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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

The President is absolutely immune to the law for any "official actions", and the Supreme Court case which established this was specifically about whether ensuring voting integrity, no matter how farcically pre-textual, is an "official action": they determined it is. The law won't help us here.

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Even if the law helps, who would enforce it? The president can violate any law it appears. The DOJ won’t do anything against the president, since it is an executive agency under the president’s direction. If it required SCOTUS, it is just too slow acting to respond to the constant stream of violations. We need a new arm of the government to enforce the law against the executive branch.

Congress won't either. What's left?

Immunity doesn't make his actions legal. If ICE is interfering with voting, the states can have them removed and prosecuted.

No they can’t, states cannot interfere with federal law enforcement in any way. They can refuse to help (and even that is controversial), but they cannot impede. Remember, it’s not like Trump and ICE are going to be announcing that they intend to interfere with elections, they’ll say it’s legitimate law enforcement against a credible threat, and state interference with Federal law enforcement against “credible threats” is completely illegal.

Years down the road, maybe some judge will rule ICE’s actions violated voters’ Constitutional rights, but who cares? The standard punishment for that is a stern “don’t do it again”. If someone is convicted because of a rights violation, their conviction might be overturned, but that’s not what would happen here: it would just be intimidation and harassment to move vote totals and no conviction to be reversed.

The "act now, justify later" blade cuts both ways.

Who do you imagine would do the “acting” here, i.e. who would be ones actually on the ground arresting ICE officers at polling stations? Local police, the state National Guard? How sure are you they would obey the (textually illegal) orders to do that? Because these are both cohorts who lean heavily pro-Trump; I’m fairly confident they would not.

Americans needs to decide whether the issues is that the constitution is just badly written or whether the supreme court is trying to intentionally destroy democracy to help their right wing friends. Or whether both are true.

Liberia had a nearly identical constitution for much of its existence. You know, the place from where General Butt Naked warlord engaged in cannabilism of the populace and each president for awhile was replaced with the last via having their ear cut off or tortured and then hanged while the next guys people drink a budweiser in front of the camera for the world to see.

It's a road map to where we end up with a similar document but a different culture.

The paper is _the_ reminder of the promises we owe to future selves and generations. Its value lies in the People's strength to enforce it by exercising the obligations and rights it describes.

My personal litmus test for whether we've entered any kind of "there's still a little hope for the Republic" territory is whether anyone with real power is talking about eliminating the permanent position of Supreme Court Justice and replacing that with a by-lot panel system from the lower courts.

This isn't a crazy or impossible proposition, it can be done with just a law. We already form some courts in a similar way, so it's also not unprecedented. It even avoids the naked partisanship of a simple court-packing.

As far as I can tell, nobody who matters is talking about it yet. So. Hope is... remote.

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