• 11 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • That’s a vaguely optimistic way to think about civil war, but I’m doubtful that

    1. people perpetually scared enough to find owning guns in urban environments necessary are going to disagree with the fear-mongering rhetoric a president-king invokes.

    2. owning guns translates into any sort of effective resistance

    3. it was worth killing children and civilians for decades in the hopes of an eventual opportunity to fight something

    4. civilians with their own guns won’t be choosing their own targets

    5. a sliver of power finally used to destroy a country is more important than the peaceful maintenance of representative democracy.


  • Mass executions being “barely in” the scope of presidential immunity means that even by your interpretation, mass executions are covered by Presidential immunity

    Individual interpretation is the problem.

    The president thinks to themselves “yea, that’s barely in” and then it’s official and covered.

    Political suicide? Could be. Maybe not.

    At the least, mass executions will be part of the official US presidential record. If they are carried out those people are dead and civil erupts, and if they aren’t the president is immune and the person(s) who disobeyed him is subject to execution for treason.

    Say the president signs an executive order explicitly stating that any act is considered a presidential duty during the day in which a president conducts a minimum of one official act.

    Then literally everything is official no matter what.

    Although that’s unnecessary with how the supreme Court has defended official presidential immunity:

    On page 30-31 of the SC decision, the supreme Court makes it known that because they have decided the US president is entitled to immunity and specifically cannot “be held criminally liable” for “certain official acts”(interpreted however broadly one would like), examining an unofficial act related to an official act, like legally examining whether or not dumps knew inciting a violent coup was illegal, “would permit a prosecutor to do indirectly what he cannot do directly- invite the jury to examine acts for which a president is immune from prosecution”

    This means that any unofficial part of any official conduct, both interpreted however you see fit, cannot be legally scrutinized as scrutiny of an “unofficial act” could result in the legal scrutiny of an “official act” for which the supreme Court has decided there can be no legal scrutiny or prosecution anymore.

    So, “hey, drowning that bag of puppies doesn’t seem very official”.

    “Yea, too bad we can’t do anything about it since he has to sign a bill into law this afternoon”.


  • Yyyup.

    Even when dumps was elected or roe was overturned, I was very disappointed but rationalized that voting could turn it around, even with a crappy voting system like the US has.

    But granting absolute legal immunity to the most powerful branch of government is so broad and so reckless that I no longer clearly recognize any more safeguards on what can happen overnight to the US government.

    Counterargument: The US dollar hasn’t budged since the ruling, so for some reason nobody else is worried yet.

    I don’t really understand that.


  • Unofficial duties especially are not discreetly outlined or prohibited, so anything the US president does during an official act becomes an official act That cannot be legally scrutinized or prosecuted.

    The president is commander-in-chief of the US military.

    So ordering the US Navy to bomb Seattle is an official, legal act.

    The president receives ambassadors. If they decide to shoot someone while waiting for an ambassador to arrive, or set a wildfire in a field of horses while on a “brainstorming jog” for that meeting, that shooting or arson is part of their official duty.

    The State of the Union is an official act, so the president burning the flag while garroting an orphan on national television is now an official, legal act immune from legal liability.



  • Presidential polls are absurd propaganda at this point, and I guess you’re referring to the same two clips fox news hasn’t stopped running since the debate rather than to his obvious first term track record of “being old and still reliably and actively passing progressive legislation”.

    He already won against trump, he regularly passes progressives legislation, you vote for Biden and get Harris anyway if you want a backup.

    I can’t imagine how abandoning a proven candidate who beat trump before inspires political confidence if you haven’t been successfully manipulated to trust in the reliability of conservative media instead of years of reality.


  • Replacing the major candidate who already passed significant democratic legislation for 4 years is unlikely to result in greater Democratic faith or voter galvanization.

    Harris certainly does not have that kind of momentum or support.

    Any sort of candidate scramble now is all but forfeiting the 2024 election to trump.

    Democrats already functionally control the Senate and have for biden’s four presidential years; I can’t see how nervously replacing Biden wins them any more seats, even optimistically.

    That said, by the numbers, keeping the house majority and packing the court is more likely than a complete constitutional rewrite, a strategy I used as an example to show just how bleak the chance of restoring the us balance of executive power is.





  • Absolute immunity is exactly how genocide and civil wars are facilitated.

    I doubt it will get as far Rwanda better of societal complexity, but if someone awful is elected and they decide to execute trans, or arab, or left handed people, or decides to murder anyone themselves, there’s no reason why they should consider the legal allowance of or consequences of their actions before taking action and no way outside of specific new amendments to scrutinize, prosecute or guard against that action in the future.

    The states now have to rely on the personal judgments and courage of everyone under the commander in chief, which is everyone, to refuse to carry out atrocities.


  • It’s definitely the latter, corruption.

    There’s no way the conservative justices could have drawn many of their conclusions with any consistent interpretation of the constitution and the enumerated rights.

    The court conservatives are clearly advancing corporate and political partisan interests and interpreting identical constitutional amendments and passages different ways on different decisions.

    Thomas has explicitly said that all he wants to do is hurt liberals, and accepted gifts from wealthy donors with connections to cases he oversees.

    I’m sure he’s not the only one.



  • There can be a fight, but it can be stopped at any point by the executive branch for any reason without restriction or consequence.

    Plus, now there is a legal precedent for presidential immunity, so even if the best situation occurs and executive balance is restored, the next team of bandits can point to 2024 and say well look, the highest court in the land said their ruling supersedes the Constitution.

    Fixing this will require some sort of comprehensive rewrite of either the Constitution to make its powers inviolate or better yet, to make the limitations on the branches inviolate.

    Maybe increase the amendments by tenfold to elucidate exactly what is allowed and not allowed, because right now “reasonable judgment” is often invoked as a limitation on important legal rulings, but if you have a conservative majority refusing to honestly engage with “reasonable judgment” and willing to pwrjure themselvesto irritate harmful and unreasonable judgment, as the conservatives on the court are and have been willing to do for decades, then they can do things like violate or invalidate the Constitution.

    The problem with all of these solutions is that the limitations on executive power are already very clear, and the supreme Court is objectively violating them.

    I don’t see a clear resolution at this point, although I’m so shocked by the end of the US government that I’m still working through the consequences and considering hopeful solutions.

    Right now, the most hopeful solution I see is like when dumps asked pence to violate the Constitution and declare him president, pence refused.

    So if another atrocity is now ordered, right now the only hope is that the person being ordered to do it will risk being executed for treason and not follow that order.

    Relying on many someones like pence to all do the right thing is not exactly comforting.





  • Disclaimer: someone calm me and op down.

    I couldn’t believe that every post wasn’t about this ruling all day

    No, you shouldn’t calm down, this decision is absolutely cataclysmic for the US should a dangerous person be elected or the ruling not overturned.

    I’ve been saying the states are okay despite all SCOTUS’ stripping of civil rights and everything else wrong with that country because as long as there were checks and balances, voting had relevance.

    With this ruling,I can’t see that it will continue to.

    A president can order their political opponents murdered.

    They can order that all civil rights be suspended indefinitely.

    They can order a suspension or abolition of term limits.

    They can abolish voting altogether in a hundred different ways and nothing can be legally done to halt that president from continuing to abolish voting until it sticks.

    If anyone does manage to legally stop the president, the president can kill them or cut off their fingers and remove their voice box.

    Literally anything is now legal, fair game.

    Biden has spoken out against that kind of power and he has it right now, so VOTE for BIDEN to buy yourselves some time.

    Whoever comes after this term or the next likely won’t have the same scruples.

    This is far and away the most dangerous and harmful decision SCOTUS has ever made, which is saying a LOT.

    It is the antithesis of the line in the Constitution explicitly stating that no elected official (like the president) has legal immunity.

    The decision to grant an entire branch of the government absolute(it is absolute, anything can become “official”) legal immunity could very rapidly destroy the country as it is and turn it into a true authoritarian state within a week.

    It takes some time to write, print and sign the executive orders or I’d say a day.

    I have to read up on it more because I haven’t read or heard enough yet to convince me that this decision is not utterly catastrophic.

    I’m shocked the dollar hasn’t collapsed, any further international faith in US stability is misplaced.

    Antiquated.