You would think that somebody that called themselves a journalist would actually have journalistic integrity. Nothing the ‘journalist’ claimed was in the SCOTUS ruling. SCOTUS ruled that the president has immunity for many of his presidential actions and none for personal actions such as going on a murder streak
Under this ruling the president has absolute immunity for their use of any powers granted by the constitution, and that includes use of the military, pardon powers, and appointing and firing of executive department officials. Their motivations and purposes for use of those powers cannot be questioned by the courts or by any laws passed by congress.
The whole “official” vs “non official” acts things only comes into play for powers not explicitly granted by the constitution. And even then the president gets presumptive immunity.
Go read the actual ruling and the dissents and stop spreading misinformation. The journalist and the headline are accurate.
Quoting from Sotomayer’s dissent (pp 29-30, paragraphing my own):
This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Kore- matsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting).
The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world.
When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.
Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to as- sassinate a political rival? Immune.
Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune.
Takes a bribe in ex- change for a pardon?
Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
They go on with an incisive critique of the majority’s reasoning:
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trap- pings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
That’s not true. Criminal acts are not protected, nor can they be made in an official capacity. Furthermore, the ruling says the court that determines official acts is the trails court. Not the supreme Court. Stop spreading misinformation.
The ruling doesn’t even allow unrelated trials to use evidence that might be from official presidential business. Trump just requested his conviction in NY to be overburdened based on this ruling. So how it would not protect criminal acts when you can see in your own eyes this being used to get away from criminal acts. The other trials are also in jeopardy.
As for the “decision made by trials court” that is insignificant as SCOTUS can override them.
You cannot commit criminal acts in an official capacity, full stop. It is not possible. The moment your actions are criminal you are no longer upholding the oath you have taken and the action is not official. Obviously.
Oo, nice try turning this around on them. But nah, man, you’re refusing to acknowledge the ruling itself explicitly telling you you’re wrong. You’re not arguing in good faith. Go away.
If official conduct for which the President is immune may be scrutinized to help secure his conviction, even on charges that purport to be based only on his unofficial conduct, the “intended effect” of immunity would be defeated.
The highest court didn’t give any president a free pass. If the president is carrying out a function of the constitution there is immunity. For everything else they enjoy no immunity. Like for instance breaking a law.
And the courts bought by Trump and Co. will see to it that every criminal behavior is considered official and constitutional. You are a bit blind if you see this having any positive effect. The president, and anyone else for that matter, should have zero immunity. Immunity only invites abuse. Just look at qualified immunity for a great example of how it is a failed idea.
True, but your defense of it does give the appearance that you at the least do not mind it. You don’t seem to find it problematic, and to others that itself is also problematic. Please feel free to contradict me if I’m wrong, but from what you’ve said so far you really, as I mentioned, do seem to not see the issues or repercussions this will have.
First responders have (in some counties had) immunity while doing their job. If grandma needs CPR you don’t want a first responder to hesitate to provide that CPR because they might crack a rib and get sued, or worse, thrown in jail.
The president should not be afraid to make decisions in fear of political retaliation, which is exactly what this ruling clarifys.
If the first responder breaks the law they are held accountable. If the president breaks the law they will be held accountable.
This doesn’t mean the president can do whatever they want and they are immune from the law. That’s ridiculous. The ruling even states that.
There is a key difference there I think. That is that one is engaged in saving people that are about to die, the other has power to ruin a large swath of ordinary lives and set orders in place that destroy industries or prop up harmful ones, and remove agencies and regulations that keep people safe. They should be held accountable at all times of their presidency. They should be concerned about what can happen if they make a greviously bad decision. There should be no immunity and they should be held accountable for their actions just as every other person in this country is.
And again, in an ideal world, they would be held accountable by laws. But in this case, if we are talking Trump, he will not be because the highest court in the nation, is corrupt and planted by him as loyalists to him, and will give him a free pass and now will say it was because he had immunity. I and ideal world we wouldn’t have to have this conversation, but we are not talking about an ideal world.
The president already had immunity before this ruling. You or I cannot send a missle to Iran to kill people. The president can. It’s been like this for 200 years. It was like this when Trump was president. The president didn’t gain any magic law dodging powers. They aren’t suddenly a genie that can do whatever they want.
SCOTUS ruled that the president has immunity for many of his presidential actions and none for personal actions such as going on a murder streak
Right, that's literally the point. All a malfeasant president would need to do is declare that assassinating political rivals is an official presidential action. If the president argues that it's an official act of their office and not of their own personhood, there's little room to hold them accountable for it.
It may seem like an absolutely ridiculous argument, and that's because it is. What constitutes an "official" presidential action was left intentionally un-defined by the court, so that such ridiculous arguments could be treated as legitimate if the immunity is challenged.
I would take this at face value except for the fact that the president is the commander in chief of the largest, best equipped, most lethal, official killing organization in the planet.
Killing is, and has always been, a possible official act.
The only remedy the current court’s ruling really allows is impeachment. It essentially means that (absent a later ruling specifying exactly what counts as a President’s “official acts,”) the President can do literally anything he wants and never suffer any consequences. Don’t agree that what he was doing was an official act? Impeach him or stfu. He’s not going to jail for breaking any law, ever.
I heard a good argument that while these justices are appointed for life to be judges, it doesn’t specify which branch. Reappointment them to a lower court and appoint new justices. They voted for this let them reap the consequences. Outline enforceable ethics standards.
Just dismiss the senators as official business. What still stands in the way of a total power grab by a US president?
As long as it’s official business and they keep it official by officially removing all obstacles, they are legally perfectly in the clear. IANAL obviously, but total power seems just a matter of being audacious enough to grab it.
The president can’t dismiss them. That’s adding executive power. They took away criminal liability. He’d need to kill/kidnap/imprison them. And who knows if they’d rule that as an official act. They didn’t actually outline what counts and what doesn’t. So maybe for Biden that wouldn’t count and for Trump it would.
I think the more viable option is just packing the court but biden would have to get two Republicans to flip and all Democrats to agree. It’s embarrassing he didn’t do it when the Democrats had Senate in 2020
How would he “illegally introduce a new law”? He could issue a decree but it would be meaningless because nothing gives a president the power to make laws.
The president can issue executive orders pursuant to a grant of discretion from Congress, or under the inherent powers that office holds to deal with certain matters which have the force of law.
The president can issue executive orders pursuant to a grant of discretion from Congress, or under the inherent powers that office holds to deal with certain matters which have the force of law.
Executive orders are limited to exercising powers already granted to the President by Congress or the Constitution. The President cannot just make up new laws. This is basic stuff that should have been explained to you numerous times if you’re American.
Correct. There’s absolutely nothing stopping Biden from doing exactly what Trump already tried and failed to do. He could put pressure on Governors to “find x number of votes”, submit a fake slate of electors to cast doubt on the results, outright threaten people if they don’t comply with his wishes. I’m sure this SCOTUS will find a way to interpret any of Biden’s would-be illegal actions as actually illegal, but tiptoe around Trump’s sedition and fraud.
I can’t believe that the prevailing opinion of the times is that the president can literally break the law, even ones specifically meant to bind them and only them such as campaign finance laws, and be immune from consequences under almost any circumstance as long as the court says it’s official. Congress effectively can no longer act as a check against the Executive. Only the Judicial can say what is official or unofficial.
Sadly no. The way they turned it around was very clever.
So they said that only official presidential business is immune, but were ambiguous what that actually means, so inevitably they made it so it would go through them to determine what is the official business.
Second thing is that they picked up from their ass that Constitution also says that no official business can be used in any trial, even if it is unrelated. This not only jeopardizes all the indictments he had, it possibly will negate the New York trial.
trump already submitted request to have it referred based on this SCOTUS ruling.
This election might be the last free election we have. And even if trump loses it will still not be over.
Please vote and make your friends and family vote. And not just for president but also for the Congress.
Edit: I also recommend everyone a book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century” (there’s also reading on YouTube) all the warning signs are present. The more people are aware what it is at stake the higher chance that this can be stopped.
The “unbiased” judge will define what is allowed in the trial or not. And the prosecutor can appeal that decision and hope the higher judge is not also bought and paid for by the criminal president.
Until it eventually hits the Supreme Court and they decide what is and isn’t an official act based on what political party the President is affiliated with.
I wonder how that would work if the act was against them. I mean he could assassinate the entire Supreme Court because of the war or drugs or whatever, and then who stops him?
Trump could kill anyone and they would determine that it was official business. On the other hand, Biden could have the Republican judges executed and replaced with sycophants who could rule that this also was an official act. It’s a bad ruling.
He can’t appoint justices without Senate approval. He only needs 50 Senators to approve though. The rest can be bombed for reasons that apparently don’t matter.
He only needs 50 senators if all 100 are present. Start tossing some of the more treasonous ones in Gitmo as an official act and that threshold can be brought down quite a bit.
So officially dissolve the Supreme Court and instate a new pack of judges and let those judges decide if it was an “Official Act” and thus totally legal.
Like now? The president has always been able to assassinate you, officially, the difference is that before he would have gone to jail and now he won’t.
Who’s to say that maintaining the dignity of the office of President is not in the interest of the US? She is impugning his reputation therefore making him look weak which could embolden our enemies. She must disappear for the good of all Americans. It’s not hard to justify just about anything as an official act in the interest of the US.
Not really. Exercise of a Presidential power, no matter the reason, is immune from prosecution. If it’s legal to drop a bomb on ISIS it’s legal to drop a bomb on a pornstar.
A lot of people are reading this wrong. What is likely going to happen is that the district court will say that a grand Jury can decide if something is an official act. That might be challenged again but I’d wager that’s the next stop in this saga.
But don’t forget that official government records and any inquiries as to the motives of the president will not be admissible as evidence in any such case.
The US has already extrajudicialy murdered a US citizen on purpose. The US under Obama sent a drone to murder a citizen without a trial.
Precedent was publicly set then.
The US 3 letter agencies have been doing this in secret for their entire time in power. But those are widely considered outside the law but necessary. Whatever that means.
Agree but I feel like pointing that out is implying this somehow doesn’t make things worse which I feel like is missing the point. This removes the implicit threat of prosecution for anything the president does.
Now no matter how much political will exists for the prosecution, the president is fully and unequivocally immune.
If you want to get a bit more cynical, you could very easily describe the deaths of Fred Hampton and the Freedom Summer murders as presidential assassinations. If you want to take the extra step down the rabbit hole, there’s very real reason to suspect MLK was assassinated by the FBI.
Maybe Obama should have been charged, just to set the record straight, but likely this wasn’t attempted because (1) Trump was too busy grifting to put any weight behind this, (2) all of those killed were on foreign soil, and (3) they were all working with Al Qaeda. This is getting into the realm of whether or not killing an enemy combatant is murder and what really defines an enemy combatant. I’m sure there was also pressure from both sides to specifically not answer these questions.
Either way I’d rather live in a country where a President gets charged after leaving office as a rule, than live in a country where a President can practically burn everything to the ground and walk away untouched.
Most presidents have done this. Whether it be bombing countries they’re not at war with, trafficking drugs to enrich the war machine by arming enemies of the state, or invading foreign countries and committing war crimes based on their own manufactured lies.
Fun fact. We haven’t officially declared war since 1941.
Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and now Ukraine? All NATO led military interventions or AUMF policing actions. No articles of war required.
trafficking drugs to enrich the war machine
One of the craziest “America just be like that” stories I’ve ever heard was the time Bush Sr set up a drug buy right outside the White House, by having the DEA extort a teenager picked up for selling crack on the opposite side of town to show up on Pennsylvania Avenue the night of a State of the Union Address and do a straw sale to another agent, just so he could talk about it on national TV an hour later like it happened organically.
Bush dangling a bag of crack on national TV and saying in his Father-Knows-Best voice that we need to go full-on Phoenix Program across every major American city, because of his little kabuki crack sale, is one of those “burned into my conscience” factoids that really changed how I saw our country operating.
Welcome back to another episode of “Where’s Humanity Going to Shit Next?”, where we tackle the depressing consequences of the actions of the human race to our beloved planet Earth. This episode we visit the US once again, where the president decides he now has the power to kill you himself if he feels like it.
Join us next time to see where humanity is really gonna shit next.
I really don’t understand how people are twisting this so dramatically. The president is still bound by the law of the constitution. No president can just go on a killing spree. They still need to operate in an official capacity as POTUS. I mean, I understand we don’t want to give Trump a win under any circumstances but he most certainly can still be held accountable for his actions.
presidents are entitled to “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for official acts,
This is simply not true. There are three levels of actions: core actions defined by the constitution, other official actions as president, and acts outside of being president. It’s the first “core” actions that are immune simply because they are defined in the constitution - pardons, appointments, etc. It’s like saying putting on your turn signal to make a turn is immune from prosecution. Other actions as president are presumed to be immune but that does not mean they are “absolutely” immune from prosecution.
Presidents are now entitled to “absolute” immunity, which means that no matter what they do, the immunity cannot be lost. They are always and forever immune, no matter what evidence is brought to bear.
When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to as- sassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in ex- change for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Article II, Section 4: The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
I really don’t know what she’s going on about and I’m a little concerned.
The only reason they separated out official acts is to stall the ruling on trump’s case. If it goes back to the SCOTUS they will say all acts are official but rule on the very last day they can. They are doing this to delay it until after the election.
That article states they will be removed if convicted. The new ruling states that for anything considered “official”, the president can no longer be convicted. That’s the problem.
That is NOT what they have ruled. They have ruled that there is a presumptive immunity. That means it can be challenged upon judicial review.
The President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law. But under our system of separated powers, the President may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for his official acts. That immunity applies equally to all occupants of the Oval Office.
Roberts then goes on to explain how all but one of the charges need to go back to the courts to determine if he was acting in an official capacity.
For eight years we’ve been told we’re overreacting as we predict all this stuff like Trump stuffing the courts with conservative activists, overturning Roe, killing chevron deference, and generally legislating from the bench. Poorly written law can be interpreted however they like. True or not, the SCOTUS majority has proven that they don’t care what’s written in the constitution, law books, etc. Whether or not you think the law can be interpreted a certain way, they are now set up to do whatever they like because even though they don’t make the laws, they actually, implicitly do.
SCOTUS majority has proven that they don’t care what’s written in the constitution
That’s an odd take being that they’re heavily relying on Article II to define which of a president’s actions are immune and everything outside of that is either open to interpretation or absolutely NOT immune.
Hey, many actual members of the bar have said it is now legal (in that he is immune from prosecution) for Joe Biden to order the military to kill Donald Trump. You’ll forgive me if I trust their analysis over that of oxjox@lemmy.ml.
I’d like to know what has changed. My assumption is that it has always been legal given it was done for reasonable reasons (national security, etc). Are they claiming that now the president can kill anyone they wish with no reason whatsoever? Has this wholly removed the fourth section of Article II?
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Add comment