If eg. a CEO of a company signs something illegal, and in turn the company does something illegal, the CEO is criminally on the line.
If the president signs something illegal (unconstitutional in this case), why does nothing happen?
If the president signs something illegal (unconstitutional in this case), why does nothing happen?
Impeachment is what exists to hold presidents accountable, and then voting is what holds the senate accountable, when they choose not to hold the president accountable.
I think the president can be prosecuted for criminal offenses though when they’re out of office, since what I said above would no longer apply.
I think we may be about to see the the end of the tradition of get out of jail free cards for former presidents, but I don't know what the long term consequences will be.
Why do they all do it? Might be a better question to ponder.
If a government allows its employees to get away with doing things which are against that government’s own rules for their own operation, then a few bad apples spoil the whole barrel.
If you need government spies secretly looking on certain citizens without the targets being aware of it via a warrant, make sure they can’t ever be used like Nixon. If you need government assassins, you definitely don’t want them used the way Nixon used government spies.
The Court has had the opportunity on multiple occasions to rule that this domestic spying is unconstitutional, and has declined to do so. Ergo, for all practical matters, it's legal.
Furthermore it appears that most of the US politicians have some sort of borderline-corrupt activity going on if not being actively involved in something illegal (Epstein springs to mind, various scandals that turn up around presidential elections). People in glass houses are cautious in their stone throwing.
And a final and decisive stroke - there is plausible uncertainty about whether the action is illegal. These are people who write the law, they are not expected to be stay-inside-the-legal-lines types because they all have different opinions on where the lines should be and are usually in the process of drawing them. They appoint the people who determine what the words mean and that leads to occasional creative reinterpretations. There isn't time to prosecute over every detail that someone objects to given the range of objections there are.