Well if you think floffles are boffles then..... This is classic abusive stuff.
Yeah that didn't make sense, because that's what you're doing. I get it now. You are putting words in people's mouth that they didn't say, because you don't like and can't beat their arguments, so you're going to make other people's arguments for them that you think you can beat. Yeah, I get it now why people are just peeling out of here and away from this. I'm pretty close to bailing too.
I genuinely do not understand what you're talking about. I'm not even trying to beat any arguments. I'm not suggesting your feelings are invalid in any way. I just want to make sure the blame is in the right place.
Wow that's like saying....
There never was a fire extinguisher because the building never caught on fire. No one would vote to set the building on fire or vote for someone to set the building on fire. If someone votes to burn the building down, then that alone is the problem, not the thing that removed the fire extinguisher. Pay no attention to the 9 people in black robes removing the fire extinguisher, which as stated has never been used and was never there but they're removing it.
Because a president never broke the law and pushed the system this bad it was fine the whole time? No because the fire extinguisher was never there because someone could have burned down the building but didn't? Pay no attention to the fire extinguisher holder box they haven't removed yet ....Pay no attention to that arsonist saying he'll burn it down like he tried to last time.
A fire extinguisher is an object. It is either there or not there, surely. A legal theory isn't an object and doesn't exist until it's tested. Most constitutional scholars agreed for generations that there was no chance of any SCOTUS ruling that the President could be criminally charged for performing Presidential duties because the Constitution forbids any coequal branch of government from limiting the power of any other.
Presidents have already set fires, like suborning a memorandum from a cabinet member justifying torture. Nobody reached for the fire extinguisher then because it was understood that it wouldn't work. In a sense, what I'm saying is the opposite of what hector described it as before - not that checks and balances are in place, but that, beyond a certain point, there aren't any de jure checks and balances. Our government was never designed to be turned against itself like this.
Why should we care about things Trump said before like a week ago? Anything before like a week ago doesn't count? The universe reset and all the completely crazy things he said and did before this one Supreme Court Opinion just don't matter. Why would we ever consider those facts instead of some fantasy where he's hasn't done all the bad things he's done and has promised to do again but worse on video and in writing? And now there is a Supreme Court Opinion saying he can't be effectively prosecuted if he does crimes and that's just nothing to worry about?
It's not "nothing to worry about". It's just that nothing has changed from a week ago. You should go on worrying the same amount as before. The Supreme Court decision is a
distraction. From a Con Law standpoint, it was uncontroversial - nobody in Washington seriously thought the President could be prosecuted for performing official duties. This doesn't even mean that Presidents can't be prosecuted, it means they can only be prosecuted for acts Congress can lawfully criminalize.
Consider this. The Constitution says that the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the Army. If Congress passed a law appointing a new official as Commander-in-Chief and forbidding the President from issuing any orders to the armed forces, it would be self-evident that this is unconstitutional and the President could not be prosecuted for breaking that law by issuing orders, right? Because the Constitution says he has that power and Congress is not granted the power to take it away.
You're "just" arguing the new decision doesn't give anybody any new power. Nope. Where? Where in the constitution did it say the President is immune from criminal prosecution? It does not say that and the Supreme Court made it up a brand new thing out of nothing. Where does it say this stuff about immunity from criminal prosecution in the constitution? It doesn't. Yeah, he could be impeached, but that does not have text saying he can't be prosecuted. That's huge and the founders would have said that if they wanted it.
You start with "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.", the first sentence of Article II. Under that principle, the President has what's called
plenary power over the executive. The President is the Executive and nobody else can take that power away. Second, you take the principle that no branch of the government has powers not granted to it by the Constitution. No part of the Constitution grants the Congress, nor the Courts, the power to criminalize executive actions,
except through impeachment. Therefore, under separation of powers doctrine, no other branch has the power to criminalize executive actions. Any law that purports to criminalize executive actions would be
void because unconstitutional. And if you're wondering, the Founding Fathers DID say, in the Federalist Papers, that it was meant to work out that way.
We don't want Trump or Biden or ANYONE having this new power, but just say I'm afraid of an elected Trump to make me seem unreasonable and partisan.
Oh, is this why you think I'm "putting words in your mouth"? I thought being afraid of an elected Trump sounds pretty reasonable. I mean I don't think Biden is going to do any of those things you quoted Trump talking about. Whether he should have the power or not is one thing, but the issue is
at issue because of the question of someone who would.
You are ignoring real world things again and pretending things are cut and dry to fit your agenda. Soldiers get "gotcha'd" all the time. Nothing is safe for them. The idea that this is not going to screw over some poor soldier and that soldiers won't get put in this position with a new thing to worry about because of what the Supreme Court just did is nonsense.
It's not a new thing to worry about though. The possibility of unlawful orders being issued has always existed and has happened. Yeah, it sucks. But whether the President can be prosecuted for it (which is still up in the air, actually. I would argue that blatantly unlawful orders that violate the understood laws of war that existed even when the Constitution was written, like the My Lai massacre if we imagine that a President had ordered it, cannot be official actions because they exceed any power that a President could be granted even by the Constitution, but it's certainly arguable. There's an extra wrinkle in this I was already planning to bring up, so I'll put that in just a minute.) or not doesn't change the equation for the soldier. You could argue that this decision might make Presidents more likely to issue illegal orders and leave soldiers in the wind - I would counter that it was already widely understood that immunity
probably worked like this, so any President who wanted to do so would have done it anyway. This has arguably happened many times already, at the Presidential level, if you believe, as I do, that ordering torture, assassination of American citizens, and so many other things going back generations are illegal orders. Our government truly was built on the stipulation that you shouldn't elect a President, or a majority of Congress, who would do bad things. I realize this seems like weak protection now, but that doesn't mean that we can expect the bureaucracy to save us by subverting the Constitution that set us up that way. It means we either need to get the moral fabric of our country in order so it doesn't happen, or issue new Constitutional amendments restricting those powers further.
This point, by the way, brings me to that wrinkle I mentioned, and
the most important part of this post in my opinion - if you read anything, it should be this. One more thing the Founding Fathers said, really clearly, in various historical documents is that America should
never allow Congress to create a standing army. Article I explicitly limits the money flow for raising armies to two years at a time, which was intended to mean that armies would be raised in exigencies and then disbanded again. That's why Congress to this day has to keep passing "keep the army up" omnibus bills to get around this. The Founders
explicitly said that, since the President is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces with hardly any checks on this power - which they considered necessary to prosecute a war effectively without stultified decision-making - then Congress allowing the President to come into control of a standing army would effectively make him a King, able to use the army to do whatever he likes. Which they didn't want. It didn't take long before we all decided to break that rule, so yes, we're now in the position that they feared and it's really only lucky that it took this long.
Nixon chose to resign? Nixon chose to resign? Where on earth are you getting this from? He was forced to resign because they put his back against a wall and threatened Nixon with criminal charges. Nixon was afraid of those criminal charges because he thought he could be charged with those criminal charges, because he could and they were totally going to. The "choice" wasn't a choice, because if he did not resign he would've been impeached and charged by force, because this new bad Supreme Court case wasn't around yet.
Nixon wanted to salvage his dignity? Salvage his dignity? OMG where are you getting this? Even if that's the lie he told himself, Nixon wasn't left with any dignity after Watergate. Nixon is notorious even now. He didn't salvage anything like dignity and he didn't choose anything because he got forced with the threats from Watergate of way more than just impeachment.
Nixon was given the choice of resigning with a pretense of dignity or being prosecuted, and he chose the former. That's still a choice. It's the same as the choice an employee gets to resign or be fired, to be sure. I don't know what you call that if it's not a choice. Just because it's a choice between two bad options doesn't make it not a choice.
Yeah, the guy famous for being corrupt did a backroom deal to get a Pardon by making his Vice President the President if he would PARDON him. There was crime and worry about criminal prosecution, and you can tell because of the Pardon. Nixon resigning would have gotten him out of impeachment, but the pardon went to making sure the prosecution did not prosecute him.
It was understood at the time that Nixon resigning probably doesn't get him out of impeachment, although it would have had to go through the courts for sure. There were competing claims on whether a President can still be impeached out of office, and it continues to be likely (though not, strictly, tested) that the answer is yes. That's part of the reason he sought the pardon, and the other part was to salvage some dignity. You may not feel that Nixon has any dignity left, sure, but documentation from the time clearly shows he felt that he was doing the best he could to protect what he saw as his legacy. Not being successful doesn't change his intentions.
"Thing is," no. Hector is right and you just declared him wrong. You can't just fire every one in government and substitute whoever you want as President.
Article II strongly implies that you can. It's never been tested, but Congress has no power to limit the staffing choices of the President. Again, this is basic Con Law, it's widely understood that if it went to the Supreme Court there's a good chance that it ends up being decided that way. Ultimately, nothing in the Constitution is cut and dried until it goes to the Supreme Court, sure, but we can assume the words mean what it looks like they mean.
I mean… Nixon’s dignity was salvaged in that he wasn’t impeached, removing his immunity, then charged and convicted for the crimes he committed in office and marched to jail in chains or whatever. He did have a choice, but he decided to take the way out that guaranteed he’d not end up in jail.
MaxSpin isn’t saying anything controversial. The SCOTUS decision doesn’t really change anything, all it really did was clarify a little bit the immunity a president already has, and there are already things like impeachment that can remove that.
The only problem is that requires both houses in congress to impeach him, and we saw in the aftermath of Jan 6th that being scared of what their voters will do to them might make a particular congressperson or senator think twice about doing that, even if they were outwardly critical of Trump’s involvement in it.
He also isn't advocating for any of the bad things y’all are hypothesizing about, just that the bad things y’all are hypothesizing about could happen regardless of checks and balances if enough people within government support it. Deterrents don’t work if they won’t actually be applied.
Right, this is exactly what I mean. The only functional solution is to vote harder. I realize that looks increasingly perilous, but we still have to accept that there isn't another bonus layer of protection that can save us.
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