Trump’s lawyers warned that if a president can be prosecuted for actions taken while in office “such prosecutions will recur and become increasingly common, ushering in destructive cycles of recrimination,” adding that “Without immunity from criminal prosecution, the Presidency as we know it will cease to exist.”
If Presidents commit crimes in office, they should be held accountable. And if the Presidency ceases to exist because of the justice of accountability, then let the office perish in injustice.
Why don’t we just let them file their frivolous lawsuits in ‘28, and throw their asses out of court in discovery when they present 0 evidence, like what pretty much always happens with these imbeciles?!
good. let every presidential term end with the asshole being led away in handcuffs. the presidency as we know it needs to cease to exist. arrest all of them.
You do understand that 1) these ideas are floated mostly in jest and 2) they are floated because they map more or less directly to statements Trump has already made outlining his intentions, and he will not require precedent to do so.
Trump didn’t require precedent for anything he did, up to and including not conceding the election and attempting the violent overthrow of the government of the United States. I’m not sure why people say “Appointing additional justices just means the Republicans will do the same!” Of course they’d do it tomorrow if they had the 6-3 position reversed.
Precedent (even in Supreme Court cases), congressional comity, “respect the office of not the man,” and everything else has been thrown out the window in an accelerating process, but completely since 2016.
Setting a precedent means nothing anymore, unless we can expect Joe Biden to order Seal Team Six to assassinate Trump and the FBI to arrest all members of Congress and the courts who would hold him accountable for it. There, he’d have some precedent.
Trump has literally argued in court that the President can do anything up to and including the assassination of a political rival with no repercussions other than impeachment. By extension, that includes the arrest and assassination of members of Congress and the courts who would oversee his impeachment and/or prosecution. They argued that this is a protected right of the office of the president in the constitution, in front of a judge.
To point out that if the same logic were to be applied by Biden to solve the Trump problem is simply showing the absurdity of the argument. You can unclutch those pearls.
Fun fact: Precedent exists for presidential immunity. Nixon.
Nixon resigned after Watergate because of the obviously impending impeachment by Congress, and then was subsequently granted a pardon by Ford. It can be legally argued that if presidential (or candidate!) immunity existed in law, in any form, then there would have been no reason to resign or grant a pardon as Nixon could have simply stood beside it and blown raspberries. Therefore, it must not exist in law.
These justices seemed incredulous that since no state had needed to remove an insurrectionist in the past they were uncertain if a state could, as if we should expect insurrectionists running annually.
The impeachment procedure is remediation as a means to remove someone from office based on bad behavior. The basis of high crimes and misdemeanors would imply it being criminal, and properly as I recall it Clinton was impeached for lying to Congress about a BJ which would fall under perjury. If Trump was charged every time he lied we would never have done anything else during his term…
None of that shields someone from actual criminal charges though. There was this thought that ‘if the president does it then it’s by default lawful’ but if that actually stood as a precident all it takes is one unhinged person getting into office and the whole idea of having checks and balances is out the window. You couldn’t sanction anyone for any behavior that the president had engaged in thereafter. In practice you have an emperor with the Congress being nothing more than a token body.
The basis of high crimes and misdemeanors would imply it being criminal
That’s an incorrect reading of that phrase. “High crimes and misdemeanors” is a particular term of art that means pretty much the same thing as “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” It means someone holding office who, by virtue of using the powers of that office, abused those powers in a particularly impactful way. It doesn’t necessarily mean the violation of a specific law, although it could obviously include that. There’s obviously legal precedent that provides additional context, but as formulated at the time it was written it basically means “abuse of power.”
I expect so since I’m no lawyer, makes me kind of curious what the most mundane reason any of our relatively few impeachments where for. Even the first of Trump’s I don’t know would truly fit an existing criminal law without some work, more just acting like a tool against the interests of the nation.
This is a dumb argument for anyone with sense, but it’s probably the best one he could possibly make.
For whatever godforsaken reason, the minute you run for office, the courts lose their goddamn minds and act like, “Courts hate this one trick, but they can’t stop you.”
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