The thing that bugs me is how any order given to subordinates is a use of executive power, right? So that’s immune. But say the subordinate considered refusing an unlawful order. Why, then would they decide to refuse the order when the president could also choose to pardon them for any crimes they committed during the execution of the unlawful order?
If anyone ever doubted that the DNC and the GOP weren't on the same team, just watch as the DNC let this opportunity slip right through their fingers. Access to the greatest political, strategical, minds and they will let this opening wash away into a river of fascism.
It's a play, we are watching theatre. Meant to keep you distracted. Meant to keep you oppressed.
For starters, by spending the last 4 years training a different candidate to beat trump this year.
But failing that, they could absolutely have prevented that disaster on the debate. They knew full well how the rest of America will react to seeing Biden look like that, and I find it no coincidence that it happened directly before The Supreme Court ruled to overturn Chevron and Grant immunity to Trump.
While that is interesting, you realize before the 4 years you mentioned, Trump did everything he's in trouble for doing. He also established the supreme court we have. If Biden randomly died his first 5 months, we still would be in a similar (if not the same) situation. Every person who made this happen, would still have their previously established power. Training someone new would not have stopped this inevitability.
It wouldn't have, that's true. I just feel that it would have been a better circumstance than that we have now. But I think honestly I'm just reaching for copium right now. This entire week was a dark week in our country.
We could all collectively decide to chop the heads off of the elite. We don't need to argue about which capitalist is better every 4 years. There's nothing physically stopping 90% of the country from just overthrowing the other 10% if we really tried together
Just make a balance of what the governments of the last 40 years did. Would the us be worse or better off if those changes had not been made? My opinion is that government is unnecessary. There are enough laws already. If anything really needs to be changed it can be done by referendum. Abolish the government!
Edit: government is the biggest illusion of them all
So Biden should just shoot Trump... Let the courts decide if it's an official act or not, delay delay, appeal to the supreme Court like all these decisions will be, and Biden may have shrugged of this mortal coil by the time all that happens
Sorry, I mean fake as in not where the justices live. I'm pretty sure someone just took random addresses from vaguely around where the justices live and put them on there, I think the residents are just random fellows
Edit: Google searching has proven inconclusive in my quest for the truth, but there are articles claiming those are their addresses so I could be wrong. But people online keep saying the information is outdated by 1-2 decades and wrong (like this Redditor) so idk.
This response is so weird I can't quite tell what your point is. Are you suggesting that the Iraqis resisted with small arms fire? Because that's not the case.
More US citizens die each year in the US from guns than US soldiers died in the entirety of the Iraq war. And it's not a small difference either - each year 4-5x as many citizens die from gun violence. Not including suicides (which would more than double the number)
So was your post trying to say the small arms resistance in Iraq was effective?
I'm a pacifist and don't want to glorify violence at all but, the 'RA also was very effective at dealing with collaborators and informers. Minority rule cannot sustain itself in the long-term.
When a group of American freedom fighters go to take over a U.S.A. military base and hesitant soldiers aren’t sure if they should follow a traitorous president or their oath to the Constitution, the American freedom fighters being well-armed will make the difference.
We could probably mount a pretty decent resistance with what we have available. look what happened in iraq during the occupation. insurgency would be the way to go in a rebellion against the us govt.
Also the Whiskey rebellion and Union/county wars, but nobody remembers them because they were relatively small. Also a lot of Rednecks especially Boomers and Gen X ended up being fucken bootlickers, sure there are some of us within Gen Z who are trying to revers the damage but well culture rarely moves fast.
Hey now, don't besmirch the name Redneck with those sad sods. The Rednecks fought the good fight at the Battle of Blair Mountain, only to be put down by the US military backing robber barons.
Oh no I agree, I was moreso opining the damage done to Redneck culture as a whole. I may be of the Southern Californian variety and have little to no relations to those fine sons of bitches in the Appalachians but I have nothing but respect for mine distant kin. No I was simply stating that the bootlickers in who were taken advantage of through several points of cultural weakness did a shit tonne of damage. I have had the pleasure of talking to Rednecks of the Greatest generation and Silent generation, theyre no shits given savagery is something I wish I could muster but given the fact at least one of them car bombed one of his bosses and smuggled guns to the IRA I can say that I will never match up. But im still doing better than the Boomers.
Are the Dems gonna do anything or is America as we know it just going to die, "get out and vote" isn't going to cut it when they can just say it doesn't count
Why bother, the president can just make an official act to suspend the elections as the country is being "invaded" by the southern border, and call it treason for anyone to oppose it. A lower court would do what? Say it is wrong and commit treason? Can arrest them faster than judges can have required cases.
People aren't reading the article. They did not rule that he is immune because his acts were official.
They ruled that official acts, and not unofficial acts, convey immunity, and remanded to lower courts to determine whether his acts should be considered official or unofficial.
The problem is that they effectively expanded everything the President does to be an official act, and foreclosed a reasonable inquiry into whether an action is actually official.
They've already said Donny is most likely immune for pressuring Pence to overturn the electoral college. Yeah, they've remanded it to lower court, but it's already clear if the lower court doesn't go the way they want, the Supremos will just flip it.
They gave it absolute immunity. That means there is no way to appeal, to argue, to halt, stop, or sue any act by a president. Even arguing whether or not the act is official would be a type of qualified immunity. Meaning that, if you are the office holder of president, everything you do has carte blanche, de facto legality. Sure, some future court could devise a test for this official vs unofficial distinction, but it means nothing for the near future. Biden is now a monarch with no legal method of stopping whatever he wishes to do, so long as it doesn't explicitly fall outside of the extremely broad powers of the executive as defined by SCOTUS and the constitution. Likewise with any future officer holder.
That's not what they ruled at all. They said there was immunity for official acts, specifically citing constitutional powers like appointing judges, commanding the military and recognizing foreign states. That was honestly never in question. A lot of people are reading this wrong. This was a massive punt, which basically opens up the door for a jury to decide what constitutes an official act.
Hi! I'm a real big dumb dumb, cause I never, ya know, studied law. But I sure do know that with SCOTUS decisions, the dissenting should be read as well, to get the proper context of the decision that the opinion won't state. Sotomayor sums up the majority decision like this, and she's a damn sight more knowledgeable than I could ever be:
The majority makes three moves that, in effect, completely insulate Presidents from criminal liability. First,
the majority creates absolute immunity for the President’s
exercise of “core constitutional powers.” Ante, at 6. This
holding is unnecessary on the facts of the indictment, and
the majority’s attempt to apply it to the facts expands the
concept of core powers beyond any recognizable bounds. In
any event, it is quickly eclipsed by the second move, which
is to create expansive immunity for all “official act[s].”
Ante, at 14. Whether described as presumptive or absolute,
under the majority’s rule, a President’s use of any official
power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune
from prosecution. That is just as bad as it sounds, and it is
baseless. Finally, the majority declares that evidence con-
cerning acts for which the President is immune can play no
role in any criminal prosecution against him. See ante, at
30–32. That holding, which will prevent the Government
from using a President’s official acts to prove knowledge or
intent in prosecuting private offenses, is nonsensical.
You should really read it, it's such an important read.
PS: Sorry for formatting, it's copied verbatim from the dissenting pdf
I felt like I must have misread the ruling after seeing all of the articles and comments.
Former presidents also have a “presumption of immunity” for their official acts while in office — but, the court ruled, there is no immunity for “unofficial acts.”
So chutkin is going to decide what acts were official acts and which were unofficial.
But "presumption of immunity" is a weird fucking phrase too because it makes it seem like you can prove they aren't immune? Like presumption of innocence--you start there and work the other way. So presumably(pardon the pun) you can start there with this and work the other way still?
I'd need actual lawyers to make this make sense.
But either way it didn't seem as "carte Blanche presidents can do anything" to me when I read it.
We're waiting at this point for the lower courts to to decide which of Trump's egregious crimes were "official" or not. In the meantime, all his trials get suspended. In January, if he takes office, they will vanish when he becomes a dictator on day one (his words).
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Welp. The Supreme Clergy that now rules what used to be the US has established King Trump as the leader of the Christian Caliphate that's coming.
Conservatives are gonma love living in the white version of Iran.
Can you believe all the conservative Supreme Court justices eat lunch together in the same room? Like the ideas that must be floating around that relatively unsecured... what were we talking about again?
The big thing everyone is missing here is the ruling says the president cannot be prosecuted for actions that are constitutional. So this does not mean the end of democracy or whatever people are saying. The president can't stay in office after his term expires. The president cannot order his political opponents killed- in fact, the Supreme Court issued a statement on that just this year.
Yes, and that is very important and I did not know that, so thank you for clarifying.
That said, this supreme court interprets the constitution however they want. The court in its current form (as a whole) is not ethical, lawful, or legitimate. As soon as a republican takes the presidency, there is no stopping them.
You say that like it's a defined thing that will keep a president in check. SCOTUS rules on constitutionality. Are you really that confident that they'll keep Trump in line if he gets another term and starts really getting to work? The road to fascism isn't paved with goods intentions, it's paved with mealy mouthed, two faced decisions like this that give more and more leeway until it's too late to take back.
Amici curae aren't Supreme Court decisions. "Amici curae" means "friend of the court". It's an argument from third parties submitted for a pending case. The dissents by the actual Supreme Court justices explicitly reference the assassination potential.
That is true, thank you for explaining that to me. Although I read the dissent and what Sotomayor said was that the president would get their day in court to determine if those actions were constitutional, not that this ruling pre-approves them to do so. Meanwhile Roberts said these concerns are overblown... idk really, I don't like the ruling, it basically feels like an expansion of qualified immunity to the president, which makes things more difficult for prosecuters but not impossible.
They're only pre-approved for explicit constitutional duties, but they're presumed immune for all others and their reasoning can't be questioned. "I believed they were an imminent national security threat and took the hard choice." It's like "I feared for my life" for gun nuts, but you can apply it to nearly anything because the president has expansive emergency responsibilities and the only way to prove he wasn't actually taking an action "officially" would be using his private communications, but any communications with "advisors" are precluded from being used.
And anything that makes it through that gauntlet to the Supreme Court rather than being dismissed earlier will be decided on ideological grounds.
Well, fellow Americans. This experiment with democracy was fun while it lasted. Every significant goal of the founding fathers has been systematically thwarted by these Christofascists. We once again have a de-facto monarch.
The consequences of this decision will be dire, and unpredictable. Every law, every right, every freedom can now be undone by an official wave of the president’s hand. Rights to privacy? Gone. Due process? Gone. Bill of Rights? Gone.
No one—democrat or republican—should be happy about this. The right to bear arms is now on the chopping block right along with LGBTQ+ and abortion rights.
Hopefully I’m wrong. Hopefully I’m misreading the situation. But it sure sounds like every right that previously defined us as American people now hinges on the benevolence of our president. Americans can no longer brag about “American freedom.”
And Europe’s next. Another far right puppet of Putin will be elected to run a European country in the next few weeks. Just shows that Europe follows the US in lockstep with a 5 year delay.
