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Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

>However, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Trump v. United States (2024) that all presidents have absolute criminal immunity for official acts under core constitutional powers, presumptive immunity for other official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts.

I think future law philosophers and historians will cite this as an example of how immunity should not work. If the president can break any law as long as he is doing it as the president in an official manner (for example by signing an executive order), nothing can stop him from having all his political enemies arrested, exiled or straight-up murdered. So there is literally only the goodwill of one single person keeping the US from becoming a fascist dictatorship.

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> So there is literally only the goodwill of one single person

Well, not quite. Immunity from prosecution is not immunity from impeachment/removal (which is a political, not judicial, process).

Of course, that has its own problems, but just pointing out that in theory there are more checks than just the one you mention.

According to the constitution, impeachment is literally for treason, bribery, high crimes or other serious misdemeanours. But the SC basically said it fundamentally can not be treason, bribery, a high crime or any misdemeanour if he did something in his role as president. So the whole process has become stale.

Ultimately, the Senate decides on whether to convict/remove for impeachment. The SC does not decide it. Sure, I imagine the Senate would generally want to broadly stay in agreement with the SC, but they don't have any obligation to do so.

At least that is my understanding; I'm not a lawyer or constitutional scholar :)

The Senate decides (or at least should) based on laws that the SC interprets.

You added the adjective "serious" to misdemeanors, which is not in the Constitution. The "high" in "high crimes and misdemeanors" means crimes and misdemeanors committed by high officials, not crimes and misdemeanors that are extreme.

If I understand you correctly, then if a President's cabinet (high officials) break the law the President can be impeached. Which makes sense to me. It places accountability on the President to pick trust worthy people and to immediately get rid of them if they break the law (to lessen the chances they'd be impeached for not doing something about it and insuring they are prosecuted).

     impeached

As Trump showed, impeachment doesn't mean shit. Actual removal requires a 2/3 majority of the Senate, which is never ever happening.

This is why there is a general sense that the POTUS is now more or less completely untethered from any possible consequences for his actions.

The constitution actually doesn't really say anything about what misdemeanours are applicable in this case. This part has been shaped over time in congress, similar to how common law is shaped by courts.

That's not how it works - in the case of impeachment the Senate holds a trial, and they are allowed to use their own definitions of treason, bribery, etc. The Supreme Court is in charge of what the regular courts do and can make rulings that bind them, but they can't bind Congress in the same way. After all, the justices of the supreme court are also subject to the impeachment process like the President is and it'd be weird if they could make rules about how that works.

"For official acts under core constitutional powers". Arresting all his political enemies is not a core constitutional power (still less having them executed).

Everyone is spinning this as "total immunity". It's not. At least, it's not worded that way.

What's actually going to happen is that, the first time someone tries to prosecute it, it's going to go all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court, as it is constituted at that time, will judge whether the action in question was an official act under core constitutional powers. Until then, we don't actually know what that line looks like. I suspect it's going to be less blanket than everyone seems to be assuming... but we will see.

It’s conditional immunity: the Roberts court is openly an instrument of Republican power, but they knew there was a good chance that the Democrats would win an election and so the ruling was carefully crafted to allow them to pick the opposite outcome if a Democrat were accused of abuse of power.

You can see a similar play at work with the unprecedented use of the shadow docket to prevent lower courts from restraining the executive branch without having to take credit for positions which are highly dubious from a constitutional standpoint. If the political tides shift, they can quietly unblock the lower court’s ruling and pretend they hadn’t deliberately given this administration a window of opportunity without creating a permanent precedent empowering a future Democratic administration.

Yup, I really hoped that it might not get this bad, but the Roberts court is basically doing what the Federalist society has been aiming towards for the past 40-50 years, and it's very very sad for all of the US (longterm, this benefits absolutely no-one except autocrats).

    Arresting all his political enemies is not a core constitutional power

Unless he leaves a smoking gun in the vein of a note saying "kill this guy I don't like" -- and perhaps not even then -- nothing will happen.

What he will do is... what he is already doing. What every dictator for hundreds of years has done. His enemies will be persecuted and prosecuted under the guise of legal action: tax fraud, national security, whatever. The sort of compromat that exists, or can be fabricated to exist, for every single person on Earth.

To even have a hope of stopping Trump (or any other POTUS) there would have to be clear proof of malicious intent completely divorced from his job duties, and you'd need a Congress or Supreme Court that gave half a shit about opposing him.

> Unless he leaves a smoking gun in the vein of a note saying "kill this guy I don't like" -- and perhaps not even then -- nothing will happen.

This has literally already happpened [0].

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/trump-ac...

If they are accused of crimes, then arresting people is not just a power but a mandate. If they just so happen to be his political enemies, that does not make them exempt.

If he happens to be dumb enough to say "Arrest Chuck Schumer without charge because I don't like him", then maybe the court might see that as outside his powers. But he has been accusing his political enemies of crimes for years; he'd only have to pick one of them and have them arrested for it.

We don't make Presidents justify their actions as core powers. If we believe that he ordered an unjustifiable arrest, the burden of proof would be on us.

Let's say, hypothetically, that the president was taking tariff revenue and transferring it into a Trump-owned bank account rather than into the Treasury. Yeah, you'd have to prove it. But that would absolutely be outside the scope of his legitimate presidential power.

In real life, it wouldn't be that simple. There would be a veil of plausibility, and so it would be harder to prove. But I claim that he can still be prosecuted. He has the presumption that what he does is within the scope of his office; the burden of proof is very much on the prosecution. But he does not have complete immunity.

Complete, no. But the combination of the expansive powers given to him by the court, and the difficulties of burden of proof, means that it's hard to imagine him being successfully prosecuted for just about anything.

I think that includes persecution of political opponents. Maybe not for a capital offense, though I wouldn't be so sure. Treason is poorly defined and has capital consequences.

>I think future law philosophers and historians will cite this as an example of how immunity should not work. If the president can break any law as long as he is doing it as the president in an official manner (for example by signing an executive order), nothing can stop him from having all his political enemies arrested, exiled or straight-up murdered.

This is not true.

The framework defines how to interpret the law. If the president were to do as you say, the subesequent criminal case (brought by federal or state authorities) would interpret those actions in the standard judicial process. If a jury were to determine that the president was acting in the interest of himself, then the president does not get immunity.

As I understand it, the ruling was left as open-ended as possible and was something that was intentionally vague within the Constitution.

>If the president can break any law as long as he is doing it as the president

This is a hyperbolic misreading of the court's decision. The president was only cleared to act with impunity with the DOJ, as the department is part of the executive branch. For the other issues revolving around election interference, the court actually invited the case to be reheard - the prosecutors though must make a case that the illegal interference wasn't related to his duties as a president.

That said, I don't know why there has been a huge failure to re-litigate this issue. The previous administration could have followed up but never did - and I fear it was done out of a terrible political miscalculation.

Doesn't it also imply that the US Gov was doing something illegal. If the President is immune if doing something official, then the government was doing something officially illegal.

Even Bush/Cheney went through the motions of coming up with a legal reasoning for torture. Even Bush got Congressional approval for military actions.

This president is off the rails not even trying to have even a flimsy cover of legality.

> This president is off the rails not even trying to have even a flimsy cover of legality.

Rather he has a nerve to declare US War powers act illegal and threatened, abused, and yelled at those 5 republican senators who voted with democrats. Wild times!!

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-intervi...

> > This president is off the rails not even trying to have even a flimsy cover of legality.

The problem is Trump but also he's a symptom of a larger problem.

Left and right are so at odds with each other that all the reforms that a modern country would have to undertake in order to have less traumatic and less 'winner take all' elections not only weren't undertaken like they were in other countries, but the odds of actually happening are close to 0% ever since 2016

It appears noone considered a congress controlled by sycophants when designing the system.

To be honest, what could congress even do given what the supreme court has said? If Trump went full Hitler and decided to burn down the Capitol and have everyone in it killed who doesn't do his bidding, he couldn't even be held accountable by them in theory.

They could remove him from office. Theoretically anyway. If it hasn't happened in ~240 years, then it's probably a paper tiger.

Yeah, "theoretically" is doing a lot of work there. Removal requires a 2/3 majority of the Senate, which is absolutely neverfuckinghappening in a 2-party system.

POTUS is now unstoppable and untethered.

By the congress he had kidnapped / killed and whose building of operation is razed?

Just wait til America is ruled by someone with high intelligence AND tRump's guile.

Fixes: for the love of God, fixed terms for Supreme Court nominees. No?

Do the EU Elite and the Democrats still think that its Putin who is the Evil One?

There can be more than one Evil One. Putin is responsible for an utterly unjustified war against Ukraine, committing atrocity after atrocity.

Just because our own President is also guilty of war crimes (as well as domestic ones), it doesn't make Putin less culpable.

> I think future law philosophers and historians will cite this as an example of how immunity should not work.

Today, pretty much everyone is citing this as an example of how immunity should not work.

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