Thread is reopened.
Please be careful not to advocate for violence.
Discussion of what was illegal but might not be now, appears to be OK.
Thank you.
As head of the executive branch, Biden can order wiretaps for intelligence gathering (and similar measures). I can think of a whole, whole lot of people whom it would be good to know what they’re saying and doing privately.
And then embarrassing and damaging information might be accidentally left on the doorstep of the local news station…
Trying to take away the right to vote (what the Republicans and Trump effectively did on and around Jan 6, 2021 in Georgia, DC, and elsewhere) is a very bad thing, and obviously unconstitutional.
Making just about everything Trump did in and around that day perfectly okay, as the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices just did, is a very very very bad thing, and obviously unconstitutional.
For anyone to then complain that we’re now mentioning things that a president (who happens to be a Democrat) might do is “unconstitutional,” is ludicrous. The Republicans ripped up the Constitution and threw it in the toilet. You can’t complain now.
Potentially. It’s potentially okay. That potential is enough to delay any prosecution until well after the election.
If Biden is indeed in cognitive decline, then by the time the court system gets around to adjudicating whether or not any unusual actions he takes to preserve democracy are “official acts” or not, he may very well no longer be mentally fit to stand trial for them.
Just a thought.
No need to leak any more, divulging classified information is part of the President’s official acts. Call a press conference, and play the clips.
There’s substantial evidence that Trump gave classified security information to Putin, and who knows what he did with all the documents he didn’t return?
Have him arrested as a security threat and tried for espionage.
Since Republicans like to complain about a weaponized DOJ, they’re gonna love the weaponized NSA.
You guys are all full of such good ideas. I hope our administration is also full of good ideas, and will bring some of these to fruition.
This thread is eye-opening, and not in a good way. The Democratic party is touted here as the party defending democracy against the MAGA goons, and yet what is being advocated is nothing short of despotism. Oh sure, but it’s despotism in the service of the greater good of keeping Trump out of power! This is a dangerous road to take…
Of course it’s a dangerous road. Doing nothing would also be a dangerous road. There may not be any clean options here.
That’s the exact point we’re attempting to make. This Supreme Court decision is a terrible thing that could result in unimaginably horrific outcomes. I doubt any poster here is hoping these things might actually happen (except for that wiretapping one, that one was genius!), but by pointing out all of the bad acts that could result by gifting the president with such unfettered power is A Very Bad Thing. We’re whistling past the graveyard here.
Finger wagging from the right on this feels pretty hollow.
The Supreme Court has irreparably damaged the system of checks and balances we have in this country, and (with both this ruling and prior ones) hopelessly delegitimized itself, proving to be a corrupt and partisan body. The moment they did so, they created conditions that are ripe for despotism. This thread is a desperate reaction to that. However…
It’s a dangerous road, but not for the reasons you probably think.
I don’t think that the problem is the slippery slope to Democratic domination of the country; the mainline democrats don’t have the balls to do something like that, and the Progressives are too tiny a minority.
The real problem is that the Sulla strategy is ineffective. You seize power, clear out corruption, put in laws to prevent anyone from doing this again, and step down. Great! But the issue is, you’ve now demonstrated that the laws aren’t real; that we can change them at a whim when it’s convenient; so the next wannabe dictator just changes the rules back, takes power, and never steps down.
The only way out is to resore people’s faith in our institutions, so that working to undermine them like this seems unimaginable, and is quickly condemned by all sides. And I just don’t see how we get back to that.
I am.
I’m still a fan of the idea of calling a spade a spade. Biden needs to say something like this.
“The SCOTUS just ruled that the POTUS is above the law. That’s wrong. I’m not going to sink to their level, but we do need to do something about it. I’m asking Congress to impeach and convict all six of the justices that ruled on this. Since that’s unlikely to happen, we need to continue to elect a Democratic POTUS to gradually get these fascists off the court. America fought against this in WWII. To willingly turn the country over to a fascist after all the sacrifices made by the Greatest Generation would be a betrayal of their sacrifice. Don’t let Donald Trump become Dictator of the US with the blessing of his stooges on the SCOTUS. Do your part. Vote Democrat this fall.”
I am not part of the right, at least not the MAGA right. I have not and would never vote for Trump and I despise his naked grasping at power and his disregard for the rule of law. Like you, I am immensely concerned that our democratic ideals and institutions are being whittled away. But in the past I was mostly concerned that it was the MAGA idiots who were behind this. This thread has given me pause that maybe the Democrats (or at least certain factions of the Dems) aren’t entirely above these type of actions either.
Here is the thing. Our ideals and institutions are no longer being “whittled”. With this ruling, the SCOTUS has taken a chainsaw to them.
At this point, despotism isn’t some far off hypothetical. It is here for the taking. The court only gave presidents partial immunity, but they forbade the courts from analyzing presidential actions in order to determine if they are official acts or not, so in practice that “partial” immunity is quite far reaching.
I don’t know that we can save the system while working within the system, at this point. The only difference between me and those advocating for drastic action is that I think that working outside the system to save the system dooms the system anyways.
Yes, it’s a dangerous road to take. And the Democrats have been warning the US not to take that road for years now. The moment Trump advanced this “immunity” theory of his, every Democrat in the country pointed out how dangerous an idea it was, and how it would inevitably lead to tyranny.
But now the courts have taken that road. There’s no mechanism available to make a U-turn and go back, at least not one that can work without the aid of the very people (Republicans) who steered the US onto this road, so now the Democrats are stuck with it. So they have to figure out what they can do to mitigate the worst effects of this ruling that none of them wanted in the first place.
Spraying your house with a fire hose is a bad idea, but if the house is already on fire, it’s the best bad idea you have.
IMHO we’re one step removed from that. The house isn’t on fire yet. But it has been doused in gasoline, and the arsonist is standing read with a match. Which means we don’t need to spray the house with water. But we do need to prevent the arsonist from lighting the match (keep Trump out of office this year) and clean up the gasoline (gradually replace the 6 justices that supported presidential immunity via the normal means).
I like the idea of tapping phones and internet connections. I’d start with the SCOTUS and congressional leaders. Put together a case where they are blantly talking about overthrowing democracy. I think that we actually have probable cause to do so dispite the recent Supreme Court decision, but now that the testy constitution is out of the way, lets play by the new rules.
Hell, Biden could do it before the election just to show what the future would look like and then promise not to prosecute them if they stepped down or pushed for a law/ammendment that overturned the decison.