There has been a long tradition of NOT doing this. What are the odds that is about to change?
I am not sure if this should be a GD thread, or Elections. I guess there is room to discuss if it is a good or bad idea (GD), but my immediate thought for posting it was: What might be the position of any of the current R candidates?
As partisan as the country was after GWB, I don’t think anyone would disagree that it has only gotten worse. I think Obama and Hillary had both been asked about it during the 2008 primary, and both said it was not in the best interest of the nation. Does anybody know if the question has been put to any of the current R candidates? I am not sure I’d expect somebody like Trump or Cruz or ___ to be so high minded.
The funny (?? not funny.) part to me is that the things they would try to pin on the Obama administration are going to be the same old faux-scandals of the past 7 years … Benghazi!, IRS, email servers, Presidenting While Black, etc. Or maybe just start a whole new Audit the Past Eight Years cabinet position. This, as opposed to the things GWB and his people could/should have been charged with (Iraq, torture, justice dept. manipulations, etc.)*.
As for the GD question of: Should it ever be done?, I am inconclusive. I can see the value in the “damage to the nation” argument. But I also feel more damage can be done by letting ‘the nation’ get away with anything and everything. That said, if they ever do break the tradition and do it … it will end Badly. Like, Rome Badly. It will just escalate in turns of each side trying to jail more past leaders than the last time around, until nobody in their right mind would touch a govt job. Julius Cesar declared himself dictator for life mostly to avoid the inevitable prosecution if he stepped down (well, that and a Julius-Cesar-sized ego, but still…)
*No, SDMB conservative lawyers I need not name, I am not prepared to lay out a specific legal case of who broke what laws and how I would make a case in court. Spare us the derailment, please.
Only in the most paranoid conservative fantasies. The obstructionism by congress and right wing big money has contributed far more to the decline of our standard than any of these faux scandals the right wing propagandists have got the low information voters to buy into.
That precedent will continue. There’s nothing to be gained from it in the absence of evidence of actual criminal activity. If something is not criminal, but merely shady and wrong, then it’s up to the voters to decide. The losing candidate, or their party, has already received their punishment.
Plus any Republican is going to have an agenda. Messing around with the past is not a good way to build support for that agenda. Political capital is limited. Expending it on trying to find something to charge the outgoing President with is a great way to fail.
Besides, if there’s actual criminal activity, the President doesn’t have to do anything except NOT pardon the former President. Let the FBI do their work and let whatever happens, happen.
I think the OP agrees with you. He’s not saying the current presidential administration is worse; he’s saying partisan opposition to the current presidential administration is worse.
I don’t know if we’ll see post-presidential prosecutions becoming a thing. Once a President leaves office, he’s a spent force. The opposition gains nothing by attacking somebody who’s out of politics. It’s virtually certain Barack Obama will never run for or hold a public office after January 20, 2017. So what benefit do the Republicans gain from attacking him? Any potential benefit they might gain by discrediting the Democrats by implication will be outweighed by the far greater likelihood that they’ll end up looking bad for going after a guy who’s retired. The Republicans will be more likely to focus their attention on a target that still matters; the Democratic President who replaces Obama if that happens or the Democratic opposition in Congress.
Not at all. If the new administration came in and found evidence that the President had directed the IRS to give more scrutiny to right-wing groups, then nail him. But actual evidence of personal lawbreaking is required to prosecute, not “This administration did a lot of shady things plus a lot of disastrous things I didn’t agree with, so arrest the President.”
First you ask if we all agree that the president is above the law, then when adaher offers an example, you ask, “what law?” You’re just playing games, I think.
Now there may or may not be a law that covers his example, but his point is clear: if there is a specific law that the president can be charged with breaking, then he should be so charged.
But this is specifically what did not happen when Obama took over. Torture is illegal. Torture occurred (and even being generous to the no-such-thing people in the audience here … deaths occurred due to ‘enhanced interrogation’). Obama let it slide. Laws were broken, and it was decided that for the good of the country, “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” and "you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got spend their all their time looking over their shoulders.” (2009 link)
Without re-hashing the whole torture debate here… what I am getting at is that the Obama admin didn’t even try to go there, even with pretty reasonable suspicion that specific laws were broken.
If any of the current R candidates (Trump especially) get asked, “If you become President, and have reasonable suspicion that laws were broken by the Obama admin, will you seek to prosecute?”, I think the answer will be an aggressive Yes. Like every other issue in their primary, it will be a race for the most extreme answer. And, God forbid, if one of them becomes President, I can’t assume rational behavior will keep them from devoting valuable political capital and real resources to hare-brained investigations into Benghazi!, IRS, etc. Look what congress has been doing, after all.
I don’t so much accept it, as acknowledge that is the country we live in. And not just the President, but the whole administration.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Obama admin gets prosecuted for things it could have gone after the Bush admin for, but chose to continue doing instead (PRISM, etc)?
Seems like it’s a valid question to me. Most of the people who insisted that George W. Bush and his associates ought to be put on trial, when you asked them what specifically they should be charged with, would invariably hem and haw and come up with something like “invading a sovereign nation” or “starting a war without UN approval” which doesn’t actually meet the standards of any felony existing under US law.
Also, the International Criminal Court, the treaty for which the US has not ratified, grants universal jurisdiction to all of its signatory members. While the US does not have authority under it to arrest Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. under it, most of the rest of the world does.
This used to be common practice in 17th/18th century England, with high-ranking figures of the old administration hastily fleeing across the Channel, Bills of Attainder snapping at their heels. Eventually the politicians came to realize this was a bad idea for all of them. It’s still a bad idea.
Fortunately Obama is wiser than to pursue a case against Bush which could end up biting him in the ass too.
The Rome agreement actually says they have an obligation and not just the authority to detain/turn over war criminals to the court. There’s an exemption though. The agreement also says that obligations doesn’t over ride other international agreements. The US has run through that loophole with all the finesse of Godzilla vacationing in Tokyo. The US has negotiated such agreements that prevent the turnover of US citizens to the ICC with the overwhelming majority of signatories.
I am all for prosecuting and even imprisoning former presidents **if they committed serious offenses, but I don’t think the Obama administration needs to be prosecuted, that would go to the preceding administration.