Not that anyone particularly cares about original meaning, but think folks should still say it out loud: For all of the things that are unclear in the founding documents and unknowabilities of what the Founders intended, "the President can kill anyone or commit a coup" was *never* legally arguable
Like there's a lot they were not especially clear about, and all sorts of reasons where we shouldn't tie our own future to their past. But "Kings are bad; the President is not a King; he must be constrained by law" is one of the few things they were, to their credit, very clear about
I want back every fucking moment of my life that I was made to listen to them lecture on and on and on and on and on about Obama and his executive orders and “presidents aren’t kings”
I feel like my takeaways from No More Kings were… not the same as Roberts et al
(Also, hadn’t watched this in ages but George is rather Trumpy
youtu.be/wBTd2jSB2mM?...
ISTR seeing some commentary that we almost crowned our own George anyway.
The version I saw was that, interestingly, despite his ambition to lead the Revolutionary Army, he really didn't want the title, and seriously they weren't going to pick anyone else to be the head of state instead.
Ah, well, turns out some people got hyperfocused on the not paying taxes part of the kerfuffle and didn't actually think monarchism was all that bad, just in need of a dusting and a little paint.
Britain was in the middle of abolishing slavery, and the American Revolution was about avoiding that. "Kings are bad" was just written in to make things look better.
And describing this as “making the president a king” and “we fought a war about this” is itself wrong, because the England we broke away from had already established that the *king* is not above the law! They fought a whole war about it 150 years earlier!
Like, just do a diff with the previous version, folks. "Our new system is mostly the British system we had before, except, just to be really very clear: (1) absolutely under no circumstances have a state religion and (2) no Kings" is like ... arguably the two biggest and most central ideas they had.
And all this in the context where the prior (at least) 5 centuries of British history can roughly be understood as a struggle to put constraints and accountability on the throne.
How generous of you to consider their "originalist" viewpoint as sincere rather than something that at the time conveniently lined up with their undisclosed priorities.
Yea, a lotta problems with the Constitution that’d be nice to fix, but this isn’t one of them. This is a problem with the court, and can only be fixed by fixing the court.
There could have been an article that read “The President is subject to all the laws passed by Congress, even for his Official Acts, regardless of what future people named Roberts might think”, and this court would’ve reached the same conclusion
In fact, this case has me down on Constitutional Amendments as a manner of constraining this court.
They won’t be constrained. They must be neutralized
