do it when the Democrats had Senate in 2020
Under this new standard, a president can go on a four-to-eight-year crime spree and then retire from public life, never to be held accountable.
Uhhh, that already happened.
Yeah, but now the Supreme Court said that’s perfectly ok and totally legal.
Well, we’ve already had a president assassinate US citizens, so let’s rev up those predators and go looking for whatever billionaire’s yacht Coney Barret, Kavanuahh, and Roberts are chilling on
Fuck themmm.
Maybe Obama should have been charged, just to set the record straight, but likely this wasn’t attempted because (1) Trump was too busy grifting to put any weight behind this, (2) all of those killed were on foreign soil, and (3) they were all working with Al Qaeda. This is getting into the realm of whether or not killing an enemy combatant is murder and what really defines an enemy combatant. I’m sure there was also pressure from both sides to specifically not answer these questions.
Either way I’d rather live in a country where a President gets charged after leaving office as a rule, than live in a country where a President can practically burn everything to the ground and walk away untouched.
If you want to get a bit more cynical, you could very easily describe the deaths of Fred Hampton and the Freedom Summer murders as presidential assassinations. If you want to take the extra step down the rabbit hole, there’s very real reason to suspect MLK was assassinated by the FBI.
Except the extreme court gets to decide who is immune and what actions are okay.
With a 6-3 vote either way.
Not if they’ve been forcibly removed from office.
EXTREME
Most presidents have done this. Whether it be bombing countries they’re not at war with, trafficking drugs to enrich the war machine by arming enemies of the state, or invading foreign countries and committing war crimes based on their own manufactured lies.
bombing countries they’re not at war with
Fun fact. We haven’t officially declared war since 1941.
Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and now Ukraine? All NATO led military interventions or AUMF policing actions. No articles of war required.
trafficking drugs to enrich the war machine
One of the craziest “America just be like that” stories I’ve ever heard was the time Bush Sr set up a drug buy right outside the White House, by having the DEA extort a teenager picked up for selling crack on the opposite side of town to show up on Pennsylvania Avenue the night of a State of the Union Address and do a straw sale to another agent, just so he could talk about it on national TV an hour later like it happened organically.
Bush dangling a bag of crack on national TV and saying in his Father-Knows-Best voice that we need to go full-on Phoenix Program across every major American city, because of his little kabuki crack sale, is one of those “burned into my conscience” factoids that really changed how I saw our country operating.
We’re going to find those WMDs any day now. pepper sprays Occupy Wall Street protester
Except for the whole retiring from public life part. I wish Trump would just retire from life entirely.
Legal schmegal. A bullet has no politics
All this murder crap is lame; why has nobody been parroting how the president can do other crimes, like tax fraud or lie under oath or buying drugs or literally anything but murder?
Because the point is to scare you. “Breaking news president buys crack” is not as scary as “Breaking news president axe murders cabinet.”
The ruling is not good, but it’s not Seal Team Six executes its political rival bad. It’s more likely to be President sells nuke secrets to Saudi Arabia under the new official “I Get to Sell Nuclear Secrets to Saudi Arabia Act” he just made up right now.
literal killing if human beings is lame? we already know to white collar criminals are doing tax fraud and use drugs. old news.
No, the murder isn’t crap.
Biden can now murder the billionaires. Never mind the small fries.
The President can fire employees that refuse to have sex with him. Firing executive branch employees is well within the President’s power. If they don’t submit to him, he can fire them. Official act.
Sadly no. The way they turned it around was very clever.
So they said that only official presidential business is immune, but were ambiguous what that actually means, so inevitably they made it so it would go through them to determine what is the official business.
Second thing is that they picked up from their ass that Constitution also says that no official business can be used in any trial, even if it is unrelated. This not only jeopardizes all the indictments he had, it possibly will negate the New York trial.
trump already submitted request to have it referred based on this SCOTUS ruling.
This election might be the last free election we have. And even if trump loses it will still not be over.
Please vote and make your friends and family vote. And not just for president but also for the Congress.
How does one prove whether or not something is official business if official business can’t be used in any trial?
The “unbiased” judge will define what is allowed in the trial or not. And the prosecutor can appeal that decision and hope the higher judge is not also bought and paid for by the criminal president.
Until it eventually hits the Supreme Court and they decide what is and isn’t an official act based on what political party the President is affiliated with.
I wonder how that would work if the act was against them. I mean he could assassinate the entire Supreme Court because of the war or drugs or whatever, and then who stops him?
6-3
So officially dissolve the Supreme Court and instate a new pack of judges and let those judges decide if it was an “Official Act” and thus totally legal.
So… he could assassinate Biden and all political opposition, but not Stormy Daniels
Unless he signs an executive order. It doesn’t get much more official than that.
Trump could kill anyone and they would determine that it was official business. On the other hand, Biden could have the Republican judges executed and replaced with sycophants who could rule that this also was an official act. It’s a bad ruling.
He can’t appoint justices without Senate approval. He only needs 50 Senators to approve though. The rest can be bombed for reasons that apparently don’t matter.
He only needs 50 senators if all 100 are present. Start tossing some of the more treasonous ones in Gitmo as an official act and that threshold can be brought down quite a bit.
YES! GITMO! I knew we kept that around for a reason. 🤩
I don’t think this immunity applies to states. So the NY trial was unrelated.
The NY trial was unrelated to his presidential business anyways. It was about private property and fraud relating therein.
But also, other states that have indicted him for Jan 6th activity are unaffected by this, regardless of how Trump could spin this.
Idk, one of the judges said this ruling made him a king. I’m going to take her word over your half-assed opinion. lol
For all intents and purposes does. Just SCOTUS made itself as a final check on what is an official act and what isn’t.
I also recommend everyone a book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century”
In case it makes a difference to someone, it’s a pretty short book.
The president can also now legally dissolve the Supreme Court and instate a new supreme Court who can then make the decision if it was an official act or not.
wash; rinse; repeat
Like now? The president has always been able to assassinate you, officially, the difference is that before he would have gone to jail and now he won’t.
That’s kind of the point
Yes well, I was trying to be a little sarcastic with the headline, but looking at people’s votes I think I have failed miserably.
Bye, Rachel Maddow.
More fear mongering
Couldn’t Biden write an executive order that describes what is “official” vs “unofficial”?
Couldn’t the next president rip that order up and replace it with their own definition?
Too late. Biden made himself SCOTUS and changed back the rule, effective next term. Then replaced SCOTUS with the cast of Arrested Development.
There’s always money in the banana Republic
This election will be the final free and fair one. God help us all
To do a “well, actually” I guess we didn’t really have an empire until well past the country’s founding. We were a mostly irrelevant backwater for some period of time.
ETA: And as someone who freaking loves this country, I realize that saying a comment like the above is one that could probably get you into a fight two days from now, most especially, when all kinds of fetishistic performative military nonsense and uncritical screeds about this country are at peak ridiculousness (and I love July 4th in spite of these flaws). I consider myself a real patriot, but one that is unwilling to whitewash this country.
No, the US has been an empire from the start. Unless you don’t count conquering and colonizing the indigenous peoples because they aren’t “civilized” or something.
I don’t think most civilizations start out in their final form. They typically start much smaller and grow.
Would this same ruling have happened if Trump wasn’t involved? No, I don’t think so.
Stop the
stealoverthrow.So now Biden can do what trump did and not certify the next president using fake electors.
How would he “illegally introduce a new law”? He could issue a decree but it would be meaningless because nothing gives a president the power to make laws.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_executive_orders
The president can issue executive orders pursuant to a grant of discretion from Congress, or under the inherent powers that office holds to deal with certain matters which have the force of law.
Read more carefully:
The president can issue executive orders pursuant to a grant of discretion from Congress, or under the inherent powers that office holds to deal with certain matters which have the force of law.
Executive orders are limited to exercising powers already granted to the President by Congress or the Constitution. The President cannot just make up new laws. This is basic stuff that should have been explained to you numerous times if you’re American.
Correct. There’s absolutely nothing stopping Biden from doing exactly what Trump already tried and failed to do. He could put pressure on Governors to “find x number of votes”, submit a fake slate of electors to cast doubt on the results, outright threaten people if they don’t comply with his wishes. I’m sure this SCOTUS will find a way to interpret any of Biden’s would-be illegal actions as actually illegal, but tiptoe around Trump’s sedition and fraud.
I can’t believe that the prevailing opinion of the times is that the president can literally break the law, even ones specifically meant to bind them and only them such as campaign finance laws, and be immune from consequences under almost any circumstance as long as the court says it’s official. Congress effectively can no longer act as a check against the Executive. Only the Judicial can say what is official or unofficial.
This isn’t power anyone should have.
I mean, I wouldn’t mind the current President exercising this power over their political rivals, in the election, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, purely as a defensive measure to protect America. It sets a shitty precedence, but do we really want He Who Shall Not Be Named to set the precedence first?
“It sets a shitty precedence…” is a gross minimalization to attach to effectively making the US be a dictatorship. And saying you’re ok with a dictatorship because you happen to agree with the dictator is the kind of sentiment that cannot be left unchallenged/unexamined
