Sorry if this is not the proper community for this question. Please let me know if I should post this question elsewhere.
So like, I’m not trying to be hyperbolic or jump on some conspiracy theory crap, but this seems like very troubling news to me. My entire life, I’ve been under the impression that no one is technically/officially above the law in the US, especially the president. I thought that was a hard consensus among Americans regardless of party. Now, SCOTUS just made the POTUS immune to criminal liability.
The president can personally violate any law without legal consequences. They also already have the ability to pardon anyone else for federal violations. The POTUS can literally threaten anyone now. They can assassinate anyone. They can order anyone to assassinate anyone, then pardon them. It may even grant complete immunity from state laws because if anyone tries to hold the POTUS accountable, then they can be assassinated too. This is some Putin-level dictator stuff.
I feel like this is unbelievable and acknowledge that I may be wayyy off. Am I misunderstanding something?? Do I need to calm down?
I an not even American and even I am pissed at that dumb ruling.
And what is even more annoying is that I read that what is considered an official act is not clear, so a court will need to decide if an act was official or not, and that court will be the SCOTUS.
So they could easily decide that acts Biden performed was not official, but the same acts performed by Trump was official, and invent some crap about context being different in som complex way, so with this ruling they have moved the power from the POTUS to the SCOTUS while POTUS stays the fall guy.
I get the feeling that what Trump did to earn his felonies isn’t exactly covered. Mainly because there is no way that could be considered an official act
Didnt they just say, that it was an official act?
I believe they did.
I’m going to add my “it’s very fucking concerning and we should be out in the streets protesting” comment. Tell me to be there this weekend, and I will.
The rules remained the same as it has for 200 years. The president is PRESUMED immunity for OFFICIAL acts. UNOFFICIAL acts have no immunity. This means there are still two angles of attack. Firstly you can say it that even though it was official, it was still unlawful. And second, you can say it wasnt an official act at all.
Nah you’re missing it here. If it is deemed official it is lawful no matter if it were illegal for anyone else.
I wonder who killed JFK. Yeah it was Bush Senior and his ilk. Those responsible for the business (biznuss) plot by fascist scum in the 30s to coup d’etat the American government then. If it was not for Smedley Butler being the person they tried to get to lead this failed coup, and him going to congress instead to lead their army of hundreds of thousands… history would be VERY different.
This link is a link to one of Americas greatest heroes, in my opinion. I hope he rests in peace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
This link has a picture of the most ruthless killers in history all together cozy as a family, being two faced little biatches & fleecing the American people with wedge issue politics where people morally feel they need to choose a side (abortion, gun control, social issues like LGBTQ rights etc), instead of the American people uh, focusing on the economic side of things . https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/the-story-of-the-viral-photo-of-the-presidential-families.html
I am not important enough to be targeted but privileged enough to be noticed if I was disappeared.
Not from US, deeply concerned anyway.
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If it’s close at all I don’t see how MAGA and the GOP don’t just steal the election. I really think Biden is going to need at least 2020 electoral numbers to win safely.
Biden won the 2020 election by 50,000 votes.
That’s a funny way to misspell 7 million.
Hell, Clinton won the popular vote by over 3 million.
If the popular vote won the election you’d have a point.
Is that how American presidential elections are won? Or did a small lead in voters in a few counties tip the swing states?
The worst part is that those who do not understand this will tell you you are insane, catastrophizing, should just focus on your own life, and will get angry at you for really caring… while the ones who do understand, generally just get depressed.
Meanwhile, our political system implodes as we have passed the climate threshold. Rivers in Alaska are running orange as a result of permafrost thawing. That means we are releasing methane now, means its only going to get worse faster.
Thank god I have never wanted and do not have children.
So all bets are off? If violence is inevitable and the alternative is a de facto dictatorship, maybe the liberal Americans should strike first while they still can, e.g., assassinating orange man and other conservative leaders.
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I know it’s wrong, but doesn’t it feel so right?
Historically assassination doesn’t really work out well, and I’d imagine that’s doubly so here, where the president’s really just a sock puppet for the billionaire class.
I’ve never wanted a Death Note more than I do now.
No, it can be done “legally.” Article 1, Section 9, Clause 2:
The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.
If President Biden suspended habeas corpus as allowed by the Constitution as required to protect public safety from seditionists who, remember, have made public threats of violence, and rounded them up, that would be an official act and he would be immune from charges. Furthermore, there would no longer be the votes in the House to impeach him.
ETA: Scare quotes. This would buy quite a lot of time as the issue worked its way through the courts. It might even incite open rebellion, then the question would be essentially moot.
They took a torch to your constitution. All for the sake of a very, very evil man.
The heritage foundation has been working on this long before the angry orange was a viable candidate. He is just the current face because he is belligerent enough to follow through on what they want to do and does a bang up job of riling up the conservative base.
If he was out of the picture they would be doing the same things with someone else who wouldn’t be nearly as effective, but they would still be going down the same road.
That’s one of the things that really gets me about all this. This didn’t happen suddenly, but there has never been any actual effort by the opposition party to counter it. They never address the trend in any organized way, and never really raise awareness of it. The closest they get is to fundraise off the threats, but it never translates into action or progress. If anything, they organize to ostracize the few members of their party that do speak forcefully about it.
It’s horribly depressing, but the only people around to fight the actually evil people are slightly less evil people.
The only reason democrats, as a whole, are a better alternative to republicans is because they chose a different portion of the population to pander to in order to gain power.
It really fucking sucks.
Yes, it scares the shit out of me. Even if we manage to never elect Trump before he dies, the next time any Republican makes it to the presidency, the American Experiment is over.
I think it’s silly to assume that this can’t and won’t be abused by Democrats as well, given time. The worst thing we could do in this situation is make it partisan.
No president should have this power.
Not to defend the democrats too much but even if they do it, the SCOTUS is heavily biased against them which means that they would get heavily punished.
Also at the least the liberal wing of the SCOTUS voted against this, unlike the republican appointed judges.
So there’s clearly one side pushing for this and one trying to prevent it.
It’s one more piece of Project 2025.
Trump is the side-show. Stop getting distracted by his fat orange ass. The disorganized, played more golf and gave more bad speeches than any President before him is just a side show. Most of the executive branch jobs that go with the administration each election were left empty in 2016.
Project 2025 is an organized, focused Trump term where the machinery runs for him. Where the mechanics of what to do have been thought out and planned for since 2020. Where he can sit on a gold toilet and truly let other people handle the day to day.
And just sign it all with presidential immunity.
So unless cardiovascular disease does it’s fucking job in the next 4 months (yeah, that’s right, the self imposed I don’t want to deal with it time warp you’re in let you forget that it’s just 4 months away), and bad COVID comes back and hits the SCOTUS hard, it’ll be SCOTUS 2.0 for the entire executive branch of the government come 2025. And like a SCOTUS vote, that 2:1 vote in our entire government will be in favor of authoritarian Christian nationalism. That’s what the the SCOTUS vote on immunity is. It’s not about Trump. It’s about authoritarianism going forward.
High odds on Project 2025 because I know you fuckers under 40 won’t be voting in the numbers boomers or GenX do. You’ll stock up on the steam summer sale, maybe get a Costco crate of cool ranch, tuck in, and try to pretend it’s not happening instead.
Yea, it sucks, but the vote is basically Kamala or Trump. No or yes on Project 2025. And if project 2025 goes in, America really is dead and shit is going to get violent.
Not sure another play through of Mass Effect Legendary or BG3 is going to be able to block that out this time.
OK boomer
Millenials are old now. We’re not “the youth”, we’re like mid-30s to early 40s.
Four years ago, when the last presidential election occurred, the millennial age range was 24-39. Beyond that, I’m comparing generational participation in elections at particular ages.
Further, not all of Gen Z will be of voting age for this election, so the youngest generational cohort where all members of that cohort are able to vote is still millennials, i.e., millennials are the youngest generation able to fully participate in elections.
I’m not saying millennials are all “young,” I’m saying that in terms of electoral participation statistics, they’re the youngest generation able to fully participate, and that compared to when Gen X and Boomers were going, Gen Z and Millennials participate (and have participated) at higher rates than the generations above them.
This is contrary to the subtext of the Boomer Lite (Gen X) poster to which I’m responding that implies younger generations are too busy distracting themselves with their phones and video games to participate in politics.
It seemed really obvious to me that he was talking about actual youth, ie Zoomers. But you started throwing a bunch of statistics about millenials.
Millenials are a politically active generation. The fear is that Zoomers are not. That was the point I got from his comment.
As I said, Gen Z has, so far, participated in the elections they’ve been eligible for at higher rates than any previous generation since the age of voting was made 18, including millennials.
The youngest of Gen Z is currently about 12 years old, so they’ve had less elections to participate in with a smaller percentage of their generational cohort able to participate. Nevertheless, so far, a higher percentage of eligible Gen Z voters have voted in elections than Millennials, Boomers, and Boomers Lite.
The youngest generational cohort that are all above the voting age are millennials, which have also voted at higher rates than Boomers and Boomers Lite at similar ages.
Nevertheless, so far, a higher percentage of eligible Gen Z voters have voted in elections than Millennials, Boomers, and Boomers Lite.
…compared to previous generations at that age.
Youth turnout is still abysmal, it’s just less abysmal than previous generations.
K
Lol, not a boomer.
All I hear is I can’t vote for this asshole because Israel. Or, I’m not doing this (Trump and Biden) again.
And games are everyone these days. From boomers to high schoolers. Granted, I think the number of boomers is likely less than all the rest. I’m sure Steam is doing a hefty sales level from GenX on down.
And there absolutely is a time warp of avoidance in general. Even the media has less energy for the election crap of late.
Oh, bonus, sentencing for trump is being delayed until after the election.
I feel like if Trump wins the election, my trans ass is going to end up in a concentration camp. Kinda hope I die before that happens.
We’re completely fucked. The cult of 45 has a superpower few people understand: bottomless stupidity. It’s more frightening than it sounds. They will destroy themselves for their orange god, and take the rest of us with them. They have nothing to lose, and their only desire is for their dictator to “make the libruls cry”.
And as usual, the leaders of the Democrats are bringing educational pamphlets to a gun fight.
It’s not stupidity, it’s loyalty to the level of irrationality.
You’ll understand the current American right if you assume that they have no attachment to the meaning of their words, and the prime axiom they operate by is: “My team is always right”.
They use words as weapons to convince those who can be swayed by them, but they themselves are immune to being swayed by words, and largely indifferent to their literal meaning - only their emotional content.
This is not to deify the left, they have their own problems.
The working class folks on the right have a lot more in common with the working class folks on the left than they realize or will admit to themselves. They see “liberals” as both the enemy and the source of all their problems. Trump and the Republicans could dismantle Social Security and Medicare and every social program that exists, causing tremendous harm to working class people on both sides…and Trump’s cult followers would still blame the left for it. They consistently vote against their own interests and fail to acknowledge facts or truth. If that’s not stupidity, I don’t know what stupidity means.
When he went to Miami to be indicted he was disappointed because not a single person showed up. Hard to square with all these supposed super fans. Phish had more loyal fans.
I appreciate the counterpoint and hope it means something. The polls show Biden trailing Trump by an uncomfortable margin. Not that I put much faith in polls anymore.
And they’re not even good pamphlets! They’re trite bullshit!
The president can personally violate any law without legal consequences.
This isn’t true.
They ruled that the President has criminal immunity for official acts in line with the constitutional rights and duties of the POTUS.
They also ruled that non-official acts, or acts taken in a personal capacity as a private citizen, are not immune to criminal prosecution, and that there’s a large gray area in between the two where it needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis.
I’m very concerned. The US has been increasingly authoritarian for a long time. But I really hate hoarding people are only seeing “oh shit that’s authoritarian now”
I mean, let’s be real, we live in a fucking authoritarian police state, and this isn’t something that suddenly happened with Trump or the SCOTUS, they are just showing some of the terminal symptoms. Our police force is above the law, mass surveillance is normal, corporate surveillance is a profitable business that doesn’t shirk from getting profit from the Govt, and our democratic system is feeling pretty autocratic.
The oppressive arms of the next authoritarian on the throne of the oval office have been set up over many decades, accelerating recently. But now that the throne has been polished, people are starting to notice.
This system is fucked.
Hopefully this is a wake up call. We’ve got military bases all around the world, the only country like that. That’s weird, right? We’re the world government stomping around the world, deciding what countries are part of the modern world and which ones aren’t depending not on whether you’re a dictatorship or not, but whether we like you and if your economic policies are beneficial to us. And that authoritarianism and imperialism is finally coming home to roost domestically. I hate to see it, because I live here, but it makes sense with what we’ve been as a country since we killed off all the natives for their land.
Bringing up imperialism is a good call, you’re absolutely right. Although I left it out in my comment, the techniques used abroad always come back home on Foucault’s imperial boomerang.
The technology we use on our borders will be used to oppress activists and protesters in the city. The techniques used to stomp on indigenous people abroad will stomp on our queers and PoC back at home. Old military equipment will be sold to the military we turn on our civilians: cops.
I’m not American and so am not in touch with American politics, but I have an American friend who doesn’t seem to be bothered by it. I assume he knows better than me, so I’m trying not to worry about it.
But if I were to worry about it, I can see the whole Trump situation leading to another civil war for you guys…
Biden has no balls. He should take one for the team and order the execution of SCOTUS. Either he gets prosecuted or he’ll put an end to this nonsense by force. Even if he gets prosecuted he’s old as fuck he’ll never see prison.
