If inciting an insurrection towards their own government is an action without legal repercussions, I don’t see how the law would be less lenient about straight up firing a gun at an opponent.
I by no means want any party to resolve to violent tactics. So even though I play with the thought, I really don’t want anything like it to happen. I am just curious if it’s actually the case that a sitting president has now effectively a licence to kill.
What am I missing?
Because what they really did was set themselves up as the ones who decide what is and isn’t an official act.
As long as there is a right-wing supreme court, any action by a republican president will be official and immune, but if a democratic president tried to throw their weight around in the same… They’ll get shut down.
Wait, maybe the justices just gave Biden the authority to do just that.
…
Naw. See, if he did, that’d delegitimize the presidency and cause a constitutional crisis.
But, if a Republican President does it, it’s an exercise in upholding American freedom and the true authority of the office. See the difference?
The immunity from criminal prosecution has to do with official acts, not personal acts. It wouldn’t apply to Biden personally shooting Trump.
It would apply to a military proclamation as commander-in-chief that the Trump movement is a domestic insurrectionist movement that carried out an armed attack on the US Congress; that the Trump movement thus exists in a state of war against the United States; and directing the US Army to decapitate the movement by capturing or killing its leaders, taking all enemy combatants as prisoners of war, etc. (Now consider that the Army is only obliged to follow constitutional orders, and would have Significant Questions about the constitutionality of such an order.)
Further, the immunity is only from criminal prosecution and would not protect Biden from impeachment and removal from office by Congress while the Army is still figuring out whether the order is constitutional.
That sounds both crazy and not actually wildly far fetched. If the tables were turned and Trump was in the position of having the power to declare Biden’s movement as an enemy and carry out violent ways to stop them, I would almost expect it to happen.
It would make for an interesting movie, thatxs hopefully based in fiction.
He can just pardon himself if he shoots Trump because he has immunity when issuing the pardon, since that is an official act.
Better do it in DC. Murder can be charged under state law, and the presidential pardon power only applies to federal charges.
So Biden could officially flood the supreme court with democrat judges, then officially ask them to revoke this stupid ruling?
Supreme Court judges must be confirmed by a majority of the Senate before being seated.
The ratio is 50, and dems have 51 senators.
Biden can order the murder of all the right wing justices and then the senate can rubber stamp them in.
They didn’t change anything other than reiterate what the president is immune from, what he has always been immune from and when he is not immune from prosecution
All Biden has to do is claim that it’s an official act, because Trump is a terrorist, a threat to the Constitution, or some other questionable legal pretext. The problem is that there’s no remedy against such a claim. It could be litigated and go to SCOTUS again, who would have to decide whether it’s an official act or not. But this ruling gives no definite rule on what does or does not count as an official act.
The ruling is limited to “official acts”, but the same court is the one who decides if an act is official or not
Feel like the next logical step is to throw the 6 justices in question into jail. They obviously can’t rule on their own trial so…
Why couldn’t they? The supreme court is literally the final authority, and there is no mechanism to automatically remove a justice from the bench. There is an ethics code that says they should recuse themselves if they have a conflict in a case but it has no enforcement mechanism - two sitting justices have literally taken bribes in violation of the ethics code
So he just has to order the CIA to do it.
The… the CIA and many other government agencies have a stories history of doing absolutely insane things that are absolutely crimes…
…And many of those things only get brought to light by a whistle lower or leak ot some Watergate level fuckup of being caught in the act, or years or decades of actual investigation later.
There are so many problems with this ruling its mind boggling.
The immunity from criminal prosecution has to do with official acts, not personal acts
Trying to overthrow a court and Congress sanctioned vote of the people to retain power is most certainly a personal act.
Declare a national security emergency. Have the SEALS eliminate Trump for being a traitor. Bing bang boom, America is Great Again.
It has to be an official act within the scope of the executive branch. So he couldn’t just bring a gun and shot him, however he could direct the justice department to focus on domestic terrorism and cite Trump’s threats for political retribution as a terroristic threat and have him and every other Republican who publicly agreed with him disappeared.
Trump is arguing that his twitter was “official communications”, and thus can’t be used in court. This means that the 34 felony convictions might go away now.
But the truth is that the Supreme Court didn’t say that every “official act” was immune from consequences. The more nuanced reading is that any act that the Court declares official is immune from consequences.
The Conservatives on the Court declared the president King, but only when they feel like it.
Bring his own gun? Unofficial act. Have the DOJ black bag his opponent and rendition him to a CIA camp in Saudi Arabia? Official act and immune.
You just need to pull the “it was in the best interest of the United States” card and it’s an official act.
Well then why hasn’t he done it… I can’t think of something of a more positive interest than to dump trump down a hole.
because biden (and the democratic party in general) are a bunch of cowards who think that they will prevail simply by taking the high road. Fascism was never defeated by strongly worded speeches or political actions, it always took blood.
Biden didn’t sell classified documents to the Saudis. The Saudis didn’t purchase an entire floor in Biden Tower.
