Read up on Secretary Belknap. Yes he can because there could be the added penalty after conviction of being barred from office in the future.
statement one happened due to the president being too involved in the people’s business to be able to properly mount a defence.
statement 2 is one way you get the president out of office to prosecute him.
statement 3 should read that biden would be impeached, then convicted by the senate, removing him from the presidency, then he could be indicted, arrested, and tried.
what team trump is trying for is that a president can not be charged with anything at all unless a successful impeachment occurred for anything he did in office.
trouble is when trump was tried in the senate, they argued the opposite. that he couldn’t be impeached because he left office, and the senate is the wrong place to try him. it should be a courtroom. senators also held that same argument.
I could buy “questioning” as an official duty. But not committing fraud in an effort to overturn.
Can a President with immunity ram through an amendment? Sure, that would be illegal, but since has immunity, that doesn’t matter. Write it so that the current President is immune to the immunity amendment, so he can’t then be prosecuted after it is adopted.
Speaking of scary arguments, the attorney for the prosecution seemed to be making the argument that, how a president should determine whether something was legal while he was in office was to ask his attorney general, and if that attorney general said it was, then the president is off the hook. Which is basically just moving the dictatorship level down one person.
Meet Stephen Miller the new AG. “Why yes Mr. president rounding up all of your political opponents into death camps is fully in part of your official duties.”
And this was the argument made by the prosecution. With friends like these who needs enemies.
I want to expand on this. It’s important to see the hypotheticals that Coney Barrett put before Trump lawyer, John (“Sig”) Sauer SOURCE:
[ACB]“So, you concede that private acts don’t get immunity?” Barrett asked Sauer, to which he replied, “We do.”
[Barrett then referred to pages 46 and 47 of Smith’s brief in the case.]
[She alluded to three hypothetical acts as outlined in the case, asking Sauer whether each of the following was considered a private act:]
The petitioner turned to a private attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims of election fraud to spearhead his challenges to the election results.
The petitioner conspired with another private attorney who caused the filing in court of a verification signed by petitioner that contain false allegations to support a challenge.
Three private actors—two attorneys, including those mentioned above, and a political consultant—helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding. A petitioner and a co-conspirator attorney directed that effort.
“So those acts you would not dispute?” Barrett said. “Those were private, and you wouldn’t raise a claim that they were official?”
[Sauer said his side disputes all the allegations but said that all three scenarios are considered private acts.]
So, we’re not saying Trump DID any of those things, but somebody doing those things hypothetically would clearly be acting outside the boundaries of their official duties.
BAM!
The President has no role in approving Constitutional amendments.
Well, yeah, according to the law.
It’s that last bit that’s at issue, innit?
And if the Attorney General says it’s not, fire them and go to the Assistant Attorney General and if they say it’s not, keep going until you get to Robert Bork.
All on a Saturday night.
I’m afraid the current crop of SC justices would not be able to grasp even simple logic such as this.
I sure wish Kagan, or better yet, Jackson, when the defense lawyers were claiming that without immunity future presidents would live in fear of being prosecuted after leaving office, would have asked, “Kind of like the impeachment of Joe Biden? The only thing that would prevent that is for future presidents not to break the law.”
Like I have said earlier, if a President feels that to fulfill his responsibilities as President he must violate the law, then either there is something wrong with the law or something wrong with what we are requiring out of the President.
I will admit, Kagan (I think it was Kagan) did say that that having a President hamstrung by threat of criminal prosecution was a far better situation than having a President that had no concern of criminal prosecution.
As a devil’s advocate position, one could argue that this was an example of the exception that proves the rule. If the president could be tried like any normal citizen outside of impeachment then why would you mention that after impeachment he could be tried. You might as well say that after impeachment he a eat an apple. By making an saying that impeachment provides an exceptional circumstance where he can be tried, then that means that otherwise he can’t be.
If the Senate is controlled by the same party as the President, this would mean that they can conspire to commit any illegal acts they want to keep that power forever such as imprisoning/killing opponents, canceling elections etc. As long as they don’t vote to impeach, and the president would have the power to pardon them, what mechanism can stop this? How does this not make us instantly no longer a representative democracy? How does this not instantly end the American experiment and inflict despotism and murderous dictatorship upon us? (I realize you are doing devil’s advocate here)
As someone who considers Trump a threat to our democracy, even I find some of the reactions in this thread to be wild. This court case is not going to give Trump carte blanche to murder his political enemies or overthrow the Constitution. Y’all need to calm down.
I think that it is becoming increasingly clear that the American Experiment of representative Democracy relied on the assumption that the American people would not elect a congress that was substantially composed by those who did not value that representative Democracy. That assumption is being sorely tested.
I’m going to guess that after all the legalese is stripped out, the decision will boil down to:
Presidents don’t have absolute immunity for crimes committed while in office, but in this particular case, Smith is not allowed to prosecute this particular ex-president for this particular crime, at least until after the election when it will become a moot point.
The problem is, the people pushing this have shown they are not swayed by reasonable discussions. So we need a bit of wild hyperbole to maybe get through to them.
What percent of we, the hyperbolic, histrionic, and melodramatic saw the combination of 1/6 and the Alternate Slate of Electors scheme coming.
We should anticipate much more restraint and solemnity in a potential second Trump term?
Largely ignoring the OP about absolute immunity, but to comment on the SCOTUS hearing today…
From Reuters:
I feel like he should have mentioned that, like all citizens in the country, a former President is going to be put before a jury and that it’s that jury which shall make the determination of criminality. We can talk about political persecution all day but it’s a bit of an empty threat since the political echelon has limited ability to actually follow through with any of it.
That said, I expect this to land somewhere in the territory of Gregg v Georgia. There’s a danger of grave outcomes if the criminal system doesn’t work to a higher standard than usual - in Gregg, because the punishment would be execution, and here because corrupt prosecution of political opponents could lead to tyranny. It seems reasonable to say that there must be such a standard in place, here, as well.
Given that Congress has come up with an approved the Special Counsel legislation, based on looking at exactly these sorts of questions under Nixon and Clinton, I feel like the Gregg standard has already been met, here. Given that, additionally, grand juries were used and their guidance obeyed, we’re in the double clear.
While not carte blanche…
Justice Elena Kagan pushed Trump’s attorney on just how far presidential immunity could go, raising the hypothetical scenario of a military coup by an ex-president.
“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Kagan asked.
“If it’s an official act, there needs to be impeachment and conviction beforehand” through Congress, Trump’s attorney, D. John Sauer, said.
Kagan asked if Sauer believed such a coup would be an “official act.”
“On the way you described that hypothetical, it could well be,” Sauer said.
So yeah. The arguments that the Trump lawyers are presenting DO rise to the level you’re dismissing out of hand.
Now whether or not this SCOTUS is going to go that far, yes, I doubt it. As others suggest, certain elements are absolutely going to push this out as long as possible, and then make some unspeakably narrow ruling that doesn’t bind, and protects their primacy. At least, that’s IMHO. The cowards.