The question isn't if... it's when. We've already seen how far the left will go and the only reason they aren't jailing those they disagree with is because they can't.
The problem with that is - as demonstrated by the RvW over turning - is that it's not what the law says - since there was never law backing RvW. It's what THIS court says vs what PREVIOUS courts said.
The good lawyers giveth... the good lawyers taketh away. Judicial activism overturned by judicial activism.
The trump immunity case put forth what has always been - Presidents aren't charged without being impeached first. Something the left was trying to change. because lets be real... others - ie: Clinton lying under oath. Obama bombing countries. Bush. etc. All have done "criminal" things. The only difference is both sides of elites don't like Trump so the left decided to try and treat him differently. Which got rejected as it should be.
and besides that... "direct contradiction to established law" is a direct contradiction to what actually happened. The left was trying to wrangle laws into directions not intended to be overly broad - like they are doing to jail "J6" people.
I'd have thought that lots of countries have immunity for representatives / members of the executive which can only be revoked by a vote in the legislature. Isn't this quite common?
It sounds reasonable to NOT allow just any member of the judiciary to prosecute members of the other branches, which might wreak havoc on the political process?
> I'd have thought that lots of countries have immunity for representatives / members of the executive which can only be revoked by a vote in the legislature. Isn't this quite common?
As far as I know it's rather common for official acts, not for criminal endeavours outside of the attributions of the executive branch.
From what I gather the Supreme Court decision ruled that former presidents have broad immunity, that's not common at all. I'd guess it's common in places like Russia or similar but not in functioning developed democracies.
I can only speak for Germany here, and the law here is, that, as a member of the parliament, you have immunity for anything relating to criminal law, as long as you hold your seat. As quite some members of the Government are also members of the parliament, they have immunity though that, but not through their government office.
The living practice is, that the legislative will void immunity upon request. I don't think they have ever failed to do so. The previous parliament voided immunity a staggering 25 times.
> It sounds reasonable to NOT allow just any member of the judiciary to prosecute members of the other branches, which might wreak havoc on the political process?
The judiciary does not (and cannot) prosecute. Prosecutors are officials of the executive for this very reason. Regardless, offering blanket immunity as the solution to people hypothetically log-jamming the political process with frivolous lawsuits is laughable. I guess Bob Menendez shouldn't have been potentially interrupted from doing the peoples work.
Apparently, the history of parliamentary immunity is, that you don't want the executive to interfere with the parliament outside the constitutionally defined channels.
> Regardless, offering blanket immunity as the solution to people hypothetically log-jamming the political process with frivolous lawsuits is laughable.
What is the alternative? Think it through, an evil executive surely has the power to (lawfully, or not) arrest members of parliament, which could clearly throw a wrench into the gears of parliament, no?
> I guess Bob Menendez shouldn't have been potentially interrupted from doing the peoples work.
My comment did not imply that prosecution should be impossible. And clearly there are established ways to waive immunity in cases where the majority of a parliament agrees that prosecution is warranted.
To be fair, January 6 people could also be prosecuted on lesser charges (trespassing, assault), but DoJ wanted a bigger charge they could apply to everyone.
> The trump immunity case put forth what has always been - Presidents aren't charged without being impeached first.
Trump was impeached. He was not convicted. Funny enough in his second impeachment trail his own lawyer argued that he shouldn't be convicted in the Senate because he was not immune and could simply be tried in the courts.
McConnell made the same argument: "We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one,"
And in fact there are plenty of examples of Presidents being assumed not to be immune, the pardoning of Nixon for example.
Futher the Constitution explicitly grants legislative immunity to legislators but does not mention any such immunity to the President, a circle this decision doesn't even begin to square.
The argument that the president has always been presumed immune goes pretty aggressively against history.
"was impeached, not convicted" you're being pedantic and you know I meant convicted. Yes, he was impeached... but not convicted so that's the end of it. A democrat house impeached and a republican senate found him not guilty.
"his own lawyer" lawyers talk shit... we now know, per SCOTUS, the correc tpath.
"presumed immune" I don't think that the President should be immune, per-se... but the crux of the current problem is Democrats going after a Republican - and vice versa, if that was to happen.
Remember... Trump said "lock her up". Then didn't. (and yes, she's not the POTUS - thankfully - but my point stands).
Trump's response through the courts is in response to Democrats prosecution through the courts.
For example... he was charged with and became a "felon" for misdemeanor charges (no clue what those were) bumped up to felonies for "election interference".
Meanwhile: Hillary was charged with and actually convicted of those things - misdemeanor charges that she paid a $130k fine for (if I'm not mistaken). Doing stuff to influence an election. The exact thing that should have been turned into a "felony" per the law as being used by Democrats.
We are at this place, arguing about presidential immunity, which we haven't been to before because one side is actively persecuting a rival who they LITERALLY wouldn't be persecuting if he wasn't running for office again.
So the "the president isn't presumed immune" was never tested because the Justice System was never weaponized before.
> "was impeached, not convicted" you're being pedantic and you know I meant convicted. Yes, he was impeached... but not convicted so that's the end of it. A democrat house impeached and a republican senate found him not guilty.
Mostly true, but since we're discussing his second rather than first impeachment trial, it was not a Republican Senate that found him not guilty - it was a Democratic Senate, specifically one split 50-50 but with Democratic President of the Senate (VPOTUS) Kamala Harris as the tiebreaker. Also he was acquitted only due to the supermajority required - a majority of senators, including 7 Republicans, did vote to convict.
Plus, even though Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he voted to acquit based on his interpretation of the Constitution - I think this was about whether a former president could be impeached and convicted at all - he also said that Trump was "practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of" January 6.
> "his own lawyer" lawyers talk shit... we now know, per SCOTUS, the correc tpath.
We know the path that SCOTUS has made legally binding on lower courts, but it was not handled in a way that gives most Democrats faith that it was a fair ruling. In particular, I have zero confidence that they would have ruled the same way if the defendant had been a Democratic former president rather than Trump.
I'm going to use a word you used in your comment and say that most Democrats feel the judicial system is heavily weaponized by Republicans against Democrats, not by Democrats against Republicans.
> Remember... Trump said "lock her up". Then didn't. (and yes, she's not the POTUS - thankfully - but my point stands).
I have no idea what point this is supposed to represent.
> For example... he was charged with and became a "felon" for misdemeanor charges (no clue what those were) bumped up to felonies for "election interference".
You're referring to the NY case here, which is actually the least severe of his four cases. But sure, it's the only one where he's been convicted so far.
He was indicted by a NY state grand jury, at the request of a NY state district attorney, of falsifying 34 business records (about the hush money payments to Stormey Daniels) with intent to defraud, where the "intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof". Without that extra intent regarding another crime, this would just be a misdemeanor under NY law, but that extra intent makes it a felony.
The 12-member NY state trial jury could only convict Trump if they found unanimously that this was proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
What "other crime" were they asked to find in this case that Trump had the intent to commit or to aid or conceal the commission thereof?
Again, the 12-member NY state trial jury could only convict Trump if they found unanimously that the intent to commit this "other crime" was proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
The "other crime" in this case was NY state Election Law section 17-152, which is basically about two or more people conspiring to affecting the result of an election "through unlawful means".
What unlawful means? The prosecutor listed three possibilities: a tax crime, falsification of bank records, and a federal campaign finance violation. The jurors in this case all had to find unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt that the intended conspiracy to affect the result of the election involved one of these unlawful means, but they did not all have to agree unanimously on which unlawful means was involved.
> Meanwhile: Hillary was charged with and actually convicted of those things - misdemeanor charges that she paid a $130k fine for (if I'm not mistaken). Doing stuff to influence an election. The exact thing that should have been turned into a "felony" per the law as being used by Democrats.
Not true. Hillary's campaign and the DNC paid civil penalties ($8k for the campaign and $113k for the DNC) to the Federal Election Commission to settle an investigation, with no criminal charges or convictions and no criminal fines, no involvement of the judiciary or the DOJ at all, no finding by any judge or jury that the FEC's allegations were true, and with Hillary's campaign and the DNC still denying the accuracy of the allegations.
Also, while the FEC is evenly divided between the parties and not especially partisan, these actions which you found serious enough to call charges and convictions happened under the current term of President Biden, after the underlying complaint had been received under the Trump administration. Seems pretty non-weaponized to me.
What's more, even if that had been a criminal investigation, there's no way a federal prosecutor can charge the same statutes as NY prosecutors can charge, and vice versa - two entirely separate criminal systems. So what works in NY state criminal law and what works in federal criminal law are not always the same. There are other examples of NY state law being stricter than federal law, such as in securities fraud.
> We are at this place, arguing about presidential immunity, which we haven't been to before because one side is actively persecuting a rival who they LITERALLY wouldn't be persecuting if he wasn't running for office again.
To be honest, the NY case would probably have gone forward even if Trump weren't running again, simply because it would still be good politics for the prosecutor involved. I am opposed to prosecutors being elected for exactly this reason, but that isn't specifically a Democratic problem: most US states elect their local prosecutors, including most Republican states.
And as much as I said it was the weakest and least important case of those being brought, keep in mind that the group of people who ended up convicting Trump was neither the elected prosecutor nor Judge Merchan: it was 12 ordinary New Yorkers, including at least some of whom (I forget how many) support Trump in the political or policy context, who unanimously decided after hearing the evidence that the criminal charges had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The case was still strong enough to convince them of that. Plus the entire 34-count indictment could only get brought in the first place after a NY state grand jury decided that the prosecutor had presented enough evidence to constitute probable cause for the indictment.
That isn't very weaponized. It wasn't a partisan or even elected judge convicting Trump, it was a jury of his peers. Note that Judge Merchan is not an elected official, unlike a few NY judges and unlike most judges in certain other states. He was first appointed to the bench by former NYC Mayor Bloomberg, who was registered and elected as a Republican at the time, and was appointed to his current position by an appointee of an appointee of a former Democratic NY governor.
Also, the just-as-elected NY statewide Attorney General Letitia James declined to bring certain criminal charges against Trump (I'm not sure exactly what they would have been), because she felt she couldn't prove them to the high criminal standard of proof of beyond a reasonable doubt. I think she did bring similar charges as a civil lawsuit with the usual "more likely than not" standard of proof, but that's a Democratic elected NY prosecutor responsibly avoiding an unjustified witch hunt even where it might be good partisan politics to go overboard.
Last thought - the classified documents case is one where Trump has gotten extreme leniency compared to what an ordinary defendant would get, not extreme weaponized prosecution. If a nonpolitical government employee with a security clearance had kept classified documents after leaving their employment and had refused to return them after the government had noticed the situation and requested their return, they would have been physically put in jail, and probably also convicted, long ago. There is no real way to call that one weaponized.
> So the "the president isn't presumed immune" was never tested because the Justice System was never weaponized before.
It wasn't tested before because Nixon was pardoned, period. A draft grand jury indictment against Nixon was unsealed in 2018, and Ford's pardon is very likely the only reason those charges didn't go forward - at the very least, a prosecutor thought the situation justified enough to present to a grand jury.
Besides Nixon and Trump, are you aware of any former presidents where a prosecutor concluded that criminal charges were warranted under the usual standards of evidence and proof underlying charging decisions? I'm not. All the other cases that get widely discussed either didn't involve former presidents, didn't involve violations of criminal law, or didn't involve the required evidence and proof for prosecutors to expect that they could successfully obtain a conviction.
>it was not handled in a way that gives most Democrats faith that it was a fair ruling.
You don't have faith it would have been handled the same but you have faith that a Democrat would have had these charges against them?
Just for comparison... Hillary committed misdemeanors that LITERALLY was money crimes to influence an election. The exact same "crimes" that Trump had turned into felonies (without actual evidence of the crimes).
The problem we are in today is that these cases (4 of them) are obviously, blatantly and undeniably political and everyone knows that if Trump wasn't running for reelection or if Trump wasn't a Republican? These charges wouldn't be brought.
> it wasn't tested because
exactly. It wasn't tested. A draft grand jury indictment isn't an indictment.
> you aware of any former presidents where a prosecutor concluded that criminal charges were warranted
Are you aware of any prosecutors that were illegally appointed and paid for? because if you want to talk details, stuff like that is important as well. Florida wasn't appointed properly.
And, lets be honest... a lot of the "proof" is suspect. IE: The J6 committee that hid and deleted evidence from Republicans or the Jean trial where character evidence wasn't allowed showing that she's crazy. (Oh... statute of limitations be damned as well for a he said-she said civil trial).
The end of the story the main problem is you can complain that SCOTUS would do differently if it was another party... but you can't do that and ignore the fact that these cases are getting to the SCOTUS because the lower courts are treating Trump differently because of party and politics.
Weaponization of the "Justice System".
> Last thought - the classified documents case is one where Trump has gotten extreme leniency compared to what an ordinary defendant would get
Really? I find it extremly lenient to not charge a Senator for keeping classified documents unsecured in his garage. I find it lenient for another Senator to not get charged for storing classified info on an illegal server then deleting the evidence that was under subpoena.
Yet somehow... it's lenient that a POTUS who's working with the "archive" gets raided without warning and a photo op happens? then the prosecutor admits to doctoring evidence?
Trump is being treated leniently?
We have a different definition of lenient, I think :)
> The trump immunity case put forth what has always been - Presidents aren't charged without being impeached first.
Can you point me to the part of the constitution describing the procedure for impeaching former presidents? If they do the crimes at the end of their term is that just water under the bridge?
> The trump immunity case put forth what has always been
I find this the most disturbing aspect of contemporary attempts at justifying the Supreme Court's behavior. When the court was full of liberals, they were doing judicial activism and that was bad and their decisions should be overturned. But now that those presidents who lost the popular vote got our guys in, the Supreme Court's interpretation of the law isn't the product of biases and preferences held by political appointees, it simply reveals eternal truths set out by our most benevolent god-kissed founders.
> When the court was full of liberals, they were doing judicial activism and that was bad and their decisions should be overturned
and now we are in a court full of conservatives who are doing judicial activist and that's bad and their decisions should be over turned, the courts should be expanded and those we disagree with should be charged with crimes, etc.
That argument goes both ways.
The reality is we are having the conversations as a result of the Justice System being abused SOLEY because one side is charging a political opponent with EVERYTHING they can think of by stretching laws in ways that were never intended.
Previous Presidents weren't presumed immune? That's never been tested because previous presidents weren't prosecuted - despite clear evidence that things have been done wrong but any president you can choose. Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc? Pick your president and we can probably find crimes worth prosecuting. Yet... it didn't happen previously.
What we have now is CLEARLY political persecution against a political rival. Crimes he's being charged with (IE: his "felony") are done by others (IE: hillary who was convicted of money crimes and paid fines to influence an election) and yet not thrown to the wolves via political persecution.
Why are we here? because of the weaponization of the court system.
maybe if regulations and taxes weren't so high, there could be more competition? Transparency and the like would help...
Increasing taxes and removing alternatives is never a good deal.
"market forces aren't enough" government forces aren't enough either.
The VA is the penultimate example and I wouldn't wish that upon my worst enemy. That's where our veterans go to commit suicide in the parking lots waiting on help.
"The VA is the penultimate example and I wouldn't wish that upon my worst enemy. That's where our veterans go to commit suicide in the parking lots waiting on help."
The people I know who use the VA are quite OK with it. It's not perfect but none of them would want to put up with the insanity the rest of us has to.
Yeah... and the people that commit suicide in the parking lots waiting on help? They are chopped liver? They don't matter.
"it's not perfect" It's garbage and a prime example of government programs. Works for a few and fucks over the rest.
The ACA helps a few... and is built on lies - keep your plan? keep your doctor? save $2500 a year? Lies, lies, lies... a few million get help. The other 100m pay more, higher deductibles, lose their plans, lose their doctors.
But who cares about the 100m if the 1m get helped, eh?
the biggest problem is the wasted money, the lies and the people dying in the parking lots.
If you care about the people, look at the numbers across many different countries, not just US. The picture is pretty clear: US, with its mostly privately run and for-profit healthcare system, spends significantly more money per patient while achieving worse results for that money. The vast majority of Americans would get a better deal as far as their healthcare goes in literally every other developed country.
And it's gotten worse the more the government steps in to help.
The problem is the suggestion that government solutions will solve government created problems.
I have no problem admitting things can be fixed... but stuff like the unAffordable Care Act which is built on lies (Like your plan? Like your doctor? save $2500/year) is not going to solve the issues - nor is single payer, government ran solutions.
You'll never solve government created problems with government ran beauracracy.
Those other countries that have it better than we do have healthcare systems either run directly by their governments, or tightly regulated by it in a way that effectively means that the government decides how things are run.
Those other countries also have problems and people with money still go elsewhere when they need help. Rationing exists. Long lines exist. Denials exist. Shortages of doctors exist. etc.
The problem is that the conversation only focuses on the good parts of those systems and ignores the issues.
You can't have a real conversation and claim "have it better" when that may be true in parts but not in whole.
I don't claim the US system is better... or the best. But claiming that government ran or government overregulation leads to better is a lie. The VA is proof of that. the lies around the unACA is proof of that. The ever increasing prices and decreasing results due to government influence is proof of that.
Destroying what we have with something like the ACA isn't proof that government ran will be better... it's simply proof that people are willing to destroy what was working and claim that the destroyers will do a better job if only they have more money and more power.
That's like CA solving homelessness. "more money, more power and we'll solve homelessness" and there's never been more homelessness or less affordability in CA.
Yes... lets make life more expensive by getting rid of taxes.
The reason life is so expensive OBVIOUSLY isn't because of the massive and ever increasing tax burden. NOOOO of course not. Its because people aren't taxed enough.
So lets increase taxes more so we can have goverment solutions to the government problem. Obviously we simply aren't governmenting enough.
Yo dawg... I heard you like government. So I got some government to put in your government!
The question is what's the circle? for all the "ZOMG You're just burning it back into the sky!" worries - which are legitimate in a sense... this seems like a usable circle where CO2 gets pulled from the air and turned into Carbon, Oxygen and Electricity... then the carbon that's now algea can be turned into more electricity via burning which puts CO2 back into the air sure but now you have a cycle.
The issue with gas/oil/petrol is that the "cycle" is pull from ground and pump into air without a way to pull it back from the air.
So yes, this puts CO2 back into the air... after pulling it out of the air. So how is it not a step forward?
I'd call such a cycle carbon neutral but not carbon negative. Things that are neutral are good, but we also need to figure out how to scale up some things that are truly negative.
Carbon Neutral is the term I was looking for so thank you for that.
Don't give up good in the pursuit of perfect.
If we get a few of these types of solutions - IE Growing algea to pull it from the air and burning it to get electricity and "putting it back"? If scaled? that can be the path forward - especially if we're getting electricity on both sides of the fence.
I'm just pretty allergic to the word "the" in discussions of this, in general. This seems like it could be a useful technology, but no one thing is the path forward.
The path forward is to invent and scale and tweak and improve lots of different things.
"the question is how it scales" and which mega corp is going to buy and bury the tech.
But seriously... stuff like this ("ZOMG MIRACLE BATTERY! MIRACLE SOLUTION! ZOMG!) seem to disappear because it takes years to turn an idea into a demo... and longer to get a demo to market and to scale.
We are surrounded by stuff that followed that route but I hope stuff like this actually makes it to market.
Inflation makes everything more expensive (light bulbs, nails, electricity). Regulations to make stuff "safer" also makes stuff more expensive. Places like CA have had a housing shortage for decades - they are short on houses built vs needed by tens of thousands a year for decades.
An "investment" in rentals doesn't take supply away, even converting from a rental to an owner-occupied doesn't.
What you need is more supply, and without that prices will continue to go wild because the number of people who want to live in the area outstrips the supply of spaces.
In the past, you'd have new cities pop up and take some of the pressure off, but that's slowed down (though places like Austin have gone wild).
It doesn't take supply away... but it does add overhead and middle men - which increases costs. Those investors need returns on their investments - whether you agree with capitalism or not.
"more supply" which is why I included places like CA that have had DECADES of shortages because of regulation, corruption, NIMBY, etc.
When you add the need for "more supply" to the need for investors to recoup costs, increased costs to build (IE: More safety features, solar requirements, etc), increased interest rates, etc?
It's easy to say supply and it's easy to say "towns used to pop up"... it's harder to admit that there's only so much space and those easy to pop-up areas are becoming fewer because there's fewer places to put up "towns" out of nowhere.
Outside of the US, do people think that truth can be changed because you aren't in the US? Just deny literally 100+ years of history?
The only way Socialism works is in The Utopia that's never existed.
The real life examples of socialism are authoritarian nightmares. Thinking that outside of the US this isn't still true is an... interesting... attempt to deny history.
Capitalism has raised billions of people out of poverty. Yes, the people who are no longer starving are happy to no longer be starving. Communism on the other hand usually leads to mass famine. Even nordic democratic socialism is falling apart. None of the systems are perfect, they are all hampered by power hungry leaders. Capitalism clearly seems to be the best option.
Absolute capitalism doesn't work. Every modern economy is its share of socialist policy. The question today isn't whether you support socialism, but rather where you draw the line.
True... but we've never had absolute capitalism. Just like we've never had absolute communism. Absolute socialism. Absolute monarchy. etc.
What we have is imperfect capitalism vs imperfect communism vs imperfect socialism vs ...
The reality is that imperfect capitalism, despite its flaws, is better than the alternatives, despite the attempt to ignore their flaws.
Because that's the only way you can argue socialism is better... is arguing the idea of socialism vs the reality of capitalism.
We can discuss the "line" that gets drawn but when that line crosses from one system to the other? We can absolutely judge Capitalism vs Socialism vs Communism.
The question isn't if... it's when. We've already seen how far the left will go and the only reason they aren't jailing those they disagree with is because they can't.
Yet.