It seems that the Trump team are arguing in favor of the proposition that President Biden should have the full legal authority to hire a hit man for the purposes of eliminating his political rivals, and then pardoning the hit man.
This argument is asinine on it’s face.
The sensible way to run this hearing would be that Biden and Trump should be sat down in the courtroom, Biden should be given a loaded gun and told by the judges to hold it to Trump’s head, then they ask the Trump attorneys exactly what arguments they want to make about presidential immunity.
Sort of. They are saying there are some actions that lie outside of the limits of “official acts” - presumably hiring a hitman would fall outside that limit. But that everything Trump did was within those limits.
The claim is that Trump was just investigating legitimate claims of voter fraud and then exercising his free speech rights to “encourage” a crowd of supporters to “encourage” Congress to investigate.
And since those were “official acts” the only proper mechanism for prosecuting them is impeachment and removal.
I didn’t catch the first part so I wonder if the arguments touched on the possibility that a President could engage in illegal official acts that aren’t discovered until after they are out of office. In such a case it would seem like prosecution is impossible under Trump’s argument since surely the Congress wouldn’t bother impeaching a President who is out of office. In fact, I believe enough Senators voted not guilty on the impeachment trial because Trump was already out of office.
So you have a weird situation where first Trump’s team argued to Senators not to convict him because if he did anything illegal he would be tried for it in criminal court and now are arguing that since those same Senators voted not guilty he can’t be tried in criminal court. Chutzpah.
That would be so awesome. Better than the Squid Games.
no, the president can not hire a hit man. that would be outside the government. he can send a special ops team of the military. that is within the government.
the judges and team u.s. were a bit incredulous at the team trump argument.
chutzpah indeed!
But of course this is not just an argument of convenience to excuse Trump’s past actions. Assassination squads is exactly how MAGA want and plan their presidency to operate.
I point out that the traditional 21st Century US vehicle of targeted killing is not a “hit squad”. It’s a drone-fired guided missile.
But a more effective deterrent than death could be to lock up his enemies and force them to listen to recordings of Trump rallies on continuous loop.
My paraphrase:
This is not a matter for Congress and Impeachment. This is a matter for the Courts.
This case shouldn’t even be before the courts unless there was a prior Impeachment proceeding.
And how can a President do their job – you know: assassinating and incarcerating each and every one of their political opponents – if they constantly have to look over their shoulder all the while??
Mind blown.
Speaking of mind-blowing… [Gift link]
A list… a long, continuous list…day by day, spelled out, action by action. And yet there is still a question?
Related I guess, and I don’t see a separate thread for this.
In the appeals court hearing about whether the president is liable to criminal prosecution: one of the justices asked whether the president could officially order a SEAL team to assassinate a political rival without being subject to criminal prosecution, and Trump’s lawyer said, if I understand from listening to his words, that criminal liability would only occur if and after the president had been impeached and convicted and removed from office.
Here is a CNN panel discussion of this.
I’m sure the people in charge of the impeachment will be under no threat whatsoever from a President who authorizes assassinations of political rivals.
Yes, I think this falls under the Maxim “If they explicitly tell you they are going to go full authoritarian, believe them.”
This is exactly what I was thinking.
OK, now there is an impeachment hearing to determine whether the president should be removed for ordering a drone strike on the Democrat party convention.
And during the hearing, there is a large squad of armed military personnel with Trump MAGA patches standing in Congress during voting “to prevent any unrest”.
How does one suppose that vote is going to go?
Yes, this is the argument. Any official act (which surely any military order as CinC would be) is subject to presidential immunity absent impeachment and conviction. Regardless of when the act was discovered.
In fact they went a bit farther and said that the acts charged criminally had to be the same acts as he was impeached for. So if Congress impeached and convicted the President for the SEAL Team assassination, and later uncovered evidence of some other crime, the other crime could not be prosecuted because he wasn’t first impeached for that crime.
It’s completely bonkers, yet I don’t have a ton of faith in SCOTUS ruling on the issue.
I do, since they’ve held a narrow view of presidential immunity up until now, I don’t know why that would suddenly change.
That’s fair… do you have any cites on the issue of immunity for criminal behavior? I guess there was the tax return case, which is sort of related.
Did the Carol Jean King cases have any appeals that ended up before SCOTUS? I thought the issue had been raised and dismissed at the appeals level but not at SCOTUS.
Yes, Trump v. Vance.
Quoting the article:
The Court released its decision on July 9, 2020, by affirming the decision of the Second Circuit and remanding the case for continued review. The 7–2 decision affirmed that absolute immunity to the president is not granted by the Supremacy Clause or Article II of the Constitution. Through those principles, the Court also held that the president enjoys no absolute immunity from state criminal subpoenas directed at his private papers and that he is not entitled to a heightened standard for the issuance of such a subpoena. Instead, the president can rely on the defenses that are available to everyone else like overbreadth and unwarranted harassment. In remanding the case to the District Court, the Court’s order stated that “the President may raise further arguments as appropriate” to challenge the subpoena. In evaluating those arguments judges should be “meticulous” according to the Court, but “this does not mean they should use a stricter standard in evaluating them.”
The judgement was 7-2. Only Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas objected.
That was inline with previous cases asking about whether or not the POTUS can claim absolute immunity. Previously you can look at Clinton v. Jones or United States v. Nixon for similar rulings that established limitations to immunity.
Thank you! I thought it might be the tax return case.
Obviously some differences here: tax returns are not part of “official duties” and it applied to immunity from a subpoena not federal prosecution. But it is nice to see that there may a majority to reject Trump’s immunity claims (at least in the broadest sense).
Although I do note with concern that of the 5 justices that signed on with the majority opinion, only 4 remain. If Barrett sides with Alito and Thomas, it would just take the two that wrote concurring briefs (Kavanaugh and Gorsuch) to flip to sustain some sort of immunity claim for official acts in this case.
ETA: Although on the other hand, both of the dissents hinged on how responding to subpoenas would place an undue burden on a sitting President. Clearly something that does not apply to Trump at this time.
This is encouraging, actually. I don’t expect either the appeals court or the supreme court would uphold anything like that standard.
There was some discussion in that panel I linked to about another argument that Trump’s lawyers made, to the effect that if this kind of prosecution were allowed, then any potentially illegal act done by a president could be subject to prosecution later, regardless of the motivation or context of the act. Two examples that they discussed were when GWBush pushed false information to Congress so they would authorize the invasion of Iraq, and when Obama ordered drone strikes that resulted in the deaths of US citizens in the middle east.
Maybe this is fodder for a separate thread, but it would be an interesting (though possibly short) discussion on how the court system would deal with those kinds of charges, where the actions were clearly in the scope of the president, vs. the kinds of things that Trump is being accused of, or the test question from that judge about ordering domestic assassinations.