- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
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In 1982 SCOTUS made a decision on this:
“We hold that the petitioner, as a former President of the United States, is entitled to absolute immunity from damages liability predicated on his official acts.”
The media, the Democrats, but I repeat myself, have all been lying to you. This has always been the case. Nothing has changed.
This most recent ruling wildly expanded the immunity, added presumed immunity for adjacent actions, and phrased everything in such a way that actually prosecuting the president for literally anything will take years.
Say the president does something you think is illegal and should be prosecuted. Stop. Before you can take him to court over that, you need to determine if what he did was “official” or “unofficial.” SCOTUS didn’t give deterministic guidelines to differentiate, so you need to have a separate court case just for that. Alright so let’s have the court case that determines whether what the president did was official or unofficial. Let’s introduce some evidence—
Stop. Evidence from official acts cannot be introduced in a case to prove something was unofficial. So you actually need to have a separate court case to determine if that evidence is official or unofficial. Once you have your results, one party won’t like it and will appeal it up and up to the supreme court. Repeat for potentially every single piece of evidence.
Okay now that we know what evidence we can and can’t introduce, we can finally determine if what the president did was official or unofficial. Once we have a result, one party won’t like it and it will be appealed all the way up to the supreme court again. Only when SCOTUS rules the action was unofficial (IF they rule it was unofficial) can you then BEGIN the process of actually taking the president to court over that action.
This will take years, not to mention the supreme court is appointed by the president and it recently ruled that taking bribes after you do something instead of before is perfectly legal actually. This is all by design. The point is to keep this all tied up in court for years, which effectively gives the president full immunity for everything. And he can also pressure the courts or judges to rule his way via any number of threats (if you think that’s an unofficial act, feel free to take him to court over it).
This is pretty clearly designed to functionally protect the president from all culpability (which the dissenting SCOTUS opinions agree on, ergo their dissent).
Before prosecuting a president you have always had to stop and determine if what was done was in an official capacity or an unofficial capacity. It’s been like that for 200 years. That’s why you can’t charge bush 1, bush 2, or Obama with war crimes. Furthermore, the court made their stance on Trump quite clear. They did not dismiss any of his cases. If they were in his pocket, and he had this absolute immunity as you claim, all cases would be dropped.
Folks, it’s quite clear what the president can and cannot do. He can pardon, appoint, dismiss, and instruct the military to take actions and has full immunity to do so. Which of course the president must have full immunity for those actions. If you or I send a missle to kill people we would get charged. The president would not.
Moreover, presumptive immunity leaves the door wide open. The ruling says that any action taken with presumptive immunity may be challenged and that the burden is on the government to show that the action was not within the presidents duties, and failed to uphold the constitutional oath taken. If the president blatantly breaks the law that burden of proof would be childish to gather. The president is not above the law, and never was.
“We hold that the petitioner, as a former President of the United States, is entitled to absolute immunity from damages liability predicated on his official acts.”
Specifically, immunity from civil damages. The president couldn’t be sued by randos claiming he cost them a job or whatever.
This is a new class of fascism. Keep on trollin’.
The president has always enjoyed immunity for performing official duties. Obviously.
We called for this on day 1 of Biden’s first term…
He chose to put a bipartisan committee in charge of seeing if we should just let the corrupt Republican SC stay in power, and the committee waited two years till dems didnt have the numbers to fix anything, before recommending Dems don’t fix anything.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/biden-support-expanding-supreme-court-white-house/story?id=85703773
The aristocrats! /s
As long as the Dems have less than 60 votes in the Senate, and aren’t willing to ditch the fucking filibuster, there’s literally nothing they can do.
You can’t reform the court without a Constitutional Amendment since the operation and formation of the court is defined by the Constitution.
So, 2/3rds vote in the House, 2/3rds vote in the Senate, ratification by the States.
and aren’t willing to ditch the fucking filibuster, there’s literally nothing they can do.
That’s the rub.
We have things we can do, but party leadership don’t want to do it.
So when they say they can’t do anything, things like “get rid of the filibuster” come up. And they party has to acknowledge that would work…
They’re just not willing to do it.
Which when that comes back to voters, makes them less likely to vote. Because they feel like even when we have the numbers, it won’t change anything because party leadership wants to have the fight against fascism with at least one hand tied behind their back out of an outdated sense of honor.
We’re fucking fighting fascism bro.
What matters is winning.
Fucking let’s go. Do it.
Bidens guys already came out saying they don’t want to reform the Supreme Court. It’s not on the ballot this cycle.
Yeah I just saw that. Ridiculous.
And in 2 years he’ll probably “regret” not doing anything.2 years he might come to regret that decision in January when Trump usess his new powers to lock his ass up.
If fucking Biden lose in November he better use that new gift to stop Trump. Dumbass really wants to use this to fundraiser on, Biden so out of fucking touch he got no clue that we are just this vote away from a Christofascist state.
I ALMOST want to vote Trump just to see SOMEONE (like Biden) FINALLY receive Consequences for their Actions! ALMOST.
In other words everyone, things are not going according to Liberals/Democrats, so, we need to change the entire structure, Constitution, and political system in America.
