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Why? If the president can't do his job without committing crimes, maybe we need to either review his job or the law. The constitution certainly doesn't suggest immunity from criminal liability.
Furthermore, is there are reason why this standard is particular to the presidency and not any elected official? Shouldn't Bob Menendez be accountable to his voters, not some dodgy DoJ official? Who are federal prosecutors to to contravene the will of Illinois' people by charging Mike Madigan?
There are too many hypothetical crimes. 3 felonies a day and all. A malicious reading of laws makes us all hypothetical criminals.
The Constitution states the responsibilities of the executive. They can not also be illegal. No mere law supercedes the Constitution.
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Even if we did "fix" the 50,000+ pages of the U.S. code, as well as all state and local laws, there's no way to create a law code that can't be interpreted maliciously by one of the thousands of legal jurisdictions.
Scale matters. The severity of the crimes and the scope of the office should come into play.
But it really comes down to pragmatism. Do you want to be right, or do you want to have a functioning country? The only reason that elected officials are not routinely prosecuted is because it is not done. This is the mos maiorum of our country. The reason that parties haven't (thus far) used lawfare against their opponents is because they value the country over their own ideological victory.
They can already do this.
We already prosecute elected officials. If we concede to Trumpist threats every time it comes time to punish him for his lawlessness, we won't have a functioning country. Why not say the stubborn insistence that Trump must be impervious to prosecution and punishment is a threat to the stability of the country because the message it sends is that procedural politics are futile? If corrupt politicians will never face justice, why not deliver it yourself?
Why haven't you delivered it yourself? There must be real reasons within your psychology right?
I feel like our confusions here are similar. Rule of law seems unreasonably efficacious upon the people of this nation.
But the answer must reside within the both of us. Why haven't you, or I, personally, gone out and made killing some lawless politician or another our life's work?
For me, alongside being a bit selfish wrt how I spend my life- My certainty that it would be a net good for the people of this nation or this planet is quite low. Assassinating Trump would trigger civil war 2.0 or something just as bad.
It would also be a major defection... which isn't the sort of thing I stand for- except when I deem it absolutely necessary to prevent an 'always defect against jesusbot' equilibrium. I don't judge us as there yet. My life is far too blessed for that.
I'm sure you have similar reasons. For now at least. Maybe we are approaching that tipping point... where skilled and smart people start stepping over that edge and heads start rolling...
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Again to me, you want any prosecution of the president to be so clear that it is bipartisan. If you do that, then the risk of spiraling lawfare is heavily limited.
There's another stable equilibrium: One side is so dominant that they can simply impose their will on the other side.
IMO, the impetus for the lawfare is that Democrats thought they had fully captured the institutions, and could now impose their will with no risk of retaliation.
We're at this weird spot in history, due to social media, where the elite seems a lot more unipolar than it really is. If you go by the official statements of corporations, media, and universities, then like 90%+ of the elite are fully woke. But I think this is a false consensus, and there are a lot of shy Tories out there. Elon Musk liberating Twitter really freed up the discourse. A lot of elites are coming out of the closet now. David Sachs can host a Trump fundraiser in San Francisco and get a lot of donations with almost no pushback.
I mean, there are shades of this with the Elon Musk stuff since that's not even pretending, but with Trump it's more like "well, we're obviously correct, so people will agree with us, right?".
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IMO this is a bullshit story right-wingers tell themselves to rationalize power grabs. Throw in regular ominous remarks about the dangers of prosecuting (their) politicians just so people understand and it looks more like a story of incredible Democratic naivete where they thought a conservative judiciary would act in a principled manner rather than closing ranks to protecting their guy.
They didn't close ranks, though; they left most of the charges against Trump potentially open.
They left the possibility of charges potentially open, but kneecapped the ability to actually exercise them. Discussions with his staff, a.k.a. the people he would likely confer with with regards to committing the crime, are largely off limits. You need to prove that they are not official acts to gather evidence, which to me seems to say that you need to prove the crime before you are allowed to gather the evidence to prove the crime. You're all but disallowed from questioning his motives, when motives are a massive part of what makes most things a crime.
Uh, that's not what the opinion says. It says that a court has to hear whether the sort of conduct alleged is immune prior to discovery and trial, that immune conduct can't be probed for evidence regarding prosecution for non-immune conduct, and that improper motives for immune conduct do not cancel the immunity.
The first of those is basically a motion-to-dismiss hearing, where the court says "suppose everything the prosecution says is true; are these actions actually a crime?" The prosecution doesn't need to produce evidence for one of those, since all its claims are presumed true for this purpose anyway, so it's appropriate for it to happen before discovery. (To give an example, suppose a prosecutor brings a case against me alleging that I walked to the supermarket. I file a motion to dismiss, pointing out that walking to the supermarket is not illegal. There's a hearing, at which it is assumed that I did indeed walk to the supermarket, on the question of whether walking to the supermarket is illegal. The judge finds that the alleged conduct is not illegal, and dismisses the case because there's no crime alleged.)
The second basically says that once the court's decided what's immune and not, discovery only takes place into the non-immune actions, not the immune ones. Note that it does not say that discovery can't take place into official actions, only into immune ones (i.e. ones where absolute immunity applies, or ones where presumptive immunity applies and the court has found that presumption upheld); discovery can proceed against actions where the court has found presumptive immunity to be rebutted.
The third says that immunity is based on the type of act rather than the motive, so you can't declare otherwise-immune conduct non-immune because of an alleged improper motive - but types of act that are declared to not be immune can still have their motives investigated.
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Sure I guess. But when one faction controls everything law qua process is irrelevant. But when they are multiple factions law inherently needs to be a process. I’m suggesting a process.
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