Didn’t know which of the SCOTUS/Presidential immunity threads to put this in, so I made my own. In fact, it may be a Factual Question, with an objective yes or no answer, but just in case the answer is “yes,” my follow-up is, what are the ramifications of the SCOTUS decision wrt any such law not applying to the presidency?
It depends, unfortunately, heavily on what exactly the abuse is. If it’s something blatant like embezzling $40 million into the president’s own pockets, it would definitely be a crime. If it’s something subtle like “Help me in my election and I’ll nominate you as judge to a federal court,” it would be sleazy but stands a good chance of dodging prosecution.
The term does seem rather vague. Can you give some specific examples?
As others have noted, you need a legal definition on what constitutes abuse or misuse.
Using the powers of an elected office for personal gain is generally illegal, either because you used those powers on your own behalf or you used them on behalf of another person in exchange for receiving some benefit from that person.
But even here, the issue can be ambiguous. Let’s say I’m a Senator who votes in favor of a tax cut which applies to several thousand people. I’m one of those thousands of people. So I voted on a law which personally benefitted me. However, I doubt this would qualify as illegal.
I have one from newsradio today. NOTE: not intended to be an Anti-Trump post, it’s just the example I heard based on the new indictment.
Suppose Trump wins in 2024 and directs the Justice Department to drop all charges against “Mr. Trump”. Is that a misuse of the office? Obviously. But under the SCOTUS ruling is it a crime or an official action?
I was wondering if this was about Judge Cedric Simpson in Michigan. He sentenced a defendant who repeatedly swore at him to 558 days in jail for contempt of court. Some people are saying this was excessive and abuse of power. And there have been cases where excessive sentences following from contempt of court have been cited as abuse of power.
Could the OP please come back and clarify a bit?
I’d say that doing things that are for personal gain independent of your status as a citizen or senator (i.e. whatever perks of the job there are), ought to be illegal.
I mean, voting for a bill that affects you positively as a citizen isn’t and shouldn’t be illegal. It may be unethical, if it’s not the best solution for your state or the nation as a whole, but not illegal.
But getting vacations paid for by people who are expecting some kind of consideration or quid pro quo in the future should be illegal.
I’m reminded of my buddy’s mom’s boyfriend. He was a county judge of some sort in the Houston area, and a big wheel in the local Democratic party. Guy got tons of favors and free stuff- it couldn’t have been legal, and if it was, it absolutely shouldn’t have been. I mean, it was preferential restaurant seating, it was free meals, it was free coupons for anything and everything you can imagine that was local (the big national chains didn’t bother), and access to all sorts of things. I mean, I remember the story my buddy told once. He was a big basketball fan, and the judge says to him at dinner one night “Who’s your favorite Rockets player?” Buddy says “Charles Barkley”. Next day, the judge shows up with Barkley’s still sweaty jersey from the night before with an autograph on it. Just to get that sort of thing in one of the biggest cities in the country implies an extremely unusual level of access, and to be able to make it happen on the spur of the moment, even more so.
I doubt any of it was actually illegal, but it was sure as hell shadier than anything I’d been exposed to until that point, and kept looking for him in the local papers for years afterward to see if he ever got caught doing anything illegal.
I definitely feel like it should have been illegal; he was definitely personally benefiting from it, and it was clearly because of his position and the perceived access to it. Just because there wasn’t any explilcit money changing hands, didn’t mean that people didn’t clear the decks for this guy at the most expensive restaurants in town, and give him Charles Barkley’s game-worn jersey on request.
The problem is the law requires clear definitions. You can’t just say things like this should be illegal but things like that are legal.
For example, I think most people would agree that it should be illegal for an elected official to take bribes in exchange for voting for a law. But should it be illegal to donate to an elected official’s re-election campaign fund in exchange for them voting for a law? Should it be illegal to donate to an elected official’s re-election campaign fund because they publicly promise that if elected they will vote for a law? At what point does it stop being bribery and become supporting candidates whose positions you agree with?
Absent an explicit quid pro quo, the Supreme Court made it much more difficult to prosecute public corruption and bribery of a public official cases in McDonnell v. United States.
When Obama resigned from the senate to become president, the governor of IL Rod Blagojevich tried to simple sell the seat for money. He went to prison until he was pardoned by someone who probably thought it was find and dandy. Or maybe he was paid to do it.
The general term you’re looking for is “malfeasance of office,” but that is a description, not a specific crime.
As for what would happen to a specific POTUS, Congress has the sole power to impeach and remove a President from office. As for the whether a specific action falls under the broad protection a President enjoys (thanks to SCOTUS) there’s an appeal going on right now trying to untangle Individual One’s “official” and “unofficial” actions.
I don’t know if I can clarify, sorry. I’m not thinking of something as egregious as murder for hire (even if that HAS been thrown into question), or as picayune as scoring tickets to Disneyland with automatic Fast-Pass on every ride, but something that ONLY an officeholder would have the authority to do, like mobilizing the state militia for your kid’s bar mitzvah, or suspending habeas corpus for the duration of the NCAA basketball championship.
It’s not something I’ve thought out for a long time, but I feel like there’s a difference of some kind between donating to a campaign fund and giving some sort of gifts to the person themselves.
One’s essentially saying “We like you as a candidate, and we expect what you’re doing to continue, or that you do what you’ve promised to do”, while direct gifts are more like “I expect YOU to do what I want”
I mean, I’ve donated some money to a political campaign, and I have expectations should he be elected. At this point, the only difference between me and someone else with more money is the magnitude of the donation and the magnitude and specificity of the expectations. But that’s different than if I say… flew him and his family to Maui on my private jet and gave them the run of my estate for a month for free while he’s in office. That sort of thing seems somehow different to me, and I’m not sure how I’d legislate that.
But in order to make it a law, you have to be able to put it down in words.
I also note that this is what Trump was convicted of. People gave money to his political campaign fund. Trump then took the money out of his campaign fund and spent it as if it was his personal money.
The problem with that is that there are few things that only an elected official can decide - for example, in my state , only a governor can pardon a convict. But the governor doesn’t officially play a part in releasing inmates on parole. S/he does however appoint the members of the board that makes those decisions - who might decide to release someone because the governor’s campaign has expressed an interest in this person being released and the people on the board want to be reappointed. When this happened in my state, there was no way to tie it back to the governor, but you would definitely want to include situations where it could be proven that the office holder influenced other people’s decisions.
Based on the July 1st Trump v. US decision, there is no such thing as abuse of power when it comes to the president. As long what he did was an official act the court can’t look at their motives, even if those motives might include a million dollars being deposited into their bank account, silencing a rival, or stealing an election. Now you can still be prosecuted for doing illegal things on your own, but if you used your elected powers to get them done, you are fine.
For state and local officials Snyder Vs. US basically eviscerated any chance of federal prosecution so long as the Quo isn’t mentioned explicitly until after the Quid. So if you there is a company that has a reputation for giving large amounts of money for officials who act in their interests. They can tell you what they want and you can accept whatever payoff they deem appropriate. But you still might run afoul of state law (unless you are a state official who can influence who is subject to said law).
So far it still seems like its illegal to bribe federal officials, (except maybe supreme court justices) but I suspect that’s only until a proper test case gets filed.
To be clear, in my OP, I said abuse of office, not abuse of power, although if you wish to declare that to be a distinction without a difference, I don’t anticipate pushing back very hard on that. But the very idea that such an offense CANNOT be applicable to a president so difficult to wrap my head around that I can’t believe that these jurists passed law school, let alone a state bar exam.
But that’s the genesis of my original question: is there any such law on the books that applies to any other elected official?
Actually, I would be curious as to what you see the distinction as being. To my mind they are entirely synonymous. Note I’m not arguing with you, I am just interested in an example of what you see as the difference.