I doubt anyone would argue that the Secret Service was arresting Reagan when they tossed him into the limo when Hinckley shot him. They were removing him from the scene of danger, because shots had been fired. They didn’t know at the moment that Reagan had been hit.
Getting the President out of dangerous situations is the Secret Service’s job. If Trump shoots someone, he is obviously at risk of being shot back. So, off he goes.
If you are thinking they would feel themselves legally obligated to obey if he ordered them to drive him to the airport so he could fly to a country with no extradition treaty, I don’t think that would happen. Once shots are fired, protocol takes over. They get the President to a safe location, even if he doesn’t want to go.
The Secret Service is not like the SDMB. They don’t nitpick themselves into absurdities.
Do you really think the Secret Service is going to get into trouble, or get arrested, or sued, or fired, or reprimanded, because they refuse to drive the Presidential getaway car? :rolleyes:
As usual depends on the raw politics of the situation i.e. Who is with him and who is against him. If the military is very supportive of him, there is unlikely to be any arrests because they would easily disband local law enforcement agencies.
If the Army was for him and Air Force against him, maybe someone else could weigh in on the outcome. If Congress and people are with him but military against him, who knows? A coup?
Basically any legal magic words will be useless in this situation besides bringing people to one side or another.
I think you are… uh, what’s the technical term? Pulling this all out of your ass.
I’m not saying you are dishonest. I’m saying your factual basis for things you say here are probably sourced from old episodes of the A-Team, some Tom Clancy novels, or something of similar rigor.
Since I posed the question let me clarify a couple of things.
First, even though Trump is currently in the WH, I don’t think we need to limit this to his hypothetical behavior. My thinking about this is in a broader, more generic way.
What if the scenario is actually one where the POTUS has a disagreement with their spouse and pushes them down a flight of stairs or off a balcony before anyone can stop it from happening? Let’s even say this happens inside the White House. There wouldn’t be any need to remove the POTUS from the scene in that scenario but it will still be murder, right? My point being this wouldn’t have to be some wild shoot out in the streets.
Even in this situation, once the President is removed from the scene where would he be taken? My guess is he would be taken back to the White House. Once there if he wanted to leave who would stop him?
I mentioned how the Secret Service reacted when Reagan was shot, and that wasn’t a novel. And I really don’t think you need a cite that the Secret Service’s job is to protect the President.
The part where the President shoots someone in front of witnesses, and then the Secret Service helps him make his escape, blindly obeying his every whim after he has just committed a major crime of violence in front of them - that’s the part coming out of someone’s ass, and not mine.
Fair enough. I just wanted to point out that this “implied” immunity has been around for a while and appears to be generally accepted among serious people.
I think we assume that there will be impeachment proceedings and that they will be fairly quick (There’s no reason that it would be a big delay. It would roughly two months between the House impeaching Clinton and his acquittal in the Senate). And I say that as someone who generally believes that “high crimes and misdemeanors” was a term of art at the time of the writing of the Constitution and impeachment should be properly limited consistent with that term, which may not include murdering your spouse.
But the other point is that a presidency will end. And there’s not really going to be a statute of limitations problem. (Your statute of limitations concerns pop up when you try to investigate a sitting president for conduct that occurred long before he took office.) And waiting a few years to prosecute a murder is not unheard of and it’s probably true that the structural concerns of the government are more important than a single murder victim.
So I think the answer is that you wait until he’s out of office. And if the Senate won’t remove him and if the people re-elect him, then you wait a few more years.
That would definitely work as far as prosecuting him/her for committing a murder but who would have the authority to make sure a President in this situation stays within the jurisdiction of the United States? While Presidents generally do adhere to Secret Service regulations about where they go and with whom, technically the President doesn’t have to follow those guidelines. What mechanism would be in place to prevent him/her from leaving the scene of the crime and heading to the airport?
There are a lot of elements that kind of tie together, so actually there’s not just one specific part of one episode that ties everything up. One of the most surprising things I’ve learned from listening is just how many things we erroneously assume are codified in law relating to the Presidency. There are very few actual laws and specific regulations. Much of what we assume is “Presidential” behavior is nothing more than Presidents conforming to the norms of those who previously held the office.
Episodes 5 (Presidential Immunity) 10 (Impeachment) and 30 (The 25th Amendment) are the ones that talk about legal means to remove a President. They talked through some cases that set precedent, but the gist is that a sitting President probably cannot be tried in any court while in office, or at least it hasn’t been successfully done yet, but you can try to remove him from office through impeachment or the 25th Amendment, both of which are Congressional powers. Starting impeachment proceedings is not particularly easy and (if I remember right) hasn’t successfully removed a President from office yet; Nixon resigned before he could be impeached.
I actually took another look though the back-catalog and found that they didn’t specifically cover the OP’s question, though. Oops.
From what they did cover, its still likely that only Congress really has the authority to detain a sitting President or remove him from office. The Secret Service is obligated to protect him from harm, but not arrest … but there’s no real established precedent for what happens if a President commits a clear-cut crime. Like so many other situations in this presidency, it all depends on what those involved feel like doing since there’s precious little actual law, the authority is murky, and there’s virtually no precedent to follow.
Well, it is true that the episode isn’t from fiction; but it is true that its one of the dumbest analogies I could possibly imagine. “President is the victim of a violent crime” is nothing like “President is in the act of committing violent crimes,” no more than a surgeon slicing someone open in an OR is like a psychopath slicing someone open in his basement.
Oh sure, nobody can dispute that. But the main reason that it is hard to dispute the conventional wisdom is that we have never really had to, since the vast majority of Presidents have not engaged in major crimes while in office.
To the extent that we are faced with such a situation, that really ought to force people to re-examine the conventional wisdom in light of an actual and not theorized attack on the rule of law. And if we have to do that, then I think we ought to give deference to what the law says and does not say, as opposed to what we wish it to say without any text to inform or support that opinion.
Right–there really is no definite answer to the OP’s question. As WillFarnaby says above, it would play out accordingly to political conditions of the moment.
There doesn’t need to be a special plan. The law applies to everyone unless special exemptions are created. So the President of the United States can be arrested by the same procedure that you or I could be. The only exemption that exists says a sitting President can’t be indicted.
This would clearly be an emergency situation. There’s no reason the appropriate officials couldn’t be meeting and producing a result within a couple of hours.
Keep in mind, I’m only saying the legal framework exists. This is an issue that our system can address if the need arose. As a practical matter, there would be some confusion. But let’s face facts; as a practical matter, the situation is never going to arise. Even Trump isn’t going to pull out a gun and shoot somebody. If we ever get into a situation where a presidential arrest is going to occur, it’ll be something everyone will see coming weeks beforehand and the plans will have been put in place before the actual arrest occurs.
Let’s just remember, the 25th Amendment is about incapacitation, not about removal for cause or an emergency. If the Cabinet asserts that the President cannot perform his duties, all the President has to do to get his powers back is write a letter to Congress. Then it is possible for Congress to decide the issue of whether the President can carry out the job, but it takes 2/3rd of both houses to remove the President.
So again: the 25th Amendment solves nothing with respect to the President committing crimes. It’s easier to impeach the President than to get him out using the 25th.
Plans will have been put in place by whom?
Wait – you’re suggesting that the President can be arrested and held in jail for crimes he cannot be prosecuted for? I’m no lawyer, but I’d guess that the President would have be released within minutes after his personal attorney files for a writ of habeas corpus.
So - [ul][li]Trump shoots someone[/li][li]The Secret Service immediately removes him from the scene[/li][li]Trump says “take me to Air Force One so I can fly out of the country”[/li][li]The Secret Service says 'Sorry, Mr. President, you are under arrest" and takes him someplace secure, like the White House[/li][li]The Secret Service then sits on him and holds him down while the White House Chief of Staff gets on the phone with the Veep[/li][li]The Veep does a conference call with the other heads of cabinets, or they all fly in from wherever they are at the moment[/li][li]The only agenda item at the meeting is “Resolved: Trump can’t very well run the executive branch from a jail cell, so he is unable to perform his duties. All in favor say Aye”. [/li][li]Pence becomes Acting President[/li][li]48 hours pass. [/li][li]Trump is released, and immediately fires off a letter saying, “I’m back! I’m the President!”[/li][li]Everyone else says, “Not so fast - we got four days to consider this. We’ll get back to you. And, you’re gonna need a lawyer…”[/ul][/li]Regards,
Shodan
I’d be curious if someone other than Shodan can establish how a person can be arrested if it is known beforehand that the person enjoys immunity from prosecution for their actions.
Maybe it is possible, I don’t know. But it would seem to be an absurdity that a person could be seized by police for doing something that cannot be punished by law (according to the legal theory I disagree with) – that seems to be the textbook definition of an illegal arrest.
Say Donnie stabs Melania. Could he be arrested? Certainly, by whatever cops have jurisdiction over where the incident occurred. Would the prosecution have to wait until January 21, 2021 at 12:01pm EST? Of course no. Q.E.D.
I disagree. The text of the Amendment requires only that the President be “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”. I think being under arrest would qualify. The same way it would be if the President were taken hostage.
The President would be able to write to Congress and ask them to overrule his cabinet. But if the President has been arrested for some flagrant crime which he clearly committed, Congress is not going to say yes.
I already addressed this point. Federal policy only says a sitting President cannot be indicted. And when the 25th Amendment is invoked, he would no longer be a sitting President.
POTUS slaps a baby and then slaps Mom when she protests. A cop sees the whole thing and moves to arrest the POTUS. The Secret Service moves to disallow this.
Theres a substantial difference between a crime that an ordinary person would be convicted of, and a crime that 2/3rds of both Houses of Congress would agree upon.
I mean, OJ walked free with a mountain of evidence against him. What makes you so sure that less than 1/3rd of Congress could find some silly reason to avoid expelling a President of their party?
But this is just a chicken-and-egg issue. Until someone explains to me that legality of arresting someone who under bad policy cannot be subject to an Article III proceeding, I assume that no Federal authority can arrest a President. And yet if he isn’t incapacitated by jail, the case for the 25th Amendment is weak. So what comes first, the President is arrested in a manner that is highly questionable if not illegal, and then the Cabinet votes him out; or he’s booted and then arrested?
Further, removal from office by impeachment is an easier thing to do than removal under the 25th Amendment. Why do people keep making reference to it as though it is a silver bullet?