As I said before, this is simply asinine reasoning. I can’t imagine the brain contortions that would allow Sauer to actually believe this.
So the president orders the military to stage a coup. They obey him. As part of the coup, the military imprisons or potentially kills the opposition party members in Congress.
And the solution to this is for the remaining members of Congress (in his own party) to impeach him? While their fellow members are hanging from lampposts, or lying in pools of blood on the floor of the House? This is beyond nuts.
Alito is saying “If a former President is wrongly persecuted by the powers that be”. Anything past that is what you argued.
It’s a review of a legal question, not a trial of Donald J Trump. That question may have been raised by an idiot for corrupt purpose, but that doesn’t impact the merit of the question as viewed in isolation nor the answer.
I believe that in math, there’s a set of games classified as being ones where all of the decisions that lead up to the current board state are irrelevant. There’s always a best possible move and you could calculate it solely by looking at the present state. You would always be better to pull in a better player - if you want to win - than to pull in someone who intimately knows the moves and decision making until this moment. The latter serves you no good.
Maybe Alito is asking for improper reasons. That’s probably not the right interpretation though. He’s asking because the question is on the table. His job is to find the best possible answer to that specific question. How the question came to land on the table is not relevant.
That’s a meaningless distinction because, if the previous decisions are relevant, then they’re part of the present state.
And Alito’s job is to find the best possible answer to the questions before him. And no path to the best answer passes through the hypothetical question he’s asking.
Maybe that’s why I can’t seem to find a Wikipedia article about it. I’d swear that the idea isn’t my original invention, at least.
It does seem to be a hypothetical for the sake of hypotheticals, at the present.
But it does seem like the sort of thing where it’s a good to have an answer earlier, and to have generated a good and robust answer for that day when the hypothetical actually matters.
Trump might not be Navalny, but Navalny really did exist.
Personally, if I was Alito, I’d be considering that and stretching any answer I gave to include a larger scope than simply whether the person was or wasn’t a former President. Not all persecuted political figures attain office.
I think this is a legitimate question that needs to be answered. What protection does the office of President offer a person over that of a regular citizen for political prosecution? I would like the answer of that to be “none”. Prosecution for political reasons should be prohibited, regardless. Certainly, having held the office of President should not offer unique protection.
No he isn’t. He very specifically said “criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent.”
Not wrongly prosecuted – criminally prosecuted, i.e., prosecuted for crimes.
And not by “the powers that be” – by “a bitter political opponent,” i.e., Trump by Biden.
It sure sounds to me that he thinks Trump’s legal problems have been brought about by Biden’s bitterness over … something … and that a president, knowing this would happen, would be within his rights to head it off by seizing control despite losing the election.
In any case, Alito’s argument boils down to “If the incumbent loses and believes his opponent will prosecute him, it’s within his official duties to contest the election results by any means necessary.”
IOW: Who cares what’s good for the country? A guy’s got to protect himself!
Sounds like something you’d hear from Tucker Carlson, not a SCOTUS justice.
ETA: Or, look at it this way: Trump led chants of “Lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton. She certainly had more reason than Trump did in 2020 to believe she might be prosecuted if her opponent won. So maybe Obama would have been within his rights to protect his former colleague by leading an insurrection to prevent Trump from taking office.
I’d generally encourage a lack of assumptions, altogether.
Alito seems to be very conservative and traditionalist. For gay marriage, abortion, etc. perhaps that matters and puts him into a particular bucket. For this particular topic, I’d probably put him down as a true Law and Order type. That’s generally not going to bode well for Trump but, to be sure, it could go any direction.
Carlson, can be quoted as saying that he hates Trump and my ears perked up when he started crying that someone must want to assassinate Trump, when no one else seems to have been thinking thoughts along those lines.
He grew up in the LA area, lives and works in the city, and formed his name by working for CNN in the role of “Republican strawman”. He ain’t a Fundie from Alabama.
My generally take of him is that he found a shtick for fame and fortune, pandering to Deep South Conservatives. We know he’s lying about his opinions on Trump. I’ve also seen him present out-of-focus flies walking on a camera lens as evidence that “America needs to be prepared for encounters with alien life” and use some dude’s blog, that compared total number of heart attacks in US college athletics to the total global news results of heart attacks after taking a Covid vaccine, as evidence of risk of Covid vaccines - a clearly nonsensical comparison for anyone who has even glanced momentarily at the source and its methods. I’m not inclined to trust that he is who he presents himself as versus the idea that he’s simply a leach who will say anything for a buck.
That doesn’t tell us much about his true politics. If he’s dreaming about Trump’s death, I wouldn’t bet on it being all that right-ward.
During questioning it seemed like there was a lot of discussion about whether it was a good idea or not to extend protection to criminal prosecution, but not a lot of discussion about where that immunity derives from. Isn’t that the crux of the matter?
The only argument I caught was the one that @flurb concisely summarized above: “SCOTUS decided the president is immune to civil charges, why shouldn’t this include criminal ones too?”
Is there any more argument than that? It seems pretty weak.
IIRC the conservative justices today seemed amenable to some sort of immunity.
It is not a binary choice for them. They can carve out any immunity they want (and, clearly, the president and others who work for the government enjoy some immunity). The question is what that will look like? I seriously doubt it would be a blanket immunity but they seem to lean into unitary executive which has great power so may give the president more power than most here (I suspect) would be comfortable with.
Civil lawsuits can be brought by just about anyone, for almost anything. Criminal charges can only be brought by government prosecutors, at whatever level they may be, and can only be brought for things that are listed as actual crimes under the laws.
And the standards of evidence are different, “a preponderance of the evidence” vs. “beyond a reasonable doubt”.
For a former President facing a criminal charge, there is a larger barrier to ending up in court in the first place, and also a larger barrier to being convicted. That feels like a sufficient level of protection to me.
After all, this is the first time in US history that this has happened, and Trump had to go way, way out of his way to end up here. I’d be okay with any future President being held to these same standards.
I’d swear that the idea isn’t my original invention, at least.