dewitty1 reblogged
Hey y’all remember when Nixon said “it’s not illegal if the president does it.” And we all agreed that was insane and unconstitutional? Well what a difference a couple decades and lots and lots of dark money make
I also feel like it's worth pointing out in a bit more detail just how bad-faith this decision was:
- Creates, for the first time in US history, the category of "absolute presidential immunity" wherein If The President Says It's Official, It Must Be Legal, I Guess, which is terrifying for any number of reasons;
- As noted by @carsonjonesfiance above, everyone knew that "the president can do whatever he wants and it's legal" was rightly rejected as batshit insane when Nixon (who looks like a kid selling ice cream cones next to Trump) said it; now the Heritage Foundation is making excellent progress on their "install a theocratic fascist dictator whose theocratic fascist dictatorship is legal because we say so" decades-long process of court capture;
- The three liberals on the court, especially Sotomayor, wrote a scathing dissent warning that this makes a mockery of the constitutional republic and the principle that no one man is above the law (which, you might say, was the impetus for the founding of America in the first place, where King George III Just Saying So was not acceptable as a system of governance). They're also notably, and I suspect correctly, unconvinced that the vague "official/unofficial" distinction is ever going to amount to anything, because the SCOTUS conservatives will just fucking throw out anything they don't like and rewrite the laws as necessary.
- In other words, as Sotomayor puts it, "this decision grants Trump all the immunity he asked for and then some." Because not only did SCOTUS make up this bullshit "the president can do whatever he wants actually!" fringe legal theory and enshrine it in American jurisprudence from now on, they didn't even bother to deal with the consequences of that decision. They made no attempt to sort out which of Trump's acts were "official"; they just kicked the can back to the circuit court and went "lol you figure it out, good luck." Let's note that SCOTUS can once more unilaterally torpedo whatever the lower courts come up with, so they might just be wasting their time to define "official" vs. "unofficial" acts anyway.
- After SCOTUS swiftly took review of this case in December 2023, after the lower circuit had already issued an extremely comprehensive opinion refuting Trump's claim, they took as long as possible to deliver this terrible decision in the first week of July; even if it had been less terrible, there's still almost no chance that the legal wrangling would be over before the election. The wingnut SCOTUS doesn't care about anything except helping Trump remain viable through the election, if need be with blatant and unprecedented juridical interference.
- This was deliberately made to shield Trump from the actions of his first term, and it will embolden him even more in his second term. SCOTUS has just given him a blank check to say anything that he goddamn well pleases in his career as a fascist dictator is actually legal; he can just designate it as an "official act," end of story. This is after SCOTUS has spent this entire term blatantly and shamelessly rewriting, tossing out, gutting, or otherwise ignoring DECADES of settled precedent in order to make it easier for the worst elements in American society to do whatever they please. This is what all that Heritage Foundation/Federalist Society/Harlan Crow dark money gets you. SCOTUS is functioning exactly as designed and it will not be stopped until it is stopped.
- Hillary Clinton warned about literally all of this, repeatedly and in detail, in 2016. People laughed at her, scorned her off, called her every name in the book, and did not bother to vote for her. Trump won and stacked SCOTUS to the current result.
- Aside from being an unaccountable fascist dictator in his (please God never to happen) second term, he will also stack the deck even further. Thomas and Alito will retire and be replaced by younger wingnuts, locking in this current ideological imbalance for the next 30 years. I would wager real money that there would be nothing of American democracy left if this happens.
- The next president will have at least two SCOTUS picks. Two SCOTUS picks from Biden would flip the court 5-4 liberal and make the tiniest bit of progress actually possible again, arrest this slide into uncontrolled fascist theocracy, and put at least a few fucking guardrails back on this lunacy.
- Biden is 81. Get over it. Biden has a stutter. Get the fuck over it. Biden isn't your personal perfect progressive pony candidate (while the left is now turning on former Online Leftist darlings Bernie Sanders and AOC as soon as they expressed any desire to work to make change with the system and didn't immediately burn it all down and make everything into Communist Paradise):
- GET THE FUCK OVER IT.
- Here are your next two clicks!
