• @prole
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    1205 days ago

    Under this new standard, a president can go on a four-to-eight-year crime spree and then retire from public life, never to be held accountable.

    Uhhh, that already happened.

        • If you want to get a bit more cynical, you could very easily describe the deaths of Fred Hampton and the Freedom Summer murders as presidential assassinations. If you want to take the extra step down the rabbit hole, there’s very real reason to suspect MLK was assassinated by the FBI.

        • Maybe Obama should have been charged, just to set the record straight, but likely this wasn’t attempted because (1) Trump was too busy grifting to put any weight behind this, (2) all of those killed were on foreign soil, and (3) they were all working with Al Qaeda. This is getting into the realm of whether or not killing an enemy combatant is murder and what really defines an enemy combatant. I’m sure there was also pressure from both sides to specifically not answer these questions.

          Either way I’d rather live in a country where a President gets charged after leaving office as a rule, than live in a country where a President can practically burn everything to the ground and walk away untouched.

    • @WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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      235 days ago

      Most presidents have done this. Whether it be bombing countries they’re not at war with, trafficking drugs to enrich the war machine by arming enemies of the state, or invading foreign countries and committing war crimes based on their own manufactured lies.

      • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        bombing countries they’re not at war with

        Fun fact. We haven’t officially declared war since 1941.

        Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and now Ukraine? All NATO led military interventions or AUMF policing actions. No articles of war required.

        trafficking drugs to enrich the war machine

        One of the craziest “America just be like that” stories I’ve ever heard was the time Bush Sr set up a drug buy right outside the White House, by having the DEA extort a teenager picked up for selling crack on the opposite side of town to show up on Pennsylvania Avenue the night of a State of the Union Address and do a straw sale to another agent, just so he could talk about it on national TV an hour later like it happened organically.

        Bush dangling a bag of crack on national TV and saying in his Father-Knows-Best voice that we need to go full-on Phoenix Program across every major American city, because of his little kabuki crack sale, is one of those “burned into my conscience” factoids that really changed how I saw our country operating.

    • @Furbag@lemmy.world
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      33 days ago

      Except for the whole retiring from public life part. I wish Trump would just retire from life entirely.

  • @takeda@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Sadly no. The way they turned it around was very clever.

    So they said that only official presidential business is immune, but were ambiguous what that actually means, so inevitably they made it so it would go through them to determine what is the official business.

    Second thing is that they picked up from their ass that Constitution also says that no official business can be used in any trial, even if it is unrelated. This not only jeopardizes all the indictments he had, it possibly will negate the New York trial.

    trump already submitted request to have it referred based on this SCOTUS ruling.

    This election might be the last free election we have. And even if trump loses it will still not be over.

    Please vote and make your friends and family vote. And not just for president but also for the Congress.

    Edit: I also recommend everyone a book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century” (there’s also reading on YouTube) all the warning signs are present. The more people are aware what it is at stake the higher chance that this can be stopped.

    • @everett@lemmy.ml
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      495 days ago

      I also recommend everyone a book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century”

      In case it makes a difference to someone, it’s a pretty short book.

    • @Psychodelic@lemmy.world
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      285 days ago

      Idk, one of the judges said this ruling made him a king. I’m going to take her word over your half-assed opinion. lol

      • @takeda@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        For all intents and purposes does. Just SCOTUS made itself as a final check on what is an official act and what isn’t.

    • @Jyek@sh.itjust.works
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      114 days ago

      So officially dissolve the Supreme Court and instate a new pack of judges and let those judges decide if it was an “Official Act” and thus totally legal.

      • @Jyek@sh.itjust.works
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        54 days ago

        The NY trial was unrelated to his presidential business anyways. It was about private property and fraud relating therein.

        • @danc4498@lemmy.world
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          24 days ago

          But also, other states that have indicted him for Jan 6th activity are unaffected by this, regardless of how Trump could spin this.

      • @takeda@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        We are dealing with an openly partisan court. Normally this wouldn’t affect it, but they already broke a lot of rules.

  • @samus12345@lemmy.world
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    424 days ago

    The President Can Now Legally Assassinate You, Officially if it Supports the SCOTUS Majority’s Agenda

    Anything Biden did would be determined to be “not official” by them because he’s a Democrat.

  • @Hobbes_Dent@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Would this same ruling have happened if Trump wasn’t involved? No, I don’t think so.

    Stop the steal overthrow.

  • @billbasher@lemmy.world
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    735 days ago

    I heard a good argument that while these justices are appointed for life to be judges, it doesn’t specify which branch. Reappointment them to a lower court and appoint new justices. They voted for this let them reap the consequences. Outline enforceable ethics standards.

    • PorradaVFR
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      345 days ago

      The rules of the Senate, as undermined by McConnell and inexplicably tolerated by Schumer ensure it won’t happen.

      That co-equal branches thing was nice while we had it.

      • @Pringles@lemm.ee
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        4 days ago

        Just dismiss the senators as official business. What still stands in the way of a total power grab by a US president?

        As long as it’s official business and they keep it official by officially removing all obstacles, they are legally perfectly in the clear. IANAL obviously, but total power seems just a matter of being audacious enough to grab it.

        • @candybrie@lemmy.world
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          54 days ago

          The president can’t dismiss them. That’s adding executive power. They took away criminal liability. He’d need to kill/kidnap/imprison them. And who knows if they’d rule that as an official act. They didn’t actually outline what counts and what doesn’t. So maybe for Biden that wouldn’t count and for Trump it would.

    • @CrystalRainwater
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      54 days ago

      I think the more viable option is just packing the court but biden would have to get two Republicans to flip and all Democrats to agree. It’s embarrassing he didn’t do it when the Democrats had Senate in 2020

  • @Jyek@sh.itjust.works
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    314 days ago

    The president can also now legally dissolve the Supreme Court and instate a new supreme Court who can then make the decision if it was an official act or not.

  • @hypnoton@discuss.online
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    4 days ago

    The pres can now assassinate a billionaire and take all their wealth for themselves as an official act, and be immune.

  • @cmoney@lemmy.world
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    345 days ago

    It’s settled law so not to worry, they can just change their minds later when it doesn’t benefit their conservative bosses.

  • Resol van Lemmy
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    245 days ago

    Welcome back to another episode of “Where’s Humanity Going to Shit Next?”, where we tackle the depressing consequences of the actions of the human race to our beloved planet Earth. This episode we visit the US once again, where the president decides he now has the power to kill you himself if he feels like it.

    Join us next time to see where humanity is really gonna shit next.

  • @Johnmannesca@lemmy.world
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    84 days ago

    All this murder crap is lame; why has nobody been parroting how the president can do other crimes, like tax fraud or lie under oath or buying drugs or literally anything but murder?

    • @JesusSon@lemmy.world
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      164 days ago

      Because the point is to scare you. “Breaking news president buys crack” is not as scary as “Breaking news president axe murders cabinet.”

      The ruling is not good, but it’s not Seal Team Six executes its political rival bad. It’s more likely to be President sells nuke secrets to Saudi Arabia under the new official “I Get to Sell Nuclear Secrets to Saudi Arabia Act” he just made up right now.

    • stinerman [Ohio]
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      104 days ago

      The President can fire employees that refuse to have sex with him. Firing executive branch employees is well within the President’s power. If they don’t submit to him, he can fire them. Official act.

    • @olutukko@lemmy.world
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      34 days ago

      literal killing if human beings is lame? we already know to white collar criminals are doing tax fraud and use drugs. old news.

      • @Johnmannesca@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        Lame like an overbeaten dead horse, I mean. I was just trying to put out there that there’s worse ways to try and ruin our country like Madoff did but worse. And plenty of others I didn’t even mention.

  • @piecat@lemmy.world
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    74 days ago

    Couldn’t Biden write an executive order that describes what is “official” vs “unofficial”?

  • The US has already extrajudicialy murdered a US citizen on purpose. The US under Obama sent a drone to murder a citizen without a trial.

    Precedent was publicly set then.

    The US 3 letter agencies have been doing this in secret for their entire time in power. But those are widely considered outside the law but necessary. Whatever that means.

    • @CrystalRainwater
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      54 days ago

      Agree but I feel like pointing that out is implying this somehow doesn’t make things worse which I feel like is missing the point. This removes the implicit threat of prosecution for anything the president does.

      Now no matter how much political will exists for the prosecution, the president is fully and unequivocally immune.