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.
How does one prove whether or not something is official business if official business can’t be used in any trial?
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.
So… he could assassinate Biden and all political opposition, but not Stormy Daniels
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.
I don’t think this immunity applies to states. So the NY trial was unrelated.
The NY trial was unrelated to his presidential business anyways. It was about private property and fraud relating therein.
Under this new standard, a president can go on a four-to-eight-year crime spree and then retire from public life, never to be held accountable.
Uhhh, that already happened.
Yeah, but now the Supreme Court said that’s perfectly ok and totally legal.
Well, we’ve already had a president assassinate US citizens, so let’s rev up those predators and go looking for whatever billionaire’s yacht Coney Barret, Kavanuahh, and Roberts are chilling on
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.
Except the extreme court gets to decide who is immune and what actions are okay.
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.
bombing countries they’re not at war with
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.
Would this same ruling have happened if Trump wasn’t involved? No, I don’t think so.
Stop the steal overthrow.
So now Biden can do what trump did and not certify the next president using fake electors.
And if he can’t break the law, can’t he illegally introduce a new law that makes all this presidential law breaking illegal?
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_executive_orders
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.
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.
This isn’t power anyone should have.
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.
The rules of the Senate, as undermined by McConnell and inexplicably tolerated by Schumer ensure it won’t happen.
That co-equal branches thing was nice while we had it.
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.
The President Can Now Legally Assassinate You, Officially if it Supports the SCOTUS Majority’s Agenda
Anything Biden did would be determined to be “not official” by them because he’s a Democrat.
As I mentioned on another comment, there is no mechanism for the court to enforce that. The DOJ is under the President. Who will arrest the President? The SC may think this empowers them more, but it really does not.