@volkris @Hyolobrika @AltonDooley This case *explicitly* grants *absolute* immunity to Presidents for their compelling a justice department to engage in prosecutions, political, malicious, or otherwise.
It does not protect civilians at all, other than the President himself, and those the President pardons.
If Joe Biden hates your grandma and tell Merrick Garland to throw the full weight of the Justice Department into finding dirt to lock her up, the decision IMMUNIZES Biden for that conduct.
@volkris @Hyolobrika @AltonDooley
No. Courts must always throw out cases that are on their face "invalid (malicious or otherwise faulty)". The problem is, when a lawsuit or prosecution occurs, there is often a dispute over whether a suit is "invalid (malicious or otherwise faulty)". 1/
@volkris @Hyolobrika @AltonDooley Courts then must inquire into the dispute as a factual matter.
Immunity is quite distinct.
"The essence of immunity 'is its possessor’s entitlement
not to have to answer for his conduct' in court."
That's John Roberts, from the decision. That is quite distinct from saying Courts must examine a prosecution in any way at all, and dismiss the bad ones. It says Courts have no business examining or evaluating an allegation at all. That is what immunity means. /fin
@volkris read the effing decision. i have read all 119 pages.
the phrase "invalid prosecution" DOES NOT APPEAR.
you are making that up. you are lying, i think not out of malice, but out of hope and misinformation, but i have informed and informed you so it starts to seem just like a lie.
you have eyes and a brain. read.
@volkris @Hyolobrika @AltonDooley my god you are wrong. you might think Trump's prosecution's are malicious or not, whatever. but this is not a narrowly tailored decision that would only affect malicious prosecutions. it is explicitly immunity, explicitly even for acts that are alleged to be, and might prove to be if examined, unlawful.
I read the news about France today and I was like "maybe we should move to France". On the hellsite "French Jews" is trending with lots of panicked tweets saying everybody's got to leave. Whatever Jews are (I frankly have no fucking idea), we are not a homogenous minority! I'd feel much safer now in France than I would in Israel, or in a United States should Donald Trump win the kingship John Roberts has just crafted for him. Vive la France!
"Rather bemusingly, the report uses the terms 'democratic', and 'free' as factual labels (as opposed to reflecting perceptions) to refer to the Freedom House classification of countries. This follows the convention of referring to [Western] expert opinions as scientific fact, while delegating people’s perceptions of their governments to mere opinion." #YoramGat https://equalitybylot.com/2024/07/06/democracy-perception-index/
@marick I don't disagree with anything that you've written. We can sit back, from a distance, and say, well, the Etruscans fell because their culture was suffused with a playfulness and passivity that rendered them vulnerable to Romans' vigor.
(Note: I am just making shit up. I know nothing about the Etruscans. Just an example.) 1/
@marick But when we speak of the present, our words are not merely descriptive, referential. They are instrumental. They have consequences. 2/
@marick If, a thousand years from now, historians look back upon deep cultural factors within the US, like some unconscious reflex towards slavery dooming us to oscillations between repression and internal violence, great. That might (I hope not!) turn out to be the best, most accurate history. 3/
@marick But in the present, history is ours to make, and that history is one we should strive not to. We can morally entertain the hypothesis that the US is still culturally a slave state only if in the next breath we are considering how to use that hypothesis to remedy things. It's certainly no good to be in denial about what is difficult and deep in our culture. 4/
@marick But, if in any sort of public comment you say some awful result is down to the character or nature of the electorate and leave it there, what have you offered? I'll tell you. You've offered an apology, and excuse, for all of those among us who engage and have agency, and especially for people in power who don't do so poorly under the electorate's putative deficiencies. 5/
@marick Public attributions of causality are not academic musings. They are interventions. They are a form of political action. If this was the voice of the people, implicitly what you are advocating is *shrug*. If it was an artifact of the electoral system by which the voice of the people was constituted, then of as constituted the voice of the people seems bad, then you are arguing for electoral reform. 6/
@marick There is in fact no definitive voice of the people. There is no such thing as "the culture" or "deep roots". These are things we conjecture, project, might have some degree of reality in social consequences, but the extent of that degree is unknowable. 7/
@marick Every time "the voters" or "the culture" done it is your simplification, you are not saying anything meaningfully true (or false). You are excusing yourself, and people in power, attributing causality to something as inexorable as the tide to facts and events which in fact are social constructions which institutions and influential individuals have tremendous capacity to shape. 8/
@marick Yesterday I had the very painful experience of listening to Sarah Isgur's take on Trump v. United States. She is among the worst of the "blame the voters" pundits, she does it all the time. 9/
@marick Don't like Trump? Has nothing to do with an electoral system that reliably and predictably yields unpopular choices. That's who the voters vote for! Don't like a paralyzed Congress made of buffoons who seek the spotlight and performative cultural controversy rather than legislating? That's who the voters vote for! 10/
@marick The institutional context that in fact is malleable — single-winner, first-past-the-post elections that create an electoral binary that encourages negative partisanship; extensive partisan gerrymandering — all elided. "Ultimately responsibility has to lie with the voters". Responsibility *cannot* rely with "the voters". "The voters" are not an entity to which agency and accountability attach. It's like blaming atoms for the temperature. 11/
@marick Our job, as politically engaged people, is to create context and circumstances under which voters as they are provide information in ways our institutions will use to make decisions that are high-quality and virtuous and will continue to support voter support. 12/
@marick That last is a constraint for institution-builders, not a question for citizens. Voters don't meaningfully choose collapse or revolutions. It's motherfuckers like us who engage and fail (or worse, engage mischievously) who are to blame when those events occur. 13/
@marick Isgur — I want to vent — gave the ultimate Take. We should not be so upset about the Trump v. United States. When countries collapse to authoritarianism, she say, the whole system gives way. It's not because the judiciary fails to hold the government to account. She describes it as just a kind of... poof! So eliminating accountability for the US' executive isn't a big deal. It wouldn't be the dealbreaker, right? 14/
@marick This isn't exactly the same as a "the voters done it" claim, but it's isomorphic, parallel. Here we have a very specific institutional restructuring that obviously might contribute to enabling authoritarianism, for which specific people — whom Isgur knows! has worked with! her friends! — are responsible. 15/
@marick The political coalition she belongs to benefits from *not* understanding accountability in an institutional and accountable way. (Because they are the institutions that would be reformed, and many of the people that should be held accountable!) 16/
@marick So what does she do? She tells "deep" facially plausible stories about how we should understand social causality that remove agency and responsibility from people and institutions with actual agency. She does not *want* virtuous reforms (at least her career-masters do not), so her business is constructing explanations for social affairs that sound wise but occlude the possibility of reform. 17/
@marick Yesterday's story was not exactly "blame the voters". But it's parallel, and her goto. She hoists responsibility on the voters all the time, even though there's no plausible way to treat voters *en masse* as any kind of responsible agent. 18/
@marick I'd ask you to pay attention to how "it's the voters" or "it's something deep in our culture" actually gets used in public discussion. Some of it is just a bromide by idiots employed to write columns who've nothing useful to say. But much of it is quite canny. It's neoliberalism's TINA, there's nothing to be done, it's not my or my political coalition's fault, it's the voters. That's the right-tilted version. 19/
@marick There's a left-tilted version, just as bad, that says the fault is the public's, so a revolution against the public's interest, even an oppression of the public, some authoritarianism is justified, because if you gave "the public" what it "wants", it would want bad things. 20/
@marick No version of this rhetoric, except a very provisional "let's-understand-what-might-be-hard" while we are addressing institutions without blaming voters, is useful or wise. And nothing in social affairs is "true" in the sense we must defer to it even if deferring to it would yield bad consequences. /fin
@jenzi The Supreme Court pretty clearly extended the shield of "official acts" around all conversations within an administration, and does not permit any inquiry into the motivations for those acts. I don't think this Supreme Court was considering precedent, except as raw material from which to form precisely the collage they decided to produce for other reasons.
@Johnhurley (i thought it an interestingly poetic use of "laptop" that i didn't quite understand, but the gist was clear!)
A great irony of Trump v. United States:
The "steelman" proposition is that it's intended to deter politically motivated malicious prosecution. But the decision *explicitly underlines* the President's authority to and absolute immunity for encouraging or compelling malicious prosecutions.
Text, from the majority holding in Trump v. United States: The Executive Branch has “exclusive authority and absolute discretion” to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute, including with respect to allegations of election crime. Nixon, 418 U. S., at 693. And the President’s “management of the Executive Branch” requires him to have “unrestricted power to remove the most important of his subordinates”—such as the Attorney General—“in their most important duties.” Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 750. The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were shams or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials. Because the Presi- dent cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitu- tional authority, Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials. Pp. 19-21.
Henry Kissinger: "The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer."
US Supreme Court: The Executive branch needs more immunity.
france provides a glimmer of hope during a deeply hopeless time.
@sliminality i don’t understand why we don’t just ban the practice.
@isomorphismes maybe. emigration is not a small thing, and my options are much narrower than they once were. this decision has thrown me personally, and indirectly my family, into a state of great insecurity, much more than anything that happened during Trump’s presidency. i didn’t really think it was Germany 1933 then. i do now. my urgency does depend on the outcome of the presidential election too. a Democratic administration might expand the court and fix this.
@volkris @Hyolobrika @AltonDooley Courts can and should absolutely throw out a malicious prosecution upon first contact. Usually there is an immediate motion by the defense to dismiss, have it thrown out because the prosecution lacks basis. All of us have the right to make such a motion, and any judge has a right to rule in favor of the defense and the case is over. That’s ordinary in criminal law. No immunity required.
@volkris It does not! What do you think “absolute immunity” means?
@volkris @Hyolobrika @AltonDooley again, you are just wrong on the facts. if a person is being prosecuted for something not illegal, the remedy is acquittal, not immunity. 1/
@volkris @Hyolobrika @AltonDooley there is nothing about this decision we can democratically change. the Supreme Court has declared absolute immunity for exercise of the President’s “conclusive and preclusive” powers part of the Constitution itself (defying history and literacy to do so). they have not conditioned this immunity on the exercise being otherwise legal. only the Supreme Court itself or a Constitutional amendment can undo this. 2/
@volkris @Hyolobrika @AltonDooley There is absolutely an automatic “get out of jail card” here. Not for all of the current Trump prosecutions, because some of what he’s being prosecuted for are arguably not “official acts”, and not “conclusive and preclusive” official acts. Trump’s prosecutions are now extraordinarily unlikely to succeed, but they can continue. But future Presidents have a clear map of how to act illegally without consequence. 3/
@volkris @Hyolobrika @AltonDooley this decision is not at all what a Supreme Court would have done if its concern was reigning in politically motivated prosecution while retaining an accountable executive. in its own words, it places as ensuring “energetic”, “unhesitating” executive above any concerns about accountability. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/07/05/if-the-issue-was-the-lawfare/index.html /fin
Just a reminder that, since July 1, 2024, if you live in the United States you no longer live in a liberal democracy. You live in a tyranny.
For the moment you live under a tyrant who happens not to be much of a brute. Don’t worry, though. As John Roberts enthused, sooner or later you’ll have a President who is “energetic”, “unhesitating”.
From a brilliant essay by @radleybalko on John Roberts' coup. Read the whole thing. https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-supreme-court-folds ht @ryanlcooper
Text: The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States is its worst decision of my lifetime. John Roberts’s sloppy, arrogant, contradictory majority opinion provides license for any future president to lie, cheat, steal, suppress dissent, and — if they have the stomach for it — assassinate. It obliterates a guardrail for executive power that’s fundamental to a functioning democracy. So fundamental, in fact, that until the country elected an aspiring autocrat brazen enough to engage in open-air corruption, it was a guardrail few thought necessary to actually define. Of course the president can be prosecuted for actual crimes. When Trump initially made his claim of “absolute immunity” for presidents from criminal charges, it was widely derided among constitutional scholars as a hopeless Hail Mary. Then John Roberts answered Trump’s prayers. This opinion isn’t a stain on Roberts’s legacy. It is his legacy. He will be remembered as the “institutionalist” who destroyed the legitimacy of the institution entrusted to his care. And if that’s the worst of the damage, we’ll all be lucky.
@marick This was largely intended for you, I thought replying to the thread would catch you, but it seems it may not have? Sorry! https://zirk.us/@interfluidity/112742768514714841
