There are two elements to the immunity decision that are particularly extreme in a way that many will miss: (1) motive is irrelevant and (2) immune acts are not just excluded from prosecution, they’re excluded from evidence.
/1
/2 Motive being irrelevant means that the President can do a thing for expressly lawless reasons so long as the thing is within the extremely broad range of official acts. So question isn’t “can the President conspire to defraud,” it’s “can the President call a state official about an election.”
/3 The problem is that almost anything can be shoehorned into an official act depending on how you characterize it or the level of generality you use. The Court’s “well of course a President has to use due care that election laws are enforced” hints at this.
/4 More powerful, to a trial lawyer, is the prohibition on the use of immune acts as evidence. In almost every other context (save Speech & Debate), you can use things as evidence when you can’t prosecute for them. If I say “this man must die,” that’s usually protected by the First Amendment ….
/5 …but it’s obvious that my statement can be introduced as evidence if I’m accused of murder.
Contrast this type of Presidential immunity. Say Donald Trump, days into his second term, meets with the Department of Justice and demands a way to deport all Muslims, reviling them as subhuman.
/6 Later Trump orders a staff member at Mar-A-Lago to kill a Muslim employee, possibly by serving him the food. Under the Court’s rule, even assuming that ordering Mar-A-Lago to kill people is unofficial conduct (not 100% clear), Trump’s anti-Muslim tirade to the AG would be inadmissible at trial.
/7 Justice Roberts smug and superior dismissal of the dissents’ concerns seems to come to us via time warp from some time that never knew Trump. The danger of lawlessness he poses are manifest — he and his followers brag of them. Only a liar or fool would dismiss them.
/8 At any rate, congratulations to the Federalist Society for an achievement beyond the reach of the British, outside the grasp of bloody civil war, impossible to Nazis and Soviets and terrorists: defeating the American idea.
So can’t Biden now, as an official act, render Trump ineligible to run? Strip him of citizenship? Do anything that will force Republicans, for a change, to waste time in court fighting the very powers they just ‘won’?
The nebulousness around "official" acts also allows the SC to set themselves up as the ultimate arbiters of what is or isn't official. Meaning that anything Trump does can be stamped "official" and anything Biden does won't enjoy the same protection.
SCOTUS never thinks of the collateral damage. Imagine being an American lawyer living in England & interacting with English lawyers & having to explain this. It's going to be hell for me. But does John Roberts think about that? Selfish bastard.
I literally cried at that statement
Do they not understand they destroyed our country as we understand it? 3 days before independence day they extinguished the beacon
Under these rules, could Biden bomb the Republican National Convention citing an imminent terrorist threat and cite national security to not disclose any further details?
www.whitehouse.gov/contact/share/
I feel like we should all write to biden, and suggest things he can do with his new shiney supreme court ordained powers.
Like arresting Alito and Thomas as an official act.
Biden needs to wipe out the entire Federalist society, throw the fascist justices in Gitmo, take out Trump/Flynn/Stone/Bannon/Miller... so many tasks to do now!
With McDonnell v Virginia, with the official [corrupt] act being a requirement to show graft and corruption, how DOES that impact being able to prosecute any case of bribery or graft in the executive branch that the president even tacitly sanctions?
They continue to try to “fix” what happened with Nixon. They all think he was weak and quit when he should have fought. This is the manifestation of that fight 50 years later.
Not quite ready to cede that to those fascist fucks. There’s always been a large contingent of fascists in this country. They’ve just always had enough power they never felt threatened. We will just have to deal with them now or else they’ll blow the whole thing up.
