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?
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.
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?
don’t be ridiculous; it says official acts, so he can’t bring a gun himself.
he has to use seal team 6 instead. see? democracy isn’t dead!
For the record, that would be an illegal order and should be refused by everyone involved in the military chain.
(Whether or not it is refused is a different matter.)
They sent back the question of what is an official act. And when the judge comes back with something like “official acts are those in which a president is acting in an official capacity as the president to fulfill obligations and duties of the president.” (IANAL….so there’s probably some anal retentive detail that is super critical in missing)
In any case, when challenging the election, that is not an official act- that was something done by Trump-the-candidate.
Inviting foreign dignitaries, however frequently is. (But probably not when selling out America and other spies to keep compromat from leaking)
Organizing an insurrection in the US never is, however.
I’m alarmed by the alarm in the dissent- they probably know where this is going, but POTUS has enjoyed some immunity anyhow as far as official acts go. And when it’s kept to a reasonable understanding… that’s more or less good.
Their alarm suggests that the majority here is not going to have a reasonable understanding when that gets appealed.
Reasonable
Who’s to say what’s reasonable.
when challenging the election, that is not an official act
Why not? He could make the argument that the election was stolen and ignoring it is in the best interest of the United states.
Why not? He could make the argument that the election was stolen and ignoring it is in the best interest of the United states.
because that act is not POTUS’s job. He’s making the argument as a candidate. he’s not supposed to be part of that process because he’s biased.
as for whose to say what’s reasonable… that is the problem. right now a dangerous number of SCOTUS are bought and paid for, or are absolutely partisan hacks.
He’s the commander in chief, ordering a seal team or the CIA to assassinate someone is an official act and legal now. What you fail to mention in your haste to try to downplay this is that they also made it impossible to present evidence of crimes by the president, so any non-public action by the president is de facto legal. It would be impossible to prosecute because even if you gathered evidence he ordered the hit, you couldn’t use it in court.
Yes, it’s that bad. No, it’s not that people are over reacting.
Read Sotomayor’s dissent, she says explicitly that this gives the president legal immunity against assassinations.
Declare a national security emergency. Have the SEALS eliminate Trump for being a traitor. Bing bang boom, America is Great Again.
They did not say that he was immune. They said that the president has immunity for certain acts. What acts? Whatever acts they, the SCOTUS, decide they should be immune from. So Biden could shoot Trump dead but the court would rule that that was illegal because some bullshit reason.
So… Biden could target SCOTUS as being treasonous & appoint new justices under immunity with the three remaining liberal justices quickly ruling he has executive privilege to do so?
So Biden could shoot Trump dead but the court would rule that that was illegal because some bullshit reason.
Ah! But with what evidence? They also ruled that presidential conduct (paraphrasing here) can’t be used as evidence.
True, but they are also the ones who decide what they can and cannot do without recourse from anyone else (because we need 2/3 of Congress to impeach which is a non-starter.) so they can rule one way and then rule another for whatever reason they want.
Our “justices” (/vomit…) don’t have to have any qualifications, we just pay lip service to norms so we (read: the federalist society) choose vaguely “acceptable” people to be justices, but you or I could be one too which really means that they have almost nothing to do with the actual law. We’re a fucking joke.
I think that “some bullshit reason” would be murder.
People have gotten fucking ridiculous lately.
They said “some bullshit reason” because the same logic would very clearly not be applied to trump if he were to do the same. Think a bit. It’s ok.
The bullshit in this example is not that they would find Biden guilty but that they could/would find Trump innocent.
That would be bullshit. Biden killing Trump being ruled as murder would not be bullshit, it’d be accurate.
