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This is the same Court that has been consistently expanding protections for firearm ownership pursuant to the Second Amendment so I expect liberals will, any day now, start finding a strange new appreciation for civilian ownership of 'weapons of war' if the President is free to kill U.S. citizens at will.
More seriously the consequences of not having immunity for 'official acts' would be arguably worse, with any given law enforcement agency that can claim proper jurisdiction able to show up to the White House with a warrant and seek to put the President in custody and/or search for evidence of criminal activity. Obvious failure mode there if we want him to be effective at his job (I, myself, wouldn't mind it! But as a practical matter who would agree to be President under these conditions?).
The line "When the President Does it, that means that it is not illegal" really does mean just that. If the laws carve out an exception for this particular person, then we can say in complete isolation from how immoral, illogical, and ill-advised an action may be, it is not illegal and thus remedies generally lie outside the legal process.
The Court has done nothing except re-allow bump stocks. All its other firearm cases were dead on arrival, except Rahimi which was their burial.
I'm not sure what exactly Rahimi entails. Gorsuch posed it as only saying that banning firearms, temporarily, from those judged, by a court, to be dangerous, is permissible.
The court in Rahimi accepted that laws against "going armed to the terror of the public" were historically significant. This translates into a blank check for any restriction on carry. Further, they accepted Rahimi, which walked back gun rights (not just by those judged by a court to be dangerous, but by those with a restraining order against them without any finding that they were dangerous), while ignoring many other cases where various courts have been ignoring Bruen.
Not quite. Bruen also recognized the same laws as historical precedents, but not for the law there in question. I don't have a good enough sense of how the court would continue to apply it more broadly, but I read Rahimi as mostly saying that "if you're dangerous, they can take your guns away." Which, will undoubtedly be attempted to be construed broadly, but Rahimi is clear (see page 15) that this is only allowing bans that show the individual in question a threat, unlike in Bruen, where they struck it down, because it presumed that they were lawful.
That is, it has to be default-legal to carry.
It is ruling only when a court decides that someone presents a threat. It's mentioned in the main opinion several times. For example, in the conclusion:
Section 922(g)(8), which the court upheld:
Note (8)(C)(ii), and note the "or" in (8)(C)(i). A court need merely order a person to not do something they're already prohibited from doing, without any finding they they represent a credible threat of any sort, and they lose their firearms rights. They didn't reach the constitutionality of (8)(C)(ii) in Rahimi, but they never will. The lower courts will take this decision as meaning the whole idea of "restraining order = lose firearms rights" is validated, and the Supreme Court will refuse to address the question again.
LOL, it isn't, not in New York or New Jersey certainly. If I strap a pistol on my hip and walk around my neighborhood, and a cop sees me, I'm going to prison with John Roberts's blessing. And despite there being ample cases to say that they really meant what they said in Bruen, the Supreme Court has taken none of them. The conservatives on the Supreme Court (except Thomas) do not want people to actually carry a gun; they support gun rights in the abstract as part of their high-class debating society, that's all.
Yeah, they definitely left up in the air whether it as a whole is fine. (Though Gorsuch, at least, seemed opposed.)
Fair enough, who knows whether they'll address it again. Why do you think they took Bruen, then, if you think they don't care? It's (mostly) the same justices?
They enjoyed the argument. It's not that they don't care; it's that they positively do not want the scenario I've been putting forth -- any unconvicted citizen being able to buy a gun, load it, and carry it into a major Blue city (they're probably mostly thinking Washington, D.C.) legally -- to happen. But they position they've taken in their high-class debate club is that the Second Amendment provides such a right.
Roberts, especially, is fond of decisions with no practical impact. Even with the recent decision striking down application of Sarbanes-Oxley to most Jan 6 protestors did nothing; the defendant in the case had enough other charges against him to put him away forever.
When Obergefell hit, people were getting gay married in every state in weeks if not days. The one resister in the entire country got fired and successfully sued for tens of thousands of dollars. It's been years since Bruen and it's still illegal for me to buy a gun or to carry one. Clearly the Supreme Court can make decisions which have effect; they just chose not to.
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Bruen was only 2 years ago and is already having initial ripple effects at the state level.
The "ripple effects" are that they're making carry permits that don't allow you to carry -- or at the very least turning the state into a minefield where if you're carrying with a permit you risk walking right into a felony at any time.
And striking down rules against pistol braces.
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2024/06/13/federal-judge-vacates-atf-rule-on-pistol-braces-n1225260
And bans on under-21's owning guns.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-judge-strikes-down-federal-law-barring-handgun-sales-those-under-21-2023-05-12/
and at the county level, striking down magazine capacity bans.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/politics/state-politics/washington-high-capacity-magazine-ban-unconstitutional-cowlitz-county-judge/281-a6f257e4-8e37-47fe-971b-e775728b1e55
This is what I mean by 'ripple effects.' There is actual traction for going after restrictions on firearms use and ownership, with a new standard applied which is more favorable towards challenges, although it all needs to shake out over time.
I guess we'll see how the 'Spirit of Aloha' holds up in court, too.
If you don't see this as an 'expansion' of gun rights okay, but I'm not sure how you characterize it as making it more likely that people will catch a felony for owning or carrying a gun.
This will likely hold up because it's not on Second Amendment grounds.
Likely will be overturned by the Fourth Circuit, and the Supreme Court will not take up the case.
Likely will be overturned by the Ninth Circuit, and cert will be denied. A similar magazine ban keeps getting upheld in the Third Circuit.
In New York and New Jersey and California, if you could get a carry permit (which you probably couldn't), you could carry a gun in most places. Now, while theoretically you can get a permit, there's a long list of places and circumstances you can't carry anyway; educational facilities, health care facilities, any public building, various private buildings, Times Square, public transportation, private passenger transit, etc.
When I can walk into a New Jersey gun store, buy a modern rifle and pistol, load them, strap the pistol on my waist and the rifle on a sling, and head to my office in New York City without taking extreme care as to the route, using either public or private transportation to get there, without breaking laws that have not been overturned, THEN I will believe there's protections for firearm ownership and carry. Right now I can't lawfully buy the guns, if I could lawfully buy the guns they'd be restricted as to magazine capacity and by other features, I cannot lawfully carry the guns in NJ, I cannot lawfully carry the guns in NY, I cannot lawfully carry the guns on public transportation, and even if I could obtain a carry permit in both state (I cannot) I would still not be able to lawfully carry on public transportation and would have to take extreme care to avoid prohibited areas in NJ; I could not avoid prohibited areas in NYC.
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I think there's a middle ground in which such charges are put on hold while the President is actually in office.
Not that I'm actually endorsing that, but one can certainly imagine that consequences for wildly-illegal-official-acts (let's say Nixon ordered the FBI to do Watergate and they acquiesced) could and should come after the President leaves office (and presumably after his successor declines to pardon him).
And it would seem there the court would agree that the president would be liable for that criminally.
I don’t think so.
I imagine there was at least one on the court who would think he should be immune (given that they declined to specify whether he had absolute immunity or presumptive immunity for official, non-core, acts), but overall the court would not be okay with it.
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How would ordering the FBI to break into your opponent’s office to steal information to help your campaign fall within the official duties of the president? It certainly isn’t within the core duties so at best eligible only for a presumption of immunity. The court didn’t rule the president has absolute immunity. They basically stated there are concentric circles of immunity. In the circle where the president is clearly exercising core presidential functions in his capacity as president there is absolute immunity. In the next circle are the areas that the president might be able to claim are functions but are far away from the core function. Here it is a presumption of immunity. The final circle are acts taken while president but not acting qua president. Here there is no immunity. I struggle to see this hypo as in the first circle.
When this happened in 2016, the excuse given was that it was for reasons of national security. You just conjure up a foreign adversary with information you know is fake, use it to get a rubber-stamped warrant from the FISA court on some minor figure in the opponent's campaign and then use that justification to suck up all of your opponent's communications.
Yes. You can lie about it (see Obama admin). But the court need not accept your lie. Also no one faced serious punishment before this ruling so nothing really changed.
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Directing the activity of the FBI is a core Presidential function.
It is not. The FBI is not created by the Constitution; it is a creation of Congress. This puts directing its activity into that second category where immunity is presumed, not absolute.
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I think that’s confusing an instrument with a function. The president does not have any function to spy on an opponent’s political campaign. So even though the president has the power to direct the FBI it would be used for an ultra vires purpose.
In contrast, if the president ordered the FBI to raid a political opponent because there was a legitimate legal purpose (eg they had credible evidence the opponent was taking a bribe) the function now is a core function and the president is immunized.
Of course, the courts would need to analyze whether certain acts were merely fig leafs but that happens today!
Even this is not certain, I think. As mentioned upthread, the FBI was created by Congress, thus directing the FBI is not an exclusive core function of the President under the US Constitution. That is to say, Congress has set the parameters within which the President must operate in regards to directing the FBI, so these powers of the president are limited or shared with another branch of government, so only presumptive immunity applies.
At least, this is how I imagine things would shake out in court if a President ever attempted such a thing.
I think you are correct and I overly simplified.
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