it says a great deal that roberts has time in his majority opinion to mock the dissents for their "tone of chilling doom" but can't actually manage to rebut this hypo. because he can't
also, the order to have the rival killed is itself an official act (directing the military, commander in chief power) so you can't introduce evidence of that even if you could somehow find a way to prosecute the assassination
The only light at the end of the tunnel for every version of this hypo, and it is a very dim one, involves that president doing the act, being charged anyway after leaving office, the government losing on TvUS grounds but appealing it back up to SCOTUS anyway, and them overruling it
What if current President decided his appointment power means he determines what constitutes “good behaviour”, takes the official act of removing 3 members of the Supreme Court for federal judicial ethics violations, and on appeal the remaining SCOTUS reconsiders absolute immunity?
Sure seems like if Biden really wants to prevent future presidents from doing this his best bet is to do it himself first and have SCOTUS rule against him...
It’s legitimately mind blowing that SCOTUS sought to protect Presidents from political prosecution while simultaneously giving them license to perform endless political prosecutions of all candidates to the office.
the most disturbing thing about the Roberts court isn’t that they’re partisan hacks (though they obviously are, and it sucks) but that they are actual morons with big vocabularies and expensive taste in wine
The opinion wasn't written to clarify things for the lower courts based on a good faith interpretation of Constitution (which they swore to uphold). It was written to "legally" undo Constitutional limits on the president that are the bedrock of our system. By making accountability extraordinarily...
2/... time consuming, unclear, difficult, and vulnerable to routine reinterpretation by SCOTUS. This was an overreach, as you cannot IMO alter the Constitution this significantly without a legislative process.
he mocks the dissent because of course they can always make up a rule to avoid some absurd or universally undesired outcome (framing the dissent as overwrought, despite the merits), but this ruling bolsters their power not to in order to achieve a desired end result.
another power play
