Immunity doesn't mean that the courts will actually treat the action as valid. Just that Biden wouldn't be prosecuted. A court can turn around and say no, the student debt remains owing
It can't unshoot a protester
no, you order those records destroyed too, and you use the national guard or the us marshals. people are simply not imaginative. threaten to take the shareholder's money if they put up a fight. and you just have to make it hard and unpopular for the next president to feel the pain.
I don't think it is logisitically possible for even a fully federalized National Guard to destroy most records of student loan debt in the US before a court issued an injunction to stop it
Like, this is something where the timeframe between issuing the order and it getting ruled unconstitutional by a hostile SCOTUS (or even a circuit court) is measured in hours
Injunction, inshmunction! Sure, defying an injuction is a crime… but the SC has ruled the President can crime freely, and has unlimited power to pardon anyone else.
Okay, but the President can't go around destroying records on his own, he has to order people to do that, people who swore an oath to reject illegal orders
And if they break that oath, he will pardon them so they face no penalty.
The SC was quite thorough in making sure there are no practical, enforceable limits on Presidential power. They gamble Biden won’t use it as they hope and know Trump will.
Biden must call that bluff.
SCOTUS doesn't believe Biden won't use them, they simply know they can overturn those limits whenever they want to. None of the words they write on paper mean anything because they can always write new ones.
If SCOTUS ruled that the President can actually shoot anyone he wants and then Biden shot someone, they would immediately rule that actually in this case the President shooting someone is illegal for reasons they make up on the spot.
Yes.
I think the argument that the SCOTUS decision on Presidential immunity means that all the laws get thrown out and the President just does whatever he wants are overblown to nearly the point of insanity, are irrational doomerism, and people need to take a walk and touch some grass.
The SCOTUS decision was outrageous and an insult to both the Constitution and the reasons the nation was filed in the first place. But it does not make the President's acts un-illegal. It also does not grant other people immunity to carry them out, or restrict the courts from blocking them.
If you want to argue that Trump or Republicans are going to take it to that kind of extreme, that's fine. They may even try to do that in some cases. And it may be difficult to stop them.
But that's them seizing power and becoming tyrants in ways far beyond anything this decision empowers.
To put it very bluntly:
If they are going to do those things, they were always going to do them. The possibility of the President being prosecuted after (and, based on prior precedent, ONLY after) leaving office was never going to be a sufficient restraint to stop that.
I don't think that's right. Trump's criminal prosecution, had it not been hindered and obstructed by SCOTUS, might have significantly reduced the likelihood that he might reoffend as President of the United States.
My counterpoint is that it sends an extremely clear message that SCOTUS, and only SCOTUS, gets to decide what can be prosecuted, and that they are on the fascist's side.
But that's happened his entire life -- no negative consequences. And now he's been pre-blessed to continue that.
So, yeah -- it doesn't mean POTUS can start shooting people without consequence. It doesn't mean Biden can order a political assassination.
But... it does mean SCOTUS has said that they *will* put their feet on the scales in his favor in the future.
Are you downplaying what happened since 2000? Violating principles of majority rule and the constitution. Stealing the Gore election (and 2 Supreme Court seats), stealing the Obama SCOTUS nomination in 2016. Now a rock solid SCOTUS majority will do everything to solidify RW power grab.
Yes, I think some of it is overblown, and some of it is downplayed.
This should still be dominating the news cycles instead of Bidens age.
But I also think this is a pretty big slide down the slope. This isn't the bottom of the pit, but we are closer to it.
This decision is awful. But its awfulness is mostly because of principle & symbolism & what the kids call "vibes" rather than direct practical effects. It's what it will encourage Trump to do, rather than what, strictly speaking, it allows him to do, that worries me.
The actual direct effect is to fuck up the Trump prosecutions. That's bad, but unless it's the factor that causes him to win the election, the damage to the country is limited.
I don't think POTUSes have restrained themselves for fear of prosecution, so it's hard to say immunity will change much.
"The damage to the country is limited" is only true if you think Democrats are going to win every future election going forward, for there is no shortage of corrupt Republicans with authoritarian eyes on the Executive.
This👆
But it is an awful decision that I predict will sit next to decisions like Koramatsu and Plessy. A nadir for the Court, and a stain on this nation.
Beyond that, and looking and the entire course the Court took to reach this point, it's also a decision that betrays profound moral cowardice.
/2
Put another way, the Court took every reasonable step to slow this case down so it wouldn't have to decide anything hard until *after* November's election.
Even here, by remanding the case for special just-for-Trump fact findings at the trial level
/cont.
/3
The Court has guaranteed it will not have to grapple with the actual facts of Trump's Jan. 6-related conduct until either:
(a) Trump loses—in which case they won't face his ire as President and can behave more rationally; or
/4
(b) Trump wins, in which case they've given themselves infinite made-up Calvinball rules of evidence to deny a lower court finding that Trump wasn't acting in his official capacity when he tried to overthrow the Republic.
The moral cowardice is just breathtaking!
/5
It's even worse b/c this is the kind of decision that only happens if the Court knows Biden isn't going abuse his near-legal immunity to commit blatant crimes.
What is your view on how permanent this sort of ruling could be? Like if Joe Biden did something that this ruling *did* cover would SCOTUS overturning their own ruling to have him prosecuted be plausible?
The AUMF makes ordering assassinations an “official act”. Until now, a President might be constrained by the idea there could be criminal charges for doing so for corrupt reasons. But now, there is no mechanism to prove such corruption, if everything is done “officially”.
