Prediction: trump wins presidency. Midterms swing hard towards Dems. Next president's Congress reforms supreme court.
This quickly becomes a standard ritual at the changing of each administration, and an accepted job hazard for incoming justices.
Good on you!
I’m not saying it should be done, but that’s the reductio ad absurdium this decision leaves us with. The aspiring despot’s toolbox has been converted into a full-blown machine shop.
If you can't enter private comms into evidence, all a president need do is privately communicate the disappearance of someone, domestic or foreign, and that evidence would be barred from any possible court cases.
Of course, you could still impeach, but no criminal prosecution could occur. If you're 35, at worst (legally) you'd lose out on your remaining term.
The implications of this ruling are absurd, and rife for abuse, should one decide to go rouge.
E.g. from the court's opinion:
> Whenever the President and Vice President discuss their official re- sponsibilities, they engage in official conduct.
It's not a huge leap to infer that the President, as Commander in Chief, is engaging in official conduct any time they ask the army (or its many contractors) to do something.
The only thing the Constitution says is:
> The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States
There's nothing in there that says they can't be used domestically, or for what purposes the President can control them. There could be some quibbling about what "actual Service" means, but I suspect it becomes recursive to "whatever the president says actual Service is".
The specific reason that everyone is freaking out is this part of the opinion:
> In dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives. Such a “highly intrusive” inquiry would risk exposing even the most obvious instances of official conduct to ju- dicial examination on the mere allegation of improper purpose.
I.e. the president's motive is unquestionable, the only question is whether the action was taken via some power granted to the President. If it is, the President has immunity, and the president has _very_ broad powers.
This is a misleading partial quotation. In the context of what they were saying, the president has the presumption of immunity, but it is not guaranteed. They specifically remanded the issue of Trump trying to get Pence to break the law to the lower courts to decide whether there was immunity. They did not say there was blanket immunity.
The question then becomes whether that presumption of immunity is rebutted under the circumstances. It is the Government’s burden to rebut the presumption of immunity. The Court therefore remands to the District Court to assess in the first instance whether a prosecution involving Trump’s alleged attempts to influence the Vice President’s oversight of the certification proceeding would pose any dangers of in- trusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.
Sure, but take a look at what I posted, and then the proceeding sentences:
> Presiding over the January 6 certification proceeding at which Members of Congress count the electoral votes is a constitutional and statutory duty of the Vice President. Art. II, §1, cl. 3; Amdt. 12; 3 U. S. C. §15. The indictment’s allegations that Trump attempted to pressure the Vice President to take particular acts in connection with his role at the certification pro- ceeding thus involve official conduct, and Trump is at least presump- tively immune from prosecution for such conduct.
I don't see any reading from that where Trump doesn't have blanket immunity. They stopped just barely short of saying so, with a clear implication of what they believe.
Certifying the vote is an official responsibility of the VP, and Trump was talking about that responsibility. They are not allowed to consider motives, only whether Trump talking to Pence about certification is within his official powers.
I would be very, very surprised if a lower court was able to find that the conduct was not in an official function. There's not a lot of room here once you take out whether the motives align with a presidential function.
I don't understand, just read the next two paragraphs. They say he doesn't have blanket immunity, and his presumptive immunity can be pierced, and explicitly sent the case back to the lower court to gather facts and decide whether he has immunity in this instance. All three of those points are not blanket immunity.
"Distinguishing the President’s official actions from his unofficial ones can be difficult."
-SCOTUS
Just because a crazy mob attacked congress at the behest of Trump does not mean official institutions would do so even if so ordered.
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-vows-fire-generals-push-...
It's fundamentally dishonest - and also somewhat delusional - to discount threats even if they didn't come to pass one time. People doubted Trump would try to hold onto office, until he did.
As an aside, I also have doubts that a chimpanzee would be able to successfully disable the safety an AK47. But it would be idiotic to leave that to chance and give one a loaded AK47 anyway.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Formal_fallacy&...
Bodies that 'descend from the constitution' are certainly constitutionally intended to uphold checks and balances. However this has manifestly failed to happen.
You have a congress deadlocked for decades, 'unitary executive' legal philosophy centralising power in the presidency in order to temporarily pass this legislative deadlock, a senate readily obeisant to the majority party, and a supreme court stacked by the ultra right rolling back civil rights and checks and balances apace. Leading to decision like Citizens United and now presidential immunity.
You have the most recently defeated president still, four years on refusing to accept the results of the last election. A president with a significant base of religious, anti-state and rural poor devastated by decades of drug war and manufacturing decline. A president who openly called for insurrection. He called too on his vice president to overthrow the decision of the electoral college and defended calls to hang him when he did not - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/12/trump-capito....
The thing tank behind the dominant wing of one of the two political parties in the duopoly has consistently pushed the line that the country is not in fact a democracy at all - https://www.heritage.org/american-founders/report/america-re...
All this against a background of a small class the most wealthy plutocrats vying for power, apparently beyond the reach of legal censure. Plutocrats who between them own all the social networks, newspapers and television stations.
Lets not forget the immense power of the total surveillance state revealed by Assange and Snowdon.
Finally you have the vast disregarded body of the American underclass, sleeping in their millions on the streets. Invisible in Americas view of itself, but inescapable in the tent cities and skid rows that seem now to populate every large American city. The nearly two million imprisoned. An underclass that can be victimised and stigmatised, mobilised and made a boogyman for middle classes all to aware of their own vulnerability in the absence of a welfare state.
As a non-American it seems incredibly clear that the path has been laid for a seizure of power within one to two election cycles. Further, I no longer see a way this can be avoided. Trump if victorious - as he seems likely to be against a clearly senescent party machine president - will likely use every power afforded him by the supreme court to remain in power. I'd expect this to follow the pattern it has followed in every other democracy which has swung to authoritarianism. The rooting out of non existent 'conspiracies' of journalists and political opponents, stigmatisation of immigrants and other minority groups, mass deportations, voter deregistration and the use of external threats to justify controls on movement in and out of the country. The rapid stacking and delegitimisation of the lower courts. The use of an enormous network of mega churches to lend the leader the imprimatur of God. Ultimately paramilitary violence and provoked insurrections leading to a state of emergency and some kind of declaration of a temporary presidency of national unity or similar.
Doubtless this sounds histrionic - but I see no institution strong enough or even truly motivated to prevent it. The only hope I see is that such regimes are almost inevitably unstable and tend to topple within a couple of generations. Eaten from the inside out by ambition and betrayal.
I'm sure that's there's a handful, but it's not what I'd consider even a miniscule population doing so.