Exactly this. It’s critically important that we prevent trump and his fascist goons from getting control of this power. But that in itself doesn’t address the really big problem here. Living at the whim of a benevolent king is still living under a king. I honestly think this is it. The constitutional republic is over in every meaningful way beyond window dressing. Given the authority of the Supreme Court, I don’t see a legal fix for this. This is dark AF.
This ruling basically covered how ex-Presidents might be prosecuted. The President still has some level of accountability to Congress via impeachment , although we've already seen how hard that is.
Of course, when Trump's second impeachment didn't stick, one of the main reasons Republicans gave for voting against it was that they felt the proper venue for that was in the courts. Now that it is in court, the Supreme Court just said "Sike! Congress needed to act all along".
Edited to add: Another legal fix would be simply packing the court. Democrats should pound this during this election. They should make sure voters know that if Democrats are given the White House and both houses of Congress, they will fix the court by adding 4 new seats.
Watching a panel of news anchors discuss this today, I was struck by the ashen looks on their faces. As if they had today witnessed a mortal wound to the nation.
I don't know. Something tells me that they don't have the integrity left to hold their own rulings true for the group of people that they don't personally support.
I'm getting more of a "rules for thee but not for me" vibe but from the supreme Court
It's not in human nature to limit your own power. I'm voting for Biden, for his appointments and admin, I have nothing against him, but my experience is that no one relinquishes power. Once the office has the power, no one's going to let it go.
First of all, they aren't monolithic. Young Cubans vote differently than old Cubans. But, Rick Scott has the formula...no matter the subject call your opponent a socialist. They hate socialism...but always want strongman rule.
He can do that by officially assassinating the conservative SC justices, nominating new ones, and then having armed marines inside the senate comittees to ensure they are confirmed immediately.
There's probably a few more steps, but this would get us back on track. He would have to be willing to give up his powers at a certain point, which means installing the legal apparatus (in the form of government officials) with the will to strip those powers.
Ah yes, the classic play in which you acquire unchecked power, exercise it to get rid of all your political rivals, then somehow use it to restore democracy. Occurs once in an anime about giant robots and psychic powers, and never in history.
"Cincinnatus was an opponent of the rights of the plebeians (the common citizens) who fell into poverty because of his son Caeso Quinctius's violent opposition to their desire for a written code of equally enforced laws"
Hey, he had at least one thing in common with The Cheeto Man.
The one thing we have going for us is that it'll be a race against mortality to accomplish these things. And I don't think his failson is likely to be installed as the next Great Leader. Usually the dictators start much younger.
The next steps would be ordering the justice department to prosecute him, going to court, and appealing all the way to the new Supreme Court so they can overturn the precedent. Which would require either moving very quickly or preventing the other side from taking power, one way or the other.
Of course, by then pandora's box is open. As long as someone is willing to follow those kinds of orders, nothing would prevent the next president from doing the same thing. It's a slippery slope not unlike the one that caused Rome to go from being a republic that viewed regicide as a fundamental virtue to an empire that would persecute groups for denying the divinity of the emperor.
Of course, by then pandora’s box is open. As long as someone is willing to follow those kinds of orders, nothing would prevent the next president from doing the same thing.
It would be a genius move for Biden to arrest Trump right now as a terrorist enemy combatant, but give hints that he's doing this because of the supreme court ruling. And then in order to be prosecuted, the Supreme Court would need to completely reverse this ruling and restore democracy. Even if Biden went to prison after a total reversal of the ruling, he would be regarded by history as a saviour of the country on par with Lincoln.
That'd be fine, but simplest move for Biden is to install Hunter as Veep, then have Hunter declare Joe the winner of the election next January. When Joe kicks the bucket a few months later, the presidency gets handed down from father to son as God intended.
Why is there a picture of Trump?
He's not the president.
Edit:
Apparently some people just don't have the ability to pick up on the subtext that Trump isn't president at the moment and Biden could also use HIS shiny new presidential powers on Trump too.
See we use something called "context" to make sense of the things being explained as sometimes words can be interpreted differently or literally.
In this case, the "context" of the ruling surrounds actions that Donald Trump took while president. It's because of this "context" that he is, in fact, the one in the illustration.
It wouldn't really make sense for Biden to be here in the "context" of the article, but I'm sure that it wouldn't literally be incorrect.
Not that I would ever suggest it, but I bet the moment a president even attempted to abuse this official power against these six conservative traitors to democracy, they'd desperately try to walk this decision back - they only care for the potential of abuse when it negatively affects them
They wouldn’t even need to actually abuse power at all.
Just order the secret service to take over their personal security details, and attach members of the seal teams to each detail…. “As advisors”.
It would be an implicit threat, sure, but also, a totally legal one, and they could hardly argue that “ensuring their safety and wellbeing” is not an official act,
Go a step further and detain them in safe houses... claim that because of their decision their have been death threats and its in the interest of natuonal security. Give them basically no freedom of movement or agency of their lives... I bet they would change their tune quickly.
I'm not advocating for violence. But I'll put it this way. If I ended up on a jury for a murder trial for someone who killed one of the justices that decided for this. I would dedicate my life to nullifying that jury so hard. Not advocating. Just saying.
President Trump signed Executive Order 13823 which kept Gitmo open and declared that the USA can detain "persons captured in connection with an armed conflict for the duration of the conflict." That being stated in Trump's executive order makes it clear that detaining such a person would be an official act.
Trump and his MAGA supporters have made unproven claims that the 2020 election was stolen and they intended to overthrow the government and install him as President on Jan-6 despite his election loss. Trump and his supporters have made continuous threats of violence and committed numerous acts of violence since then. It is therefore clear that the violent conflict that started on Jan-6, 2021 has not yet concluded. Trump and members of his MAGA army can legally be detained, without charge, for the duration of this conflict if and when they are captured.
Now there may be some question about who would capture Trump and his criminal allies and where they would be detained. It's really quite simple. George W. Bush gave us extraordinary rendition. This program used agreements with about 50 other countries to abduct "terrorists" off the streets of those nations and hold and interrogate them indefinitely in CIA black sites. It is debatable on whether or not the CIA, NSA, or FBI could legally capture Trump or any of his terrorist allies, but that is not a problem. No doubt there are any number of foreign powers that would be happy to do so on our behalf for some diplomatic or financial consideration. Negotiating with other nations and arranging treaties and agreements is unarguably part of the Presidents job and therefore an official act.
Thanks to this ruling all Biden needs to do to save our democracy is to come to an agreement with one or more nations to capture the terrorist Trump and transport him to some black site in a foreign nation. There he can be held, and interrogated if need be, until such time as the conflict with his MAGA army is ended. If there are any legally questionable actions by Biden here, they in the nature of official acts, and he is therefore immune to prosecution now or in the future. Should anyone else involved be charged with a federal crime during the capture or detention, Biden can simply pardon them.
Thank you SCOTUS. You've given Biden the ability to save our nation with no legal risk to himself or anyone else involved in the process... Except, Biden would never do any of this because he is a decent human being. So what SCOTUS has really done is destroy our nation. This is the dumbest ruling ever made by this or any other SCOTUS in the history of this nation. The next Republican president will almost certainly not be a decent human being and will commit atrocities that he or she will never be prosecuted for and will tear down our democracy and will rebuild our nation as a Christian theocracy.
The argument, such as it is, is that impeachment is the remedy for a Mad King Trump situation, rather than the courts. In fairness, this is not a completely unreasonable reading of the Constitution, but the framers' intent is almost completely irrelevant to the reality of our current political system. As originally written, the federal government was basically designed to be a vaguely-representative oligarchy, with states free to appoint senators and presidential electors however their legislatures saw fit -- the majority of states did not consistently hold a popular Presidential vote until the 1820s, for example. Impeachment by 2/3rds vote is not an unreasonable bar to set when it's assumed that everybody in government is going the part of the class and social structure, and the President acting as a class traitor would put all of Congress into uproar. The founders did not anticipate more direct democracy, the two-party system, or the vulnerability to demagoguery that those things would introduce into the system.
So here we are now, with a nakedly partisan Supreme Court majority holding that the only way to interpret the law is to ignore the world as it is and instead imagine things are still as they were at the end of the 18th century (mostly because that philosophy plays into the hands of the right wing) and pretending that a 2/3rds vote in the Senate is still a reasonable bar, when in fact the present political reality is that you will never peel 12+ sycophantic Senators away from a dangerous demagogue's camp for long enough for an impeachment process to succeed in removing him from power. Of course that's by design, but textualism and originalism paved the road to this ruling.
At this point I'm not even ironically suggesting that Biden should call their bluff and start offing prominent right wingers. The Roberts court is clearly working in the assumption that Democrats won't play dirty with the tools they're laying out for their incipient god-king, and it's looking increasingly like the only way to keep those tools out of their hands is to strike first.
The founders did anticipate direct democracy, the two-party system, and demagoguery. These were much discussed. They weren't able to provide perfectly for these eventualities, which also was well understood at the time.
The constitution clearly doesn't allow a president to be removed from office by a prosecution, but it just as clearly doesn't offer any immunity to a prosecution for presidents and not to mention ex-presidents. There's never been a presidency, including Donny's, where a criminal charge was even contemplated that would have impinged on a president's legitimate duties.
The founders did anticipate direct democracy, the two-party system, and demagoguery. These were much discussed.
...and notably not a part of the constitution they eventually drafted, which was my point. Rather than try to build a democratic system with effective safeguards against demagoguery, they chose to have a system where only "the right sort of person" got a say in the running of government, and assumed that the separations and limitations of power they wrote in to the rest of the document would be sufficient protection against bad actors in that scenario. Now, we have (more or less) representative democracy, but with no additional guardrails to protect against someone like Trump, and SCOTUS is peeling away what we do have day by day.
You can remove court justices via impeachment. They're not impeaching the president, they're impeaching the Supreme Court justices. They're nominated by presidents and confirmed by congress, so it falls on congress to remove them.
I'm not one of those people who thinks Biden won't make it through the next presidency, but I think you're setting yourself up for disappointment hoping that he lives a long time.
