If the Supreme Court has legalized tyranny, is it dumb to risk holding an election and giving their guy the opportunity to indefinitely suspend them when your guy has the scepter and the opportunity now?
This is the kind of dilemma the Supreme Court has just interpreted into the US Constitution.
No windows were broken in the US Capitol. But today was the coup. The rest is just events, unless we dethrone this court and reverse today's madness soon.
lol
Braindead takes like this are what truly make me want to disengage from politics, they're far more depressing than what our government is actually doing
@realcaseyrollins our government is doing fine. our Supreme Court has torn away the guard rails that help insist it will continue to do so.
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@Hyolobrika they've made the President immune from prosecution for any and everything that might colorably be described as an "official act". so, if a President were to unilaterally declare that, due to say a pandemic, any Federal election must be delayed, and orders enforcement of that edict, even if courts agree it would be illegal, he could not be prosecuted, while President, or after (if there is any after). an official act can be illegal still, but the President can't be prosecuted.
@kentwillard they are, if they continually elect incumbents. turn-taking is non-negotiable if you want any governance system that is not the mere oppression of some factions by others. the US two-term limit is fantastic, or at least it was while Presidents still had to respect it.
As I said in my previous post, there is a solution to this. The Congress can pass a Federal executive liability after that explicitly lays out the situations under which the president would be criminally liable for actions that they make as the executive. There are already examples of Congress doing this such as 1983 civil rights claims and the Federal civil tort claims act.
If the concern is that Donald Trump is going to do something that bad, then Congress and Senate could get together with Democrats ans some never Trumpers pass such an act, and get Joe Biden to sign it. If Joe Biden won't sign it, then create a bipartisan law with broader support that gets supermajority, and force the president to sign it.
Of course, this is all political theatre so nobody will even try to pass such a law.
In the UK there's also specific immunity regarding the monarch.
Besides that, it turns out there's a huge swath of immunity for the king or queen as a private citizen: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/14/queen-immunity-british-laws-private-property
The United States is different in that the head of state is the head of the government, and so I can see where a discrepancy between the two may arise.
The United States also has blanket immunity itself, which is a different question, and different countries state apparatus do or do not indemnify themselves.
Japan's supreme court recently claimed they have no power over the Emperor, suggesting sovereign immunity.
Australia notably does not have sovereign immunity, and their laws list which statutes do and do not apply to the crown.
India has an elected head of state in its president, and that president has immunity for the term of presidency written into the constitution, but that ends once the term ends.
So it seems like there's a lot of variability, suggesting the US could go either way under normal circumstances.
I think right now there's a problem that the US is on the verge of civil war, so we aren't in normal circumstances. Having the absolute sovereign immunity for actions taken in an official capacity I think might help throw a little water on the lawfare we're constantly seeing. If this decision went the other way, I don't see any reason to think we wouldn't see charges up against Biden, Obama, and Clinton in short order, and that it doesn't matter what you think about them, that would be a bad thing.
Having to come up with legislation, particularly bipartisan legislation, to limit such immunity, might actually be good -- it'll help set the ground rules and ensure there's accountability on one side, but that people aren't trying to figure out arbitrary rules before they've even been set on the other.
> our Supreme Court has torn away the guard rails that help insist it will continue to do so.
Who told you that?
