So, I don’t think that it’s likely in the American political system. We don’t have a tradition of giving serving officials immunity from the law – the closest we get is an extremely limited right ensuring that legislators cannot be arrested on the way to Congress, cannot have law enforcement prevent them from being in Congress.
But many countries have political systems that do do that, do give elected officials significant immunity from the justice system. If you agree with that sort of thing, it’s aimed at ensuring that they can’t be intimidated or have power exerted against them through the justice system.
Parliamentary immunity, also known as legislative immunity, is a system in which political leadership position holders such as president, vice president, minister, governor, lieutenant governor, speaker, deputy speaker, member of parliament, member of legislative assembly, member of legislative council, senator, member of congress, corporator, councilor etc. are granted full immunity from legal prosecution, both civil prosecution and criminal prosecution, in the course of the execution of their official duties.
Advocates of parliamentary immunity suggest the doctrine is necessary to keep a check on unauthorised use of power of the judiciary, to maintain judicial accountability, and to promote the health of democratic institutions.
France, for example, has this:
Members of the Parliament of France enjoy irresponsibility for what they did as parliamentarians, and partial inviolability – that is, severe restrictions for the police or justice to arrest or detain them. Both irresponsibility and inviolability are mandated by article 26 of the Constitution of France.
These dispositions are somewhat controversial, following abuse of such privileges.
There was a fairly high-profile situation in the past few years where the French parliament voted to withdraw that immunity from Marine Le Pen.
It looks increasingly unlikely that this case will be tried before the election. And if Trump wins that election, the case will likely never be tried at all.
SCOTUS doing this on purpose. If Biden wins then obviously President doesn’t have immunity to…commit crimes. But if Trump wins Trump is going to act like he has immunity so SCOTUS will have a big incentive to grant him immunity at the risk they are arrested or purged by his admin or his supporters.
This is the only thing that lets me almost fall asleep. Facists may kill an extraordinary amount of people, but it will inevitably fail, and survivors can rebuild, and hopefully work towards a system that doesn’t allow it to happen so easily again
But who knows how long that will be? It’s like when people say nature or “the earth will be fine” and my response is Obvi… but how many millions of years from now?
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