SCOTUS thread

commando said:
apparently Biden can "officially" order seal team 6 to take care of trump now.   
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Let's hope he does it quickly.  :o  And Sotomayor agrees.    Trump is turning me more and more into a liberal every day.  I can't run fast enough from his brand of conservativism.    

The President is a King

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to grant presidents absolute immunity for all official acts as president, to the exclusion of private acts. Dissenting were the three liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor, who tore into the conservative majority in her dissent.

In her dissent, she declared that “When [a president] uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.” She listed out some extreme cases where she argued this ruling would shield presidents from prosecution:

Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

Sotomayor added: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” She went on, concluding her dissent by stating her “fear for our democracy”:

The majority’s single-minded fixation on the President’s need for boldness and dispatch ignores the countervailing need for accountability and restraint. The Framers were not so single-minded. In the Federalist Papers, after “endeavor[ing] to show” that the Executive designed by the Constitution “combines … all the requisites to energy,” Alexander Hamilton asked a separate, equally important question: “Does it also combine the requisites to safety, in a republican sense, a due dependence on the people, a due responsibility?” The Federalist No. 77, p. 507 (J. Harvard Library ed. 2009). The answer then was yes, based in part upon the President’s vulnerability to “prosecution in the common course of law.” Ibid. The answer after today is no.

Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.

With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
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Dr. Strangelove said:
He has absolute immunity for official acts. SCOTUS has basically sent this to the lower courts to define what most "Official Acts" are, since they decided to let the lower courts separate "Official Acts" from "Unofficial Acts". From there, what constitutes an "Official Act" will be brought before SCOTUS from lower courts where it will be reduced, defined, and be shaped to be whatever the Federalist Society/Heritage Foundation wants it to be.

SCOTUS has basically made it so that it will be a very, very long time before Trump is tried for trying to subvert Democracy. Courts are going to spend a lot of time defining "Official Acts" and it will ultimately become whatever the Culture War Zeitgeist of the Republican Party wants it to be.
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Yes and they can 'dip their hands in the bowl of water' and not take responsibility for any of it.  History will record the Roberts' court as the court that caused democracy to fail in the USA. 

 
That is a terrible ruling. Good god. Republicans better beware what they have signed themselves up for as that power will be used against them.

 
RedDenver said:
You'll just be trading school boards and Dept of Ed for local politicians and judges. There will always be non-teachers in education.
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Judges almost always throw everything back to the school and administration in terms of policy and discipline… They almost always stay out of it because they know they have no idea what they’re dealing with and what they’re talking about.  
 

like when some crazy parent tries to get a “injunction“ so that their kid can still play in some varsity sport that weekend, even though they are failing all of their classes.

#SoonWillBeFree

 
Dr. Strangelove said:
Well, the entire problem is that these types of decisions are going to go away from experts to political appointees who will do whatever the cultural zeitgeist tells them.
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That’s really not what the ruling states in my view.  The ruling means unelected bureaucrats no longer have absolute say so on how laws should be interpreted.   It’s up to Congress to write laws more defines vs so broad and allow the executive branch to determine how the laws should be followed and defined.  

 
Archy1221 said:
That’s really not what the ruling states in my view.  The ruling means unelected bureaucrats no longer have absolute say so on how laws should be interpreted.   It’s up to Congress to write laws more defines vs so broad and allow the executive branch to determine how the laws should be followed and defined.  
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While true, the ultimate goal of getting rid of Chevron wasn't to teach Congress how to write laws. 

Laws are going to be written in ways that allow political involvement in culture war decisions, and it's going to be exploited by both sides of the political aisle. 

 
commando said:
what should King Biden do today?
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Unfortunately Biden is the wrong kind of King (he's a Democrat). SCOTUS would carve out exceptions real quick for him.

For the right kind of king though? We'll send that to lower courts so they can spend the next few years going back and fourth defining what Official Acts are (even though we could've done that at first) where we'll narrow or broaden the scope of "Official Acts" depending on who's in charge at the time. 

 
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