idk it just seems to me that laws, like tech, should be created with the question "what would the worst person i know be able to do with this power" in mind and it's truly incredible how much this opinion fails at that basic task
John Roberts must be the most neurotypical person in existence because the immunity ruling reads like someone who has never had a single “but what if…???” anxiety spiral in his life
They don't even need to imagine!
The individual literally named in the case is one of the worst people on the planet. He's got a track record of doing or attempting some of the worst shit imaginable. This isn't some distant hypothetical!
They’re fine with it because they think they’re actually in charge. For supposed fans of history they don’t seem to be familiar with the precedents here.
Their own hypotheticals were all "but what if a future president needs to do these terrible things" -- they see Trump as normative, a usable wall against those horrible Democrats who want to empower the poor and unwashed.
they don't think a Democrat will be President again
or, the federal judiciary will be there to stop him
or in the worst case scenario, the SCOTUS will remain dominated by conservatives.
Yup. The GOP SCOTUS knows what an evil person would do with the power, and they carefully wrote the opinion to:
1) Excuse Republicans who will gleefully break the law, such as Trump.
2) Retain the looming threat of punishment against Democrats.
Win-win.
To me it's if anything more simple. As Stafford Beer said: "A system is not defined by rules, but by how they are enforced." The GOP has been demonstrating my entire life that they don't care what law says, only how it can be used for their advantage. Dems have consistently ignored that dynamic.
Right even if the opinion were not so open-ended as to make the observer effect dispositive, they would just change the rules when they needed to anyway.
The ruling makes it possible for a President to be a mad king (they can take bribes, run death squads, can do any horrific act personally) but doesn't make it possible for them to be a technocratic dictator (can't tell a factory how much to pollute, except by using death squads to punish its boss).
The degree to which recent Court decisions represent an ideological partnership whose decisions are to be relied upon by like-minded executives is quite striking. It's as if the umpire gave the home team longer bats.
If Dems finish with a trifecta, they are still going to be faced with "does the President have the power to call bullshit on SCOTUS?" We are fast approaching an "Andrew Jackson But Good" moment, even if we avoid a "we couldn't keep a Republic" moment.
