Is anyone else highly concerned with the SCOTUS ruling that the POTUS is immune from criminal liability?

Nah man, this is very concerning. You don't need to calm down; I think everyone else is too fuckin calm about it.

What I want from anyone supporting this decision is a single example of a situation where the President would need to break the law in an official capacity. I want just one. I'll not get it, but I'm gonna keep demanding it.

This is a 5 alarm fire. It's very concerning. This is precariously close to the end to the quarter millennium of the American Experiment. Seriously.

The likely scenarios, as far as I can guess are that...

a) if Biden wins with anything less than a substantial majority, there will be violence. b) if Biden just scrapes a win, violence seems likely. c) if Biden loses, the violence will be long lasting and possibly irreparable in the next generation or two.

They took a torch to your constitution. All for the sake of a very, very evil man.

I am quite afraid, to be honest. The people who are not concerned do not appear to have familiarity with some very significant and recent (ie - less than a century ago) world history.

This is not just a conventional political pendulum shift where every so often you find yourself in vociferous disagreement with where things are going. This is a fundamental shredding of societal fabric.

I would very, very much like to be wrong.

It is extremely concerning. We no longer have three separate branches of government acting as a system of checks and balances.

Disclaimer: someone calm me and op down.

I couldn't believe that every post wasn't about this ruling all day

No, you shouldn't calm down, this decision is absolutely cataclysmic for the US should a dangerous person be elected or the ruling not overturned.

I've been saying the states are okay despite all SCOTUS' stripping of civil rights and everything else wrong with that country because as long as there were checks and balances, voting had relevance.

With this ruling,I can't see that it will continue to.

A president can order their political opponents murdered.

They can order that all civil rights be suspended indefinitely.

They can order a suspension or abolition of term limits.

They can abolish voting altogether in a hundred different ways and nothing can be legally done to halt that president from continuing to abolish voting until it sticks.

If anyone does manage to legally stop the president, the president can kill them or cut off their fingers and remove their voice box.

Literally anything is now legal, fair game.

Biden has spoken out against that kind of power and he has it right now, so VOTE for BIDEN to buy yourselves some time.

Whoever comes after this term or the next likely won't have the same scruples.

This is far and away the most dangerous and harmful decision SCOTUS has ever made, which is saying a LOT.

It is the antithesis of the line in the Constitution explicitly stating that no elected official (like the president) has legal immunity.

The decision to grant an entire branch of the government absolute(it is absolute, anything can become "official") legal immunity could very rapidly destroy the country as it is and turn it into a true authoritarian state within a week.

It takes some time to write, print and sign the executive orders or I'd say a day.

I have to read up on it more because I haven't read or heard enough yet to convince me that this decision is not utterly catastrophic.

I'm shocked the dollar hasn't collapsed, any further international faith in US stability is misplaced.

Antiquated.

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.

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.

Actually I think it is far worse than you may…

They ruled that the president is immune from prosecution for official acts they would get to rule on what that means.
So if Biden does X; they could rule it not official; but if Trump were to do that same thing, I’ve no doubt they would rule the other way

Yep. I'm so over American politics and I think the nation is headed in the wrong direction. I feel that the people are powerless against changing our trajectory. I had been considering doing a PhD abroad and this is really pushing that decision now.

All this shit is literally straight out of the Putin playbook. Take control of the courts, take control of what is legal, take control of elections. Republicans were always too dumb and incompetent to be anything but pawns of a better organized evil.

The Republican party is engaged in another coup

Beau of the Fifth Column on Youtube: https://youtu.be/vNzFQ10uSfU https://youtu.be/0Y-C1fWx37g

"This is now the most important election issue; it has to supersede all of the other ones. The American people now are no longer no longer choosing between two candidates that they really don't like as many of the previous election cycles have been. They're trying to make a determination which one is less likely to become a tyrant."

The only problem I have with this quote is that a large portion of the electorate want the tyrant.

It sincerely feel absolutely insane. Completely beyond any party line bullshit - I'm almost as concerned with what Obama would do with this as what Trump would do with this.

This sort of ruling has no place in a democratic society. It is beyond reprehensible, it is utterly absurd.

The fact that it has been basically accepted by the general public - no riots, no large-scale outcry - sends a dire fucking message.

"May you live in interesting times", indeed.

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.

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.

I had "The USA becomes a Failed State" pencilled in my calendar for November, not for July.

Yes.

This is a fuckin five alarm fire. It's time to leave the building. Don't grab your shit, don't put your shoes on first, fuckin worry about your safety first and foremost because this is an emergency.

I don't know what to do, to be honest. I feel like if you just went to DC near the physical location of the Supreme Court at any point in the next week you would see at least a decent number of people carrying signs and yelling. I thought about traveling there and finding them and talking to them about who they're with and how I can join. I don't know that that will solve the problem, but I think it would probably put you in touch with people who are at least doing fuckin something about it.

It will be good to have allies, learn what people are trying to do, maybe some of it will be productive, and then if the real bad shit starts roughly one year from now, at least you have some allies in place. But yes. It's a fuckin emergency. It's real, real bad.

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.

This ruling was made for trump.

Think of how much trump has done, legally, questionably legal, and illegal, while in office.

Now remove accountability for any of it while ignoring the virtually Sisyphean task already faced to prosecute what he’s (and those surrounding him have) already done, and we have yet to see any sufficiently deterrent sentence being passed.

Now also imagine the arguing over what constitutes “official” acts, you bet your ass that one side is going to be perfectly happy to “officially” let trump shoot someone on 5th avenue.

This strips trump and those like him of the merest inconvenience of facing charges when they leave office. If they leave office.

It’s potentially disastrous on multiple levels.

🎶 it's the end of the world as we know it, and I have crippling anxiety 🎶

It is absolutely highly concerning. That said, there's way too many people who haven't read the official ruling who are panicking instead of advocating for people to vote to keep Biden in office and prepare another viable candidate for that office once his second term is up. Because the only way to get these idiots off the SCOTUS is to elect non-conservative presidents who can win. And that only happens if people both vote and lobby for what they want. We need better electoral college regulations. We need ranked voting. We need the people to lobby to further limit the government because obviously this is what happens when we don't.

This ruling, coupled with the whole "Biden is too old, he should step down" BS is exactly the kind of propaganda concoction that will lead to Trump being re-elected in November if we don't do something.

Do I think this is a way for a President to sanction and enact the murder of political rivals? Under certain circumstances, yes. Do I think the average citizen should be worried about the President signing their death warrant? No.

You have to understand that we've had alphabet agencies for a long time and the President literally could use certain pretexts to kill a person if they wanted so long as they did it a specific way. That has not changed just because of this ruling and that's a big factor people should look at. There's a reason former Presidents haven't been prosecuted for drone strikes. Technically they could have been held accountable in a court of law before that. But we've known for a long time that in all actuality the law only works that way if you're poor or if you're going up against someone else who's independently wealthy. That's why Epstein is dead after all. Not because he trafficked young girls. But because his imprisonment put other rich people in danger. Sam Bankmanfried isn't in prison because he stole money. He's in prison because he stole from other rich people. Same with Elizabeth Holmes.

When Trump was in office, I need you to understand that the government (the people who guard national secrets) actually considerered him a threat and limited his ability to do damage by not telling him things. We would have been much worse off if they hadn't.

As a result, the apparatus of the government is not a monolith, just like the apparatus of the military or even just the US as a whole. It's made up of people. And we've limped along this far because we could rely on them not to do certain things. But what Trump was able to get away with by being elected and being in office? This is the fallout of that.

Your statement that the president can "personally" violate any law without criminal liability isn't correct. Here's a direct quote from the ruling "Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts."

"As for a President’s unofficial acts, there is no immunity. Although Presidential immunity is required for official actions to ensure that the President’s decision making is not distorted by the threat of future litigation stemming from those actions, that concern does not support immunity for unofficial conduct. Clinton, 520 U. S., at 694, and n. 19. The separation of powers does not bar a prosecution predicated on the President’s unofficial acts."

On its face this ruling admits there is a such thing as an unofficial act. The problem is that the SCOTUS should not be allowed to make this decision without checks or balances in place. I.e. if they are making the deduction that a President has immunity, they must cede the determination of such acts that have immunity vs those that don't to another regulatory body. That's the disturbing part to me.

This also makes me question what the point is of the impeachment process specifically because of this passage from the same ruling:

"When the President exercises such author ity, Congress cannot act on, and courts cannot examine, the President’s actions. It follows that an Act of Congress—either a specific one targeted at the President or a generally applicable one—may not criminalize the President’s actions within his exclusive constitutional power. Neither may the courts adjudicate a criminal prosecution that examines such Presidential actions."

Technically an impeachment is not a criminal trial. But that passage doesn't specify the scope. So it could be used to argue that impeachment (while not a criminal proceeding) is an examination of the Presidents actions that potentially would not be allowed. And since the impeachment process is a check and balance for the presidential office, that's not okay.

It makes me very uncomfy from a fundamental perspective. Ignoring the fact that it goes against the founding principles of the US.

It provides rather wide and sweeping immunity, and even presumed immunity.

Although to be clear, the immunity act does not cover any private acts of the president, so if they were to for example,personally murder someone, it shouldn't apply, even remotely.

Now to be clear, the likelihood that a government official uses this to kill people is incredibly small because otherwise the precedent that it would set would literally push us into civil war. Will trump do it ? Good question.

They basically just performed a coup for whoever becomes the next Republican president. It may not be Trump in 2024, but it doesnt matter, as soon as a Republican president is voted in it is over.

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.

If you aren't GQP-brainwashed, you are concerned.

Inspired by the Warren court, I used to think the supreme court was a noble institution, today I believe it has been corrupted by Republican Christofascist shills who want power at all costs, even if it means betraying the constitution to install an unelected king. We're on our way to Gilead unless something is done.

Is anybody NOT concerned?

Can't Biden just have a reaper drone fire a hellfire missile at Trump? Or am I missing something?

This is intentional to make the US dictatorship ready. What do you think will happen if Trump gets elected?

Yes. Be concerned. Be very concerned.

imo, nothing feels more deep state than scotus serving a different america.

also, i just saw some lemmy post a twitter pic saying said scotus ruling is unconstitutional. since the judicial branch is the one responsible with interpreting the law, we can probably tell what they are going to interpret "unconstitutional" as at this point.

Can the current president hunt the former president for sport now?

You're not wrong, and if anything it's actually worse than it at first seems. This is a radically new and expansive interpretation of the powers of the presidency that effectively say, there is no difference between use and abuse of executive power. Any use of the power is by definition legitimate and cannot be an abuse.

Consider bribery, one of the few crimes explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. Say the President of China writes a personal check to the President of the United States in exchange for using any one of his constitutional powers, like a pardon, or sending in seal team 6, or appointing that person attorney general, or to a cabinet position.

First, The president's motive can never be considered or investigated. Now think about that. There is no criminal prosecution in history that hasn't included some investigation of motive. It is key to describing quid pro quo. But because the president is absolutely immune in all of their official acts, their motive for using the official act cannot be entered into evidence.

Secondly, the official act itself cannot be used as evidence in any investigation even of a non-official act. So you could never say in an indictment or in a court of law, " and then the president issued the pardon", or " and then the president sent in seal team 6", you could only say in the indictment that person x gave the president some money. That's it.

Then there's Justice Thomas's opinion which, not to get in the weeds, but says that appointing a special prosecutor for the case in Georgia is a gross abuse of power. And unconstitutional.

So it is essential for the functioning of the executive branch that the President's right to stage a military coup of the United States be protected, but appointing a special prosecutor is a tyrannical act and gross abuse of power.

Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for attempting to overthrow the government, but Joe Biden is a tyrant for assigning an independent investigator to investigate him.

It is impossible to look at this supreme Court 's decisions and not see that their interpretation of the Constitution differs greatly depending on which party is in power.

The podcasters at 5-4 called this a Dred v Scott-type decision. Dred v Scott was the decision that held in the 1800s that slaves were property and could not Free themselves, and which led directly to the civil war.

We'll have to live with this decision for several years whether we like it or not, until at least two and probably three supreme Court justices leave the court and are replaced by non-conservative kooks. It may be the law of the land for the rest of our lifetime. It certainly will be the law of the land for the next decade and there is really nothing that the president or Congress can do about it as far as we know.

Oh and if Trump is elected, All of the oldest supreme Court justices could resign in order to allow Trump to appoint much younger arch conservative justices who will live longer and ensure that a conservative dominated Court controls us for many more years.

For 248 years, presidents were required to uphold the rule of law, otherwise there was an understanding that we would indict your ass the second you left office. The supreme Court has determined that is unconstitutional, and in order to uphold the rule of law, the supreme executive with the most power of any person in the world, must have a free hand to violate practically any law and cannot be prosecuted for it ever.

The only remedy is impeachment and removal from office. 2/3 of the Senate need to agree to impeachment in order to remove a president from office, and the President has such sweeping powers and immunity that it will be, especially in this divided era, impossible to reach that threshold.

So nobody is exaggerating when they call this an invitation to Donald Trump to become an autocrat. Roberts, Gorsuch, Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh and Barrett have destroyed The credibility of their court and set the table for The greatest threat to the existence of the United States as a democracy since the civil war.

As with the lowest posts in this thread, this will not be popular, but I'll say it anyway.

I'm not concerned. Not because I think everything is fine. It's because it's not been fine for a long long time. Now the curtain is being pulled back and everyone can see the reality that's always been there. Privilege just means private law, and the president is the most privileged person in the US. As time moves forward the window dressing is removed and we can see reality for what it really is. It reminds me of This Vicious Cabaret:

But the backdrop's peel and the sets give way and the cast gets eaten by the play / There's a murderer at the Matinee, there are dead men in the aisles / And the patrons and actors too are uncertain if the show is through / And with side-long looks await their cue but the frozen mask just smiles.

You are right to be concerned. If this is not reversed soon and with a bang, the USA would either be in a civil war or start WWIII in the next 5 years

I'm deeply concerned about that.
I'm more concerned that there's literally no one in the streets over it.

Yes, have you browsed Lemmy or the general internet the past few days??? How can you still be asking "is anyone else" at this point?

Mhm as a Canadian, the entire last week of SCOTUS rulings spells doom for your country if the people of the US allow Trump and any other federal Republican to attain power again. Lots of cause to be alarmed.

Roe v Wade from before this week was absolutely terrible. Snyder v Grants Pass was downright awful, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo is going to have awful consequences for years to come. Trump v. USA to me is the cherry on top of this shit ruling sundae.

The best thing you can do is disseminate each of these rulings, and why they are bad to every person you know. The message for Roe is clear, as most non-crazies would rather have state governments not mess with the business in your genitals. Try and figure out a good way to explain each of the others as they are just as horrible.

I'm very stressed about it, but I don't know what to do other than doomscroll.