Senate The Supreme Court

Here's hoping the Supreme Court right wing majority cobbles together an absurd and completely unworkable test to distinguish between the official and unofficial acts of a U.S. president.

 

It will take 5 years for subsequent decisions to mold their political hand-waving into something that pretends to be an interpretable test. Then in 10 years, someone will build a case that adheres assiduously to all the points of this doctrine, only for the Supreme Court to again blow it up because it disfavors a Republican position.

 

In all honesty, if they immunize Trump‘s behavior, Joe Biden should simply have the conservative majority arrested on the grounds that they’ve violated the Constitution with the Dobbs decision (for starters) and allowed women to be murdered through deprivation of life-saving medical care. He’ll never do it, but I would if I were president.

I’m surprised none of the justices have brought up whether or not a president could take such an action against the Court itself; Justice Sotomayor raised whether or not a president could have a rival assassinated by the military, so one would think attacking the justices would also be legitimate a question they would be concerned about.

 

The face-eating leopard eat MY face? Surely you jest!

 

Nah, because the Justices would outright say Biden is wrong and thus has to be punished.

 

I feel for you @Vaderize03 - our institutions are so corrupted that the desire to completely trash them becomes nearly overwhelming. Our regulatory bodies and governing institutions are to an extremely disturbing extent nearly completely controlled by the billionaire class and the stateless megacorporations that were intended to be the objects of regulation. Labor unions aren't powerful enough to protect the interests of the working class. Elected representatives who actively care about the division of wealth in this country are a tiny minority. Now of course we know that even the Supreme Court has been corrupted by billionaire money, and apparently nothing can be done about it because the Supreme Court is in charge of itself.

 

All of which will eventually get us to a “let them eat cake” moment, at which point the Court will realize just how powerless they truly are.

 

I agree with you on this. But like Darth Sinister said, Biden is not the president who would do this. If he were, he would have helped to expand the Court in 2021 to avoid all this. As you can imagine, however, some left-leaning left-leaning, international moderates who would be willing to do what you say, Vaderize. Unfortunately, none among them is president.

 

Obviously we need to activate Dark Brandon.

 

Wouldn't a key (not sole) determinant of official vs. personal acts include a test of who the action benefits? If it benefits others vs. personal benefit?

 

I don't think there's a very good test at all. Even now, Trump's argument is that all his actions have been "official" because it is a duty of elected officials to ensure fair elections, and he had a concern about electoral fraud. You can make up an official reason for almost anything, as he also did with his Muslim ban, even while he announced in public speeches that his main intent was bigoted. In that case, the Supreme Court claimed we all had to take his pretextual justifications at face value, despite his own comments having already discredited them. Under such a model, what is the point of an "official acts" test at all?

 

We don’t know that an official acts test will be in the majority opinion. It could be something far worse like adopting or even expanding on Trump’s position that only Congress can take legal action against a president for things s/he does as president, and if impeachment does not occur then no one else has jurisdiction to prosecute ever.

 

Then the American War for Independence would become meaningless. Might as well have stayed with Britain because the monarchy is not as powerful as the American presidency would become (not as powerful as it is now).

 

The comparison to Henry VIII is pretty darn accurate. As for the other issue, gradually, over the course of time, American presidents would support whoever agreed with their interests, whether the foreign leader was authoritarian or not. Certainly during the Cold War, it became the norm for presidents to install and support authoritarian leaders. So, yeah. That made America's War for Independence a bit of a joke. The other things include the Electoral College, as we've often discussed, and the list goes on.

 

The basic argument is "without immunity, the president would be accountable for his actions"

Um....good!

Perhaps then we would think more things through before playing war games in other countries like Iraq or Afghanistan.

 

That is why immunity is important. So that things like Iraq can continue in the future. We can't have accountability.

 

Thomas and Alito are two of the most corrupt justices in U.S. history. We know Thomas is. Alito gets plenty of bribes, too, even though they are fewer. It tips his judgment toward those donors. So, it's late-stage capitalist nonsense. They are corrupt, and they feel that presidents like Trump ought to feel entitled to be and protected from prosecution for their corruption. It makes no sense. And I'll bet that many law students would critique the poor reasoning and logical fallacies of their arguments. The leaders ought to stand for stability and protections in the public good. In other words, regulations and protections for workers and the middle class. Instead, these corrupt justices and the Republican Jones, as I call them, stand for the CEOs' interests. That's not many people. The process is antidemocratic.

 

President may end up with substantially more on-the-job accountability than cops

 

I’d like to see how he’d respond to a petition from Orthodox Jews claiming that abortion bans violate their religious beliefs given that Judaism allows abortion up until quickening.

The Indiana State Supreme Court was on board with this reasoning; he should be too.

 

Oddly enough, this is the reasoning that finally swayed me to completely support abortion rights as a Christian after being raised by my parents on the "pro-life" side and then spending a few years on the fence. Christians -- even Protestants -- by and large oppose abortion because the Catholic Church says so. Yet Jews share the same God and the same holy text (up to a certain point), and believe the complete opposite. I looked into it and found that in multiple places in the Jewish Bible (Christian Old Testament), reference is made to life beginning "at first breath" -- which does not happen until birth. And the New Testament does not contradict that.

Anyway, back to your usual Senate discussion. I would like to see him squirm when confronted with that argument.