It also has the annoying law professor's law-as-abstraction thing going on: supposing judges will still let you out, how long do you sit in jail waiting for your hearing, how much is your life wrecked?
It's better to tell Presidents that they can't do bad things before they try, not after.
The "Oh, it'll be okay, you can go to court and the judge will fix everything" attitude is out-of-touch and callous to the harms people endure even under the best circumstances. Kinda pisses me off. Would like to know how long the professor would be willing to sit in jail to have his day in court.
This all gets back to how SCOTUS has screwed all of this up and gotten it completely backwards: we in fact do want Presidents to be worried about getting second-guessed in the courts and at the polls, and to worry about being prosecuted and/or impeached. Immunity should be limited if it even exists.
In all holiness, this.
WHY THE FUCK DO PRESIDENTS NEED TO BREAK THE LAW?
People seem to assume they must because of some misguided notion of "realism". If Presidents need to break the law to do their jobs, it's bad law and they should try like anyone else to get the law changed. This is not hard.
...and I realize, arguably, this has just happened, but now the law says, "Everything the President officially does is beyond the reach of the law," which is, in fact, the opposite of changing law. It's just law's nullification.
in software development, when you're trying to get your thing to work, one often turns off security features that might be in the way. It can be tempting to ship it that way and call it good.
Sysadmins and security engineers hate this for obvious reasons. It's bad design & creates vulnerabilities.
In the present instance, it's hard to see how trying to overturn election results is part of a President's official duties, but one of the implications of the Court's decision is that the President is immune to repercussions from unlawful acts that are more clearly within the scope of official acts.
Continuing the historical example, one might argue that the President is constitutionally CIC and Congress is exceeding their prerogative if they attempt to limit POTUS' ability to deploy bombers, but SCOTUS just held that there's no effective way to review that other than impeachment.
Which seems problematic, especially since the Impeachment Clause says that impeachment doesn't attach jeopardy to possibly illegal acts, and SCOTUS has effectively nullified that clause by holding there's effectively no way to prosecute a President regardless.
However, "investigating" the integrity of the vote is well within the DOJ (Executive)'s purview, and it would be irresponsible for a President to relinquish office while that investigation is ongoing, in the same way one doesn't make one's tax returns public while they're under audit.
