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
@volkris @Hyolobrika @AltonDooley that is simply not true. absolute immunity is not distinguished by lawful or unlawful actions. there’d be no reason for that. no one needs immunity for lawful actions. prosecutors are explicitly enjoined from even *inquiring* into whether “official acts” are motivated in order to break the law. for “conclusive and preclusive” official acts, including commanding the military + providing pardons, immunity is absolute and automatic.
you misunderstood the decision.
@Geoffberner @LouisIngenthron unfortunately there is an explanation that reconciles competence and clinging, if they are selfish. 30% chance of everything is better than a 100% chance of nothing, from a pure personal influence perspective.
mostly i think highly of the Bidenistas, so i am skeptical of this rather terrible view. but the better they play diehard—even if it’s a negotiating tactic and ultimately wise—the harder it becomes, from the outside, to keep the faith.
@LouisIngenthron @Geoffberner yes. my view exactly. but that makes it all very nerve wracking from the outside, it’s impossible to distinguish potential fatal pigheadedness from potentially wise mastery of the process.
@barrkel yeah, it was more a prescriptive than descriptive claim.
@LouisIngenthron @Geoffberner i agree, but we can’t sustain cohesive parties in a two party system. the electorate has more to express than only two parties can sustainably stick to. in the moment, i agree with you it’d be better if we had a strong party that could change inadequate management to advance a virtuous underlying agenda. but we don’t, and can’t in a two party system, unless we really insulate the parties from the fractious public very bad for different reasons).
@Geoffberner @LouisIngenthron a good electoral system is not based on a consumer-choice style evaluate-service-then-fire-the-bastards. what the state does is what we collectively do, not what someone else does whom we just fire. our electoral system does encourage that metaphor, so yes, a better world gets constantly destroyed because it’s susceptible to ugly oppo or is not adequately sold.
@Geoffberner no, i don't think so at all. i think what makes this so painful is, regardless of the state of the President himself, the group of people who surround him think (with some justice!) they are doing a great job, and understand the band would be broken up, and they personally would be unlikely to have roles nearly so influential, if there were a switch of marionettes. they, i think, are all in unless/until loss becomes nearly certain.
In the US, we don't elect political parties (now famously "hollow"). And we don't elect the man, or the woman. Even in Congress, but especially as President, the job is far above the capability or judgment of one person, however old or young.
What we elect when we elect a person is that person's friends, who will become staff, advisors, appointees.
Whatever you think of the person, what matters is the people they will place around them. We choose not so much the puppet as the puppeteers.
Text: Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies, and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term have themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference.
@franktaber@mas.to so your view is simply the Democratic primary should be determinative? (counterarguments might include that new information or new debility undermines the legitimacy of that primary, or that it deserves little deference because “the field was cleared” for the incumbent. not endorsing any of these in particular. i find the current situation miserably difficult.)
@franktaber@mas.to in what sense?
@Alon Harris is included in Other, I promise!
2024 Democratic nominee should be
However poorly Biden performed at that debate (and he was embarrassing), debates are theater. However ill equipped the Democratic Party is to provide an heir apparent — and they are embarrassingly unprepared for this predictable eventuality - their dysfunction is not the clear and present danger. The Supreme Court's decision on presidential immunity is a harbinger of not just the court's growing power but of Democrats' inability to mount a populist defense. This conservative bloc on the court reflects years of undemocratic political maneuvering, from Mitch McConnell stealing a seat to the political activism of Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas. Their decisions are not only codifying minority interests, they are a show of strength for a Republican Party that has no intention of ever ceding power to majority will again. If you take your eye off the ball of democracy for any length of time, no amount of history will save you. Americans have taken our eyes off the ball. I have not wanted to make that call.
Do we really need judicial review? See Nikolas Bowie https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Bowie-SCOTUS-Testimony.pdf
// I feel like the upsides of judicial review are given shirt shrift. Miranda rights, gay marriage, until recently abortion rights all derive from judicial review. Reading this piece, you’d think the only minority rights the Court ever protected were rights of the wealthy. But in a post-Roe world with a weaponized Supreme Court legalizing corruption and authoritarianism, judicial review is becoming hard to defend.
