I would have preferred that they draw a line on specific acts not being considered “official acts”, especially as we draw the line between Trump’s presidency and his 2020 reelection campaign. I’m just not seeing a lot of honest discourse as to what this decision actually means from a legal perspective.
Well, that’s exactly the problem that has everyone up in arms here. They have made this ruling but conveniently failed to rule on what constitutes an “official” act. Therefore whenever a major ruling has to be done about this, they can decide at that time whether an act was official or not based on what flavor of president they’re ruling for or against, and until then the lower courts can take the heat off the SCOTUS directly by just ruling that everything Trump has ever done is legal because he was president once.
It’s a very transparently partisan ruling, setting the stage for further partisan ruling in the future by being extremely vague about what their ruling actually is. This ruling boils down to “the president is allowed to do anything he wants when we say so, and is subject to rule of law only when we say so, and whether we say so will be determined after the acts in question.” In this way the conservative-packed supreme court can easily enable a conservative president or trap a liberal one.
What it does set up though is an official legal stand to say that the supreme Court gets to decide what’s “official”. Meaning they can decide that all Trump’s actions are official and all of Biden’s (or whatever dem president) are not
The American justice system works on the idea of precedence. Cases have ruling decisions and the interpretation of the law that comes from those decisions becomes law. It wasn’t clear before the ruling because there was no precedent. Now the precedent that has been set that going forward, the supreme Court (currently politically motivated to the right) will have final say over whether or not a sitting or former president may be tried and prosecuted for decisions they made or actions they took in office. What would have been the correct thing to do with the least political implication (the supreme Court is meant to be free from political biases) would have been to define what actions are illegal according to the law. But they didn’t want to define actions as legal or illegal, they want the ability to justify them making case by case judgements which give them the opportunity to push their aforementioned bias.
I think your confusion is warranted, because it’s not clear how SCOTUS’ decision is different from what the Constitution comes right out and says. On the surface, it does seem to just reaffirm what we already know, and maybe the liberal justices are just whinging.
The trick is that they did it in a way that causes a lot more work in the courts. In turn, that means Trump’s trials get delayed further.
Nobody sane is going to argue that getting a hostile crowd to surround and storm the capitol while an important procedural vote is taking place is an official act of a President. But now it has to be ruled on, specifically, and that’s one more thing to add to the pile before the obvious verdict can be reached.
Trump’s lawyers have already filed an argument in the hush money case that certain points of evidence should be removed because they were official acts. If so, that would potentially result in a mistrial, and so the only Trump criminal case that went forward would have to be redone.
How do you square your take with the dissenting judges that say it effectively makes the president king?
deleted by creator
Well, that’s exactly the problem that has everyone up in arms here. They have made this ruling but conveniently failed to rule on what constitutes an “official” act. Therefore whenever a major ruling has to be done about this, they can decide at that time whether an act was official or not based on what flavor of president they’re ruling for or against, and until then the lower courts can take the heat off the SCOTUS directly by just ruling that everything Trump has ever done is legal because he was president once.
It’s a very transparently partisan ruling, setting the stage for further partisan ruling in the future by being extremely vague about what their ruling actually is. This ruling boils down to “the president is allowed to do anything he wants when we say so, and is subject to rule of law only when we say so, and whether we say so will be determined after the acts in question.” In this way the conservative-packed supreme court can easily enable a conservative president or trap a liberal one.
What it does set up though is an official legal stand to say that the supreme Court gets to decide what’s “official”. Meaning they can decide that all Trump’s actions are official and all of Biden’s (or whatever dem president) are not
deleted by creator
The American justice system works on the idea of precedence. Cases have ruling decisions and the interpretation of the law that comes from those decisions becomes law. It wasn’t clear before the ruling because there was no precedent. Now the precedent that has been set that going forward, the supreme Court (currently politically motivated to the right) will have final say over whether or not a sitting or former president may be tried and prosecuted for decisions they made or actions they took in office. What would have been the correct thing to do with the least political implication (the supreme Court is meant to be free from political biases) would have been to define what actions are illegal according to the law. But they didn’t want to define actions as legal or illegal, they want the ability to justify them making case by case judgements which give them the opportunity to push their aforementioned bias.
I think your confusion is warranted, because it’s not clear how SCOTUS’ decision is different from what the Constitution comes right out and says. On the surface, it does seem to just reaffirm what we already know, and maybe the liberal justices are just whinging.
The trick is that they did it in a way that causes a lot more work in the courts. In turn, that means Trump’s trials get delayed further.
Nobody sane is going to argue that getting a hostile crowd to surround and storm the capitol while an important procedural vote is taking place is an official act of a President. But now it has to be ruled on, specifically, and that’s one more thing to add to the pile before the obvious verdict can be reached.
Trump’s lawyers have already filed an argument in the hush money case that certain points of evidence should be removed because they were official acts. If so, that would potentially result in a mistrial, and so the only Trump criminal case that went forward would have to be redone.
deleted by creator