Theoretically, Biden could do it and not be prosecuted.
But if he ordered a member of the military to do it, they are required to refuse illegal orders. I don’t know the rules about illegal orders but I bet this would fall under that. At the same time, the President can pardon people convicted in military court so that’s not much of a deterrent.
Similarly if he ordered a civilian (say, CIA) to assassinate Trump, that person could be tried. But again, the President’s pardon power makes federal charges not much of a threat.
BUT — the President cannot grant pardons for convictions in state courts. So anyone involved would be in trouble if it happened in a US state. And if the Supreme Court did not make the President immune from state-level prosecution, Biden could be tried for being involved… but it seems unlikely that they would go for “the President is immune from federal prosecution but not state prosecution.”
Of course, all this show how insane and dangerous the idea of Presidential immunity is. It’s a terrible idea.
I am super duper NOT an expert but I believe the President can pardon crimes in DC, so that would get around the state court issue. Same for outside the US: I’m not sure states can punish crimes outside of the US. Even if they can, they may not have laws on the books to handle that sort of thing.
NSA is civilian, they work closely with CSS which is the military side. The determining factor for civilian vs military is whether the people working there are enlisted soldiers/commissioned officers or civilians who just get hired like other jobs.
According to the arguments currently being made to protect Trump from prosecution. The premise of the question was “If presidential immunity is absolute.”
They argue many things, but very few of them really hold up to real life, so I personally don’t put too much weight on them any more. I trust that the legal system will shoot those arguments down if not fast, then at least efficiently. IMO it is basically just is a method of extending these cases for last as long as possible, and I am surprised that nobody can do anything against that!
In theory that gets around the legal issue but then you’re getting into practical issues: Trump is protected by the Secret Service so either it will be extremely difficult from a practical perspective, or you would have to get quite a few people to go along with the conspiracy. Again, this highlights what a terrible idea immunity is because the possibilities get horrifying really fast.
They can order him released but unless they’re going to send a bailiff to try to break him out of federal prison, they’re just words on a sheet of paper.
Trump’s lawyers would argue that Biden can order Trump’s execution without any punishment, but that it would not cause him to win the next election because the military and other federal officials are not immune and are “obligated” not to follow illegal orders. So basically the argument is that illegal orders are unlikely to be followed.
Problem with this argument is that the president has the pardon power, which means he could promise to pardon people for following his illegal orders.
But the problem with that argument is that some believe the president could pardon himself, so maybe that situation is already a reality even if the president is not immune
What would actually happen? It seems like in both Watergate and Jan 6, some people did refuse to follow corrupt orders. But in the case of Watergate where there was more time and a more intelligent corrupt president, that wasn’t itself a major problem. In Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, he forced his AGs to resign until he landed on future Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who carried out Nixon’s illegal order to fire a special prosecutor. The bad news for Nixon is that the move was so unpopular it eventually led to his resignation as he probably would’ve been impeached otherwise.
Trump’s lawyers would argue that Biden can order Trump’s execution without any punishment, but that it would not cause him to win the next election because the military and other federal officials are not immune and are “obligated” not to follow illegal orders. So basically the argument is that illegal orders are unlikely to be followed.
As Biden, I’m not going to risk publicly having Trump killed. I’m getting a hitman
Most of SCOTUS is not in favor of “broad immunity”, for exactly this scenario. They want to make sure that Trump is never held responsible for his actions while in office, and that every President after Trump(if he doesn’t declare himself President for life) is criminally liable for everything. Trump has even said that he’ll have Biden prosecuted if he wins.
Ultra-right wing groups slowly taking over various branches of the government because roughly 30% of the population will always vote for them, no matter what.
Wait, I’ve been out of the loop for a bit; is Trump actually saying that he should be immune to charges because he was the president??? How in the world could he think that would work?
Yes. But, just an FYI, that’s not the actual reason they’re trying to claim it in court. They know it will never succeed, they just want to use it to delay his election trial until after the election.
Don’t. It’s people that are out of the loop (people that work too much, don’t care, people with busy lives, etc) who are at risk of falling for Republican propaganda about how bad Biden is and how good Trump is.
An informed populace is always for the best. It’s why Republicans attack education and freedom of information so hard.
Be thankful to be informed and thankful you can actually act on it. For now.
Yes, that is exactly what he is saying. Yes, it is completely absurd and would undermine the bedrock principles of our legal system. However, apparently somewhere between 3 and 6 members of the US Supreme Court may be seriously considering it.
(To be fair, he does claim that this absolute immunity would go away if half of the House and 2/3 of the Senate decided to impeach the President.)
Then again, with that same theory, he could just eliminate Congress altogether before the voting starts for impeachment. Or place specific justices on house arrest before they vote. Basically, the idiotic idea of a president not beholden to laws is mostly the same as a despotism if the “president” wishes it to be.
If you want to be hyper-technical about it, he could order a hit on Trump, but if Trump was already on the ballot and received 270+ EVs, he would be ineligible to be President. His Vice President would take over as President.
If both were assassinated, the Speaker of the House of the newly-seated Congress would become President.
I don’t think you meant that specifically, but yes if ordering a hit is an “official act”, he could conceivably order the murder of anyone who cares to stand against him, including those in Congress who might wish to impeach him or remove him from office.
Aren't most of the claims of immunity because congress is supposed to be the one that holds the president accountable? So as long as the House doesn't hold the president to account, they can do anything... but clearly Democrats are more willing to prosecute those in their own party than Republicans... so it's far more likely that Biden would face consequences for his actions than Trump did.
Biden could just resign, if a successful impeachment is a pre requisite of prosecution. Kill Trump, fiften other Republicans spread between the House, Senate and SCOTUS, immediately resign.
That introduces all sorts of timeline issues because you can’t impeach someone who isn’t in office anymore. It stands to reason that resigning, or ending your term, shouldn’t immediately prevent prosecution since often these kinds of cases take years to put together even with a congress that wanted to impeach. Hell, the evidence of illegal actions may not have even come out until after they resigned, in which case congress would never have an opportunity to hold them accountable.
See, you say they can’t impeach someone who isn’t in office, I’m pretty sure they actually can but usually just don’t bother because there didn’t used to be much point.
One of the major issues in this case is that Obama set a precedent when he assassinated 16 year old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki without a trial.
The reality is that the Democrats go low, and Republicans use that as a new standard to go even lower.
Biden could announce that he’s set up a deadman switch so that once the law is enacted, mercs would take out the people that ruled in favor of the law.
No. In the likely event of Trump getting off the hook, you can bet that SCOTUS will come up with some obscure and obfuscated legal hand waving that the judgment pertains to the matter at hand and does not constitute a precedent. The goal isn’t to nullify laws that can be used against the Democrats later, but to keep the Republican nominee in the running, which can only be accomplished by temporarily displacing the law.
This is the real problem on our hands. If you like the rule of law, there’s no winning scenario here no matter who comes out on top, because we’re already talking about abusing the law or changing it to suit political aims, rather than the operation of a coherent body of law being impartially carried out. In a sense the damage to our judicial norms and the larger issue of the credibility of an international rules-based order is at stake, and we’re just not winning that battle lately. Too many bad actors.
Nothing other than common decency stops a president from executing all rivals of their party, pardoning all those involved, then resigning from the office, turning it over to the VP, before Congress could impeach. Now if the only remaining members of Congress belong to the President’s party, the odds of impeachment diminish significantly. In any case, only one person - the President - could ever be held responsible.
But anyone dumb enough to try this would start Civil War 2.0.
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