The ruling actually said the president “is entitled to at least *presumptive * immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” Absolute immunity was reserved for “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority.” I’m not defending this ruling, but we don’t need to misquote it.
I was genuinely not expecting this. As little reason as this Supreme Court has given to inspire confidence, I thought this was a bridge too. I feel sick to my stomach.
It’s absolutely sickening. The fact they took up the case to begin with was sickening. We need Biden to take hold of this decision and make some official acts that can restore democracy. Biden can be the first president since Washington to do what Washington did, heal our nation and then surrender power back to We the People. Dead King Geoge III is laughing at us and the blood of the American Revolution groans in disgust at these Injustices!
I had felt the same way, until they ruled that partisan gerrymandering is constitutionally protected, that racial gerrymandering can only be unconstitutional if it doesn’t provide a partisan advantage to one side, and that the court must assume that legislators are acting in good faith because their need to not be embarrassed outweighs the constitutional rights of the people and the need for honest elections. I read that decision and said “shit, they’re gonna rule that Trump’s immune.”
I never thought the Court would put out a decision that could rival Dred Scott for worst in history, but these asshole’s have put out multiple contenders for that title in a single term.
Unfortunately they strongly signalled this move in the oral questioning bit. It was pretty much expected. Now bonking a porn star will become classed as an official act.
Cool, Biden should use those new get out of jail free cards to do a lot of shit to improve the lives of Americans and probibit Project 2025.
The party about of rule of law just got told it’s rule of law to just do whatever as president, so go nuts. Pack the court. Forcibly remove the supreme Court. Ignore it.
Hell the constitution never even said the Court has the right to interpret and block laws, that was due to the Court expanding its own power. We just went with it because Jefferson had his own Xanatos Gambit played on him.
Come on Biden do something really cool with this, make them regret it.
Have the GoP and the traitors on the supreme court taste the death penalty. Then repeal all this crap they put in place (no way to override the GoP all being dead after the fact. I'd go with banishment or any other number of things if it was guaranteed to work, but the only thing that can't potentially be lifted after the fact is death)
Oh man lemme just persuade the fascists that I shouldn’t be killed. Lemme just vote out my neighbors and corrupt cops. Free market place of ideas, where the owners of the marketplace decide what’s neutral, what’s amoral, and what’s being sold.
Sooo strip trump of his citizenship, and remove the Supreme court members that are in his pocket, reestablish new judges via voting. Create new ammendment that the president can and will be held accountable for breaking the law
Trump and his MAGA cult are a clear and present danger to our democracy and its citizens.
The SCOTUS is majority controlled by corrupt federalists openly colluding with lower courts and federalist donors to bypass our elected lawmakers (congress/senate/potus) to effectively unilaterally write policy. This is a clear and present danger to our democracy.
Biden has justification to clean house under official pretext.
Yes, but in classic dem fashion he’ll do absolutely nothing with this new power, and also do nothing to stop its use. Then will continue running a dogshit campaign to get trump re-elected come November. We are well and truly fucked.
This is oversimplifying it. They did not define “official acts”, obviously, but goose and gander. Biden is now available to use these new powers, and should.
Biden won’t abuse this power because he isn’t a complete trash person and SCOTUS knows it. They know that the only party that will abuse this power is the Republican party.
So until this trash opinion is undone, every single election is an imminent threat to democracy.
They should be terrified of what Trump would do to them with this power, though. History has shown time and time again that, just because Trump likes you today, that doesn’t mean he won’t fire you tomorrow. Or in this case, should I say “fire” you tomorrow.
Leopards won’t eat their faces. Or if it seems like they will, they’ll just do what he wants. They may have tried to maintain appearances of doing law, just conservatively, during his presidency, but since then they’ve abandoned it and are just a kangaroo court. You don’t declare the president a king and precedent optional while still maintaining some pretense of justice. They think they’ve won and now is the time to put their plans into motion.
They don’t even need to. The same court that made this decision will say everything he does is official and (now) very legal. Some old conservatives will retire to be replaced by Eileen Cannon (she gets both of their seats), and the court just needs to sit back and endorse the fascism. They’ve already done the daring act, now everything else is procedure.
In her dissent, Sotomayor made it pretty clear that that doesn’t matter.
“When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution,” Sotomayor wrote. “Orders the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
“In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law,” the justice added.
The dissent is not the prevailing ruling though. The other MAGA dip shits on the court just left the door open to anything for the next 6 months. All horrific derivatives of this timeline, sure. But they can’t stop the current administration apparently from doing the same shit without immunity until the next ruling. They’re just banking on the fact that Biden isn’t a gigantic piece of shit and will never pull the trigger on using any of these options.
I guarantee his team is sitting in a room right now coming up with ideas.
Yeah I hear you, but that door they left open is exactly why it doesn’t matter. By not defining official acts, they essentially gave themselves the authority to make that determination later, which means anything done as president can be considered official, as long as they say so. This was another power grab for them and any republicans who want to use it, but you can be sure the rules would be different for democrats.
Not until October, and they won’t have enough time to do anything to fast track a damn thing depending on what happens. If it happens bettnow and then, it happens.
That’s why the conservative SC justices would have to be declared enemy combatants, terrorists, or an emergency threat and be locked up. Now they cannot rule against the president. Or rush to pack the SC with friendly justices after removing the conservative ones, and lock up any members of congress who won’t approve the judges.
If Biden were to use his powers to force the 6 conservative Supreme Court Justices out, then there wouldn’t be anybody on the court who would disagree with the minority interpretation.
This here. As a European I am extremely worried about what is coming in US politics. I really really hope Biden will make use of this with foolproof consequences.
Lmao they had so many chances to codify everything and never did. They’ll just throw it as yet another carrot on the stick and use it for election propaganda. “Vote for us if you want us to codify that” and then after elected they’ll just act like it never happened.
Tbf, they probably didn’t anticipate the courts overturning decades of precedent when they last had a filibuster proof supermajority 12 years ago (I don’t think any of us saw this getting so, so bad back then), so this is a bit of a stretch
They weren’t paying attention. The conservative legal sphere had been dreaming of ending Chevron deference for a long time, and the conservative SCOTUS justices have been signaling it as well.
It probably won’t work. SCOTUS will just declare the new legislation unconstitutional and then go lounge on their billionaire provided yachts while the rest of us drown in sewage.
If it actually gets passed, I think it has a good chance of holding up. The big problem with Chevron deference, despite its convenience, is that the Administrative Procedures Act says that courts are supposed to do the exact opposite.
I am hopeful this could pass. Congress knows they are not technical subject matter experts. They don’t like looking like fools when they talk about the Internet being a bunch of tubes. They want to be able to pass legislation and delegate the details to experts, at least to some degree. They don’t want the overhead of that nuance and detail it takes agencies to define. I am surprised the judiciary wants that responsibility…
With agencies Congress has a scapegoat to drag in the muck and make them look good on TV. Without agencies, Congress is responsible for their own laws and being very explicit about some technical details. They look bad if shit breaks now.
This ruling doesn’t stop the ability to delegate. It stops the deference to the executive branch to interpret however they feel. If their interpretation is good, it can stand. Congress doesn’t have to say how much heavy metal is acceptable in drinking water, it just has to explicitly say setting a limit is the responsibility of the agency.
But doesn’t a lot of this come down to “ambiguity” in statutes which can be attributed to lack of technical expertise. In the example of you make is there a difference between:
Congress saying the agency is responsible for ensuring drinking water is safe vs the agency is limiting heavy metals in drinking water? If a statute says the agency is responsible for regulating drinking water safety including, but not limited to, heavy metal levels can they also regulate microplastics?
If ambiguity is at play doesn’t that require congress to provide more technical definition to some degree?
It’s crazy it goes to the courts. In an early published ruling Gorush’s ruling was talking about the compound of laughing gas because he confuse it for an air pollutant…
It depends on how they wrote the law, the destructive device rule is fairly good imo as it both covers the things congress wants and anything that is using a different name for the same result and gives the attorney general the ability to exclude things for sporting only.
With Chevron, it would stand, without it the court gets to ignore all reason and reject an agency’s interpretation even if it’s sane and carefully constructed by experts. The court gets to challenge every individual decision and reason made by the agency which the law doesn’t make explicit
As the ruling said. The chevron defense hadn’t been used since 2016, agencies have their opinions overturned or narrowed more recently. Courts were already disagreeing with agencies, and the standard to take their interpretation was just wasting time.
As stated in the dissent, ignoring your own precedence for years to create an impression that a useful legal principle isn’t useful and to create an excuse to overturn it doesn’t make for an actual reasonable argument to overturn it.
On the flip side, if the agencies’ interpretation is pants-on-head crazy it also stands under Chevron but shouldn’t under a fair examination by a court.
I have no faith in them be able to pass something like this. Not when this is what the Republicans have been dreaming of for the last 50 years. But I hope they keep trying.
I have no faith in them be able to pass something like this. Not when this is what the Republicans have been dreaming of for the last 50 years. But I hope they keep trying.
They haven’t. The ruling is only 40 years old from 1984. And it was actually a Reagan era interpretation based on Reagan EPA era. Not sure when the Republicans changed their mind on this though.
Edit: this probably is a trump era, fauci backlash, change. Maybe tea party roots. But this level of anti intellectualism and Republicans getting nominated to dismantle and not govern didn’t exist until probably 2010. Mitt Romney, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfield probably all wanted and supported agencies to do their bidding. Mitch used his power to guy like Anit Pai in the FCC which Obama approved…
Definitely tea party roots, libertarians have been against it for ages.
Reagan really kicked is off on the trajectory of privatization, trusting corporations to bed good stewards of the people. It was a steady trajectory really kicked in to high gear with the recession since blood was on the water
Now the right hates any part of the government that doesn't hold a gun, and would rather drink poison than impede corporate profits.
Interesting, I was going off the NYT summary when the news broke:
Forty years ago, when Chevron was decided by a unanimous but short-handed six-member Supreme Court, with three justices recused, it was generally viewed as a victory for conservatives. In response to a challenge from environmental groups, the justices sustained a Reagan-era interpretation of the Clean Air Act that loosened regulation of emissions, saying the Environmental Protection Agency’s reading of the statute was “a reasonable construction” that was “entitled to deference.”
It’s a compromise position. Under Chevron, Conservative justices couldn’t strike down regulations that put limits on corporations. At the same time, more liberal justices (leftist justices don’t really exist) couldn’t reverse agencies that had been captured and start ending regulations.
This ruling only makes sense for their position if they think they can hold onto the judiciary indefinitely.
Completely disagree. First of all there’s a difference in Reagan Era and Reagan endorsed. However it’s not just Chevron we’re talking about here. It’s the idea of dismantling the regulatory state in general. That’s much older than Chevron. That sentiment can be traced back to Phyllis Schlafly. That sentiment can be traced back to the John Birch Society. That sentiment can be traced back to the business plot.
They saw chevron as useful when Republicans had control over all the major agencies, but with gov agencies driven by experts and scientists who can ignore the Republicans screaming then chevron isn’t helping them anymore. And that’s part of why they try to get as many partisan judges into the system as possible, to get their way through corrupt courts instead.
commondreams.org
Newest