Senate You Forgot About Eating Pets: the 2024 US Presidential Election Thread

Wow, I completely forgot Ben Carson existed or was ever a flavor of the month, once upon a time...

 

I mean, we've seen this before. All these mainline Republicans lining up to support Trump out of pure partisanship. It's exactly like Hindenburg and Hitler all over again. All because Republicans refuse to share power or compromise.

 

https://news.yahoo.com/yahoo-newsyo...ous-as-hush-money-trial-begins-191300785.html

57% of Americans now say that Trump's alleged crimes are "very serious." This is up from September 2023. This is not surprising. Folks are trying to feed their families. As such, they will pay more attention as the election draws nearer.

• Nearly three-quarters of Americans (73%, a new high) now say that “conspiring to overturn the results of a presidential election” is a serious crime, up from 66% in December.
  
• A full 69% (another new high) now say “taking highly classified documents from the White House and obstructing efforts to retrieve them” is a serious crime, up from 63% in December.
  
• And the same share (69%) now say that “attempting to obstruct the certification of a presidential election” is a serious crime, up from 64% in December.
  

 

So Trump team is legally claiming it's legal for him to launch a coup and politically assassinate rivals, probably sell nuclear secrets... absolute immunity.

Jack Sauer, Trump’s lawyer, made the “absolute immunity” argument in a Supreme Court hearing in the Department of Justice election interference case against the former president. Trump’s team has repeatedly claimed that the ex-president can’t be prosecuted for “official acts” he did while in office.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Sauer, “If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military to assassinate him, is that within his official acts to which he has immunity?”

“That could well be an official act,” Sauer responded.

Sotomayor seemed taken aback at that line of reasoning.

“I am having a hard time thinking that creating false documents, that submitting false documents, that ordering the assassination of a rival, that accepting a bribe and countless other laws that could be broken for personal gain, that anyone would say that it would be reasonable for a president or any public official to do that,” Sotomayor said, including other examples from Trump’s lawyer’s argument that could logically lead to no prosecution.

Justice Elena Kagan offered a few more hypotheticals to Trump’s attorney, including if a president would be immune from prosecution if they sold the country’s nuclear secrets to a foreign power.

“Likely not immune,” Sauer said, before adding a qualifier: “Now, if it’s structured as an official act, he’d have to be impeached and convicted first.”

“How about if the president orders the military to stage a coup?” Kagan asked.

“I think it would depend on the circumstances,” Sauer said.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, another liberal on the court, said Trump’s reasoning could mean presidents in the future could commit all sorts of crimes.

“I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into the seat of criminal activity in this country,” Jackson said. “If the potential for criminal liability is taken off the table, wouldn’t there be a significant risk future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes in office?”​

 

We've already had a president assassinate a US citizen and get away with it.

 

True, but this is going next level.

And if there's a chance that the Supreme Court does rule reasonably on this, this could apply to past presidents, and set precedent for future presidents.

 

Again, see the whole previous discussion with Even.

You know we know this point, and don't really disagree with you. And more importantly here, we know that you know how radically different this is.

 

The difference is that one president followed the norms of Washington while doing it and the other doesn't. I know you and some others feel that it's important to make the common rabble feel like the laws of the US are upheld and apply to everyone, but you and I are smarter and know better. I just don't play the game for their sake.

 

The norms of Washington are also restraints on behavior. We know as a matter of established fact that Donald Trump wanted to, at various points, start wars, use nuclear weapons, and have the military into crowds of peaceful protestors. Insofar as he was argued down from these positions, it was pretty much only because the people around him believed they were against the norms of Washington. What do you think is the likely consequence of public affirmation from the Supreme Court that none of this matters and Presidents are free to indulge in unlimited criminality?

Because, again, that's where your argument comes apart. If this was some sort of limited single case, your moral position that "a President has already done that before!" might resonate. But that's not in fact what's happening. What's before is a literal argument that there are no bounds at all on a President's ability to be criminal. That has never been argued before. That has never been done before. As wildly unjust as some standards have been, or how inconsistently they've been applied, or the hypocrisy that stretches back to this country's very founding, you cannot credibly say that any prior has seriously put forward this proposition that nothing is wrong or impermissible for them. That is insane, and you look absurd trying to stretch that comparison.

We understand your point, and it falls well short of this discussion.

 

who said a 'president has already done that before'

all I saw was the claim that former presidents who committed crimes were also not held accountable for their respective crimes

 

starfish, this post from Lord of Vivec was in reference to the family of Anwar al-Awlaki. Both the father and son were living in Yemen. The father was purportedly involved in local Al-Qaeda leadership and was alleged to have orchestrated terrorist attacks in the US (the Fort Hood shootings). Some claim this forfeited his citizenship and gave him enemy combatant status, making him a legal target. Others contend that as a US citizen, these allegations needed to be demonstrated in formal court of law before he was sentenced to execution. It was illegitimate to make some kind of one-sided determination in absentia and then kill him with a drone. His son was, insofar as we are aware, a civilian. There are some reports that he was killed as a bystander in an attack on another Al-Qaeda leader whom we the boy was visiting (or at least in proximity to) at the time. Vivec is literally saying that a President has done the hypothetical scenario before. Which is why I replied that he said that.

But the discussion above also reinforces my point. Morally, one can make the point that either or both should not have died. It is right to say that in some ways these distinctions are extremely fine, and it just offers formal language for the government to do what it wanted to do anyway. Even more fairly, though, we can see that even if they were pretextual or strained reasons, that's a very different world than simply declaring someone is able to murder without any reason or justification at all. The situations aren't really comparable along the criterion that's actually being argued.

 

yes I saw that post, my take from that post is that other presidents have also committed crimes and were never held accountable and therefore it is unlikely that Trump will be held accountable in any meaningful way

 

Obviously I agree that the president shouldn't be able to order the killing of a US citizen, especially in a case with no due process. However, my point here is that it really feels like the only reason it's a problem with Trump is because Trump is Trump and ignores Washington's norms, while a Democratic president or any other Republican president wouldn't be getting this much pushback over the concept.

 

How are you deciding that? What other person has so consistently and publicly flouted Washington norms? You have an n of 1 for a sample size, and yet you presuppose it’s about everyone treating him specially rather than just acknowledging the possibility that it’s his behavior which is exceptional?

 

Technically, by the letter of the law, yes it was an extrajudicial assassination. Technically it was illegal. Morally....we all knew al-Awlaki was engaged in terrorism. And we also had no way to go arrest him. That's why we've chosen to tolerate the assassination.

That is a hell of a lot different from Trump brazenly, falsely claiming that BLM protesters are terrorists and telling police to gun them down.

 

The major difference is that if the Supreme Court grants immunity of ANY kind, it will be de jure permission for a President to do what he wants instead of merely de facto.

As bad the latter is, the former would be worse.

 

If the SC rules in favor of broad immunity, Biden could do the funniest thing.

 

Thank you for highlighting the disingenuousness of this whole thing. In reality, the Supreme Court is under no obligation to make a broad set of rules about when Presidents do and do not have immunity. It has done this many times in the past, as with Bush v Gore. Even this year, with relation to Trump it offered the weirdly narrow "only federal courts can say if Donald Trump violated the 14th Amendment but also I am refusing to say whether Donald Trump violated the 14th Amendment." They could very easily conclude that Donald Trump's theory of presidential immunity is wrong without saying which one is right, and anything outside that basically serves to ensure he is functionally immune from any prosecution over this cycle.

 

I wasn't clear, I mean it's because he flouts the norms. The only issue these people have with Trump is that he flouts the norms. If Trump had done what Obama did and didn't flout the norms while doing it, nobody would have cared outside of annoying people like me.

 

I appricaite that you’re not a liberal, so you find the norms as merely ways to perpetuate a system which you disagree with, but from a liberal perspective, agreeing and abiding to the norms is a large part of the system functioning. There’s a lot of things in our systems (not as much in the United States, but it’s particularly true for the Westminster system) that rely upon uncodified convention being respected.

I imagine the same would exist in a socialist system. Party delegates and apparatchiks, for example, established in China uncodified conventions to prevent the consolidation of power after Mao, which Xi has destabilised. In China, a more direct example would be how the average Chinese citizens views overreach against the heartland of China compared to in Tibet and Xinjiang. There’s no moral difference between the two, but one is going to get significant pushbush from the average Chinese citizen compared to the other.

 

Adding to Philosopher's point, which was quite robust on its own, your reasoning seems kind of circular. It seems to boil down to that idea that if what Trump did was less of big deal, people would have made less of a big deal about it.

Well, yes. What I think you have a hard time with is explaining why this shouldn't be the case. Claiming the power to illegally kill several people arbitrarily is necessarily much more of a problem than claiming you can kill one personal illegally under a highly constrained set of circumstances. You are trying to make the point that killing even one person is wrong. That has nothing to do with the over-riding point that there are differing degrees of wrongness, and people are basically right to react to them.

 

I posted about this in the Supreme Court thread; namely, under “absolute immunity” Biden could simply order the arrest of the conservative members of the Court on various charges, including murder from the Heller and Dobbs decisions.

 

I admit that under socialism I would probably be following the norms and that maybe someone more revolutionary than me wouldn't consider the norms anything more than sophistry. However I wouldn't be ignoring a leader doing something wrong just because they otherwise follow the norms of socialist society.

I don't know which thread I criticized this in, but I was against Xi getting a third term, not because the norm was to not do so, but because as someone who wants China to succeed I think you shouldn't fix what isn't broken, and here's a thing that was already working just fine: two terms while the party gets a successor ready.