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AOC wants to impeach SCOTUS justices following Trump immunity ruling
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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I'm a little confused. Isn't their ruling just a deferral back to lower courts?
They didn't grant him absolute immunity, they just reaffirmed the incredibly broad language in Article II Section 3 of the Constitution.
They're not giving him immunity for everything he did as president, they just aren't interested in being the authority that decides what is or isn't an "official act". They are letting lower courts decide that.
If there's something I'm missing here, I would love to know, but it feels like people are misunderstanding this decision en masse.
How do you square your take with the dissenting judges that say it effectively makes the president king?
I guess I just don't understand Sotomayor's response. She says that Trump got the immunity he asked for, but that's not true. He was asking for everything he did as president to be considered an "official act", and they deferred to the lower courts.
It doesn't appear that anything actually changed. I am assuming I am wrong on that, but none of the articles I have read so far have answered that question. There are just a lot of assertions that he was granted absolute immunity, which doesn't match the language of the court's opinion.
I would have preferred that they draw a line on specific acts not being considered "official acts", especially as we draw the line between Trump's presidency and his 2020 reelection campaign. I'm just not seeing a lot of honest discourse as to what this decision actually means from a legal perspective.
Well, that's exactly the problem that has everyone up in arms here. They have made this ruling but conveniently failed to rule on what constitutes an "official" act. Therefore whenever a major ruling has to be done about this, they can decide at that time whether an act was official or not based on what flavor of president they're ruling for or against, and until then the lower courts can take the heat off the SCOTUS directly by just ruling that everything Trump has ever done is legal because he was president once.
It's a very transparently partisan ruling, setting the stage for further partisan ruling in the future by being extremely vague about what their ruling actually is. This ruling boils down to "the president is allowed to do anything he wants when we say so, and is subject to rule of law only when we say so, and whether we say so will be determined after the acts in question." In this way the conservative-packed supreme court can easily enable a conservative president or trap a liberal one.
What it does set up though is an official legal stand to say that the supreme Court gets to decide what's "official". Meaning they can decide that all Trump's actions are official and all of Biden's (or whatever dem president) are not
This was already the arrangement. That's why Trump was even at the Supreme Court. He was asking for them to decide that everything he did as president was an "official act". They gave the right to decide that back to the lower courts, where it could theoretically come back to them with a more specific set of actions that they need to decide upon.
Of course, the idea that the SCOTUS is corrupted to the point that they would protect Republicans and sabotage Democrats is a worth discussing, but that seems like a wholly different issue that we allowed the highest court in the country to be corrupted by overt partisanship.
It doesn't seem so much that the claim is that the SCOTUS gave Trump immunity, but that nobody trusts the court system to draw that line to begin with.
The American justice system works on the idea of precedence. Cases have ruling decisions and the interpretation of the law that comes from those decisions becomes law. It wasn't clear before the ruling because there was no precedent. Now the precedent that has been set that going forward, the supreme Court (currently politically motivated to the right) will have final say over whether or not a sitting or former president may be tried and prosecuted for decisions they made or actions they took in office. What would have been the correct thing to do with the least political implication (the supreme Court is meant to be free from political biases) would have been to define what actions are illegal according to the law. But they didn't want to define actions as legal or illegal, they want the ability to justify them making case by case judgements which give them the opportunity to push their aforementioned bias.
I think your confusion is warranted, because it's not clear how SCOTUS' decision is different from what the Constitution comes right out and says. On the surface, it does seem to just reaffirm what we already know, and maybe the liberal justices are just whinging.
The trick is that they did it in a way that causes a lot more work in the courts. In turn, that means Trump's trials get delayed further.
Nobody sane is going to argue that getting a hostile crowd to surround and storm the capitol while an important procedural vote is taking place is an official act of a President. But now it has to be ruled on, specifically, and that's one more thing to add to the pile before the obvious verdict can be reached.
Trump's lawyers have already filed an argument in the hush money case that certain points of evidence should be removed because they were official acts. If so, that would potentially result in a mistrial, and so the only Trump criminal case that went forward would have to be redone.
What worries me is that if is the case that the liberal justices are just whinging, then we're in even deeper shit, because that would suggest that the liberal justices are making decisions directly in the context of restraining the threat of a future Trump presidency, and that means every single member of the SCOTUS has abandoned being an impartial constitutional judge...
It allows for immunity to any "official acts" by the president while they are in office and does not define what an "unofficial" act would be. So if an action is challenged from the lower courts it'll end up at the supreme court where they will deem it official or unofficial.
Which brings the onus of dethroning a king president up to the Congress to impeach them. Which has never happened. However, we have impeached a supreme court justice in the past.
They did rule that you can't question a president about his motivations or reasons for any particular act when determining whether it was official or not. Only whether the act itself qualifies as official or not, regardless of the reason behind it.
This, to my understanding, is how things already worked. We've just never had to draw the line before because we haven't ever had to charge a former president with a crime. My understanding is that the SCOTUS refused to draw the line, not that they granted the office of president absolute immunity.
That's like letting your oldest kid do whatever he wants, and after punching your other two little kids and eating their candy you let him figure out if he should be punished and you let him punish himself.
That's pretty much what they did but that's not how it's being presented by the media so you've got 30,000,000 people all riled up and ready to riot. I would have preferred if SCOTUS found a way to definitively settle this without the Remands but I understand why they did it.
The lower court will take about an hour to decide that this stuff was "unofficial" and write the legal narrative supporting that. Hell I'd be shocked if it wasn't already done. This isn't even close to over.
I think the Dems are trying to spin this as another item in the "war for Democracy" when really it's just the SC re-affirming the constitution. It's also very conveniently timed to detract attention from the growing calls for Biden to step down after his less than ideal debate performance.
When an item gets put onto the political agenda list, it becomes polarized and if you are on Party A or Party B you immediately support or reject it based on affiliation with little thought.
They’ve had the case since December’23. Don’t spread conspiracy thinking.
This is standard campaigning strategy. If the news cycle is bad for your candidate, try to refocus the narrative. Now people aren't talking about Biden's age but the SC decision.
They're making a bigger deal about it than it actually is in order to better their chances for campaign.
I don't see the conspiracy in this, it's standard stuff.
So, the Biden administration had the majority conservative Supreme Court rule that Presidents are immune from prosecution. Obviously, Biden is hiding his power level. /s
You're not understanding me. I'm not claiming he orchestrated this decision. I'm saying his campaign is using this decision as an opportunity to deflect attention away from the concerns around his age that erupted after the debate.
Never let a good crisis go to waste and all that. Am I speaking Greek?
I suppose he’s also using Hurricane Beryl as a distraction too.
It's PR 101. I'm not making a controversial statement. Biden would be stupid not to. He has competent campaign officials.
This Supreme Court decision effectively ended democratic America, and Biden won’t get any younger.
You're not making sense
It’s a big deal. Of course Biden would rather talk about the case, it undermines the entire democracy. His age will continue to be a focus of the election, Republicans will not let it go.
I've read a couple of the majority opinions and dissenter opinions
The president already had presumptive immunity for official acts. This basically just reinforces the precedent and sets up a framework for determining official vs unofficial.
Nothing about this ruling fundamentally changes Trump's position except that he has the option of claiming he was "acting officially" for example during Jan 6th. Then it will go up to USSC and they will determine the specifics case by case
Why does it not matter as much as it seems? Because a president already had presumptive immunity for official acts before.
Yes, it's important. But it's not the end to democracy. It essentially creates a check against the executive branch by the judicial branch. And honestly, I'm OK with that considering how powerful the executive branch is.
Biden's campaigners don't care about any of that. It's their job to get people to vote. They don't care about the truth. I get it, I would do the same thing in their position.
Everybody talking about replacing you because of your terrible debate performance? Blast the "End to democracy" tagine as loud as you can so that news cycle changes.
It worked like a charm, I think it was a good strategic move
Can we also acknowledge how horrible reporting is on major cases and rulings? I've seen barely any coverage of Loper Bright and what the headlines say about it is largely inaccurate.
You're getting downvoted because Lemmy, but that's more or less how I read the ruling as well. They ruled very specifically in a way that let them punt on all the other questions these trials have created.
I'd hoped for better, but not realistically.