Impeachment is the decision to press charges, and the Senate trial is closer to the actual trial.

“Charged and convicted” -> “impeached and convicted”

Otherwise a perfectly good analogy. :)

The distinction only matters for people who bring up due process concerns. The impeachment proceedings aren’t actually a trial, but a decision to have one, as such you aren’t obligated to the same ability to speak in your own defense as you would be at a proper trial. With the Senate trial there’s more expectation of due process because it’s an actual trial.

More realistically, in that it still won’t happen but it involves more paperwork and less people with guns so the it done easier to get done: use the executive powers to declare their homes national parks open to the general public.
Or order the Treasury department to put them on the list of people banks can’t do business with. One person in the Treasury making a 30 second form entry, and over the next few days it’ll trickle out and freeze their accounts, credit cards, mortgages, and everything. Sure, the random banker involved could override it but they, ironically, have personal criminal liability risk if they do so, and do they really want to risk a decade in prison rather than let the lawyers fight about it?

Because the ruling quite literally says that anything the president does as the president is presumed to have immunity unless the prosecution can argue that applying criminal law couldn’t possibly impact on the core work of the office of the president, and that their motivation for doing what they do can’t be considered when making that determination.

“As the president” Trump asked the justice department to falsely claim it had discovered election fraud as part of a plot to steal the election.
The supreme Court ruled that this is protected because if you ignore his motivation, punishing the president for consulting with the justice department about election fraud would clearly impede the core functions of the office.

Without considering motivation, would punishing the president for transporting documents he has legal access to to a place he’s allowed to take them impact impact the function of the office?

It’s a very bad ruling.

I’m still just amazed that we’re in a place where one bad debate means we talk about nothing but changing candidates for a week and counting, but dozens of criminal felony convictions is just something we roll with.

A thousand voters is actually a perfectly good statistical sampling for the US population.

What matters is that

• the daily Mail isn’t overly credible
• they don’t mention how the thousand voters were selected.

A thousand people is enough to get you into single digit margin of error for a population the size of the US. If you find them by dialing random landlines, or mailing surveys to people with a voter history, your sample biases towards the demographic that still has landlines or that’s willing to take the time to fill out a paper survey.

For the military thing, I think there’s coverage for that. The constitution gives Congress the authority to govern the conduct of the military, as well as when it may be used. The president’s “just” the commander, but they’re bound by the same rules for the military that Congress made. I think the best case a rogue president could make there would be that they should be court martialed rather that tried in a civilian court, and I’m unsure if that’s better.

Since Congress has authority over the conduct of the military, I can’t actually think of a situation where “being commander” was the defining thing, and not their conduct as commander. Closest I got was some sort of negligence resulting in death, but that’s derilection of duty and part of conduct.

I believe the executive power thing is essentially “control of the executive branch”. I think that one is actually fairly well fleshed out since it’s the leading source of disputes, since it’s all about what the president can tell a part of the executive branch to do.
It would essentially be “the president is not criminally liable for firing the attorney general”.

So yeah, I think the sane conclusion would be that the president is de facto immune to laws that currently don’t exist, and likely never will that are insanely narrow in scope.

I unfortunately don’t think the court is playing a game.
I think their slow handling of the case was partly avoiding claims of the courts influencing the election, and partly it just being complicated and unprecedented.
I think they were very clear that the other acts are basically anything the president does “as president”, particularly since they ruled that it’s okay for the president to ask the justice department about options for replacing electors, because the president gets to talk to the justice department.

I think it’s also worth reiterating that this doesn’t prevent the courts from preventing an action, or other checks against presidential actions, only the consequences the individual may face afterwards.
The president has the same authority to order the military to disband Congress as they did before, I just might be harder to sue them for it.

I’d agree that that would also be a valid way of accomplishing the same thing. Given the history of how we’ve handled things like civil immunity for the presidency before, it’s at least consistent to call it an extension or clarification of existing practices, rather than something new.

Those are all great points.

To be clear, I don’t agree with the notion that the president requires immunity in order to be “undistracted” while being president.
I think that immunity for explicitly delineated powers makes sense purely from a logical point of view: the constitution says the president can do a thing, therefore a law saying they can’t do that thing is either unconstitutional, or doesn’t apply to the president.
If they’re impeached it wasn’t a valid use of their powers and they are potentially personally criminally liable.
I feel like it’s less traditional immunity and more an acknowledgement that the legislature can’t criminalize things in the constitution, and someone can’t be guilty of a crime under an unconstitutional law.

It’s the not-enumerated official acts bit that’s wonky to me.

I don’t think anything that trump did would even remotely fit under an enumerated power of the president, which are pretty clearly and narrowly defined. Nowhere does the constitution empower the president to futz about with elections. If Congress delegated that power to the president, then the president is acting in the bounds of a law they can break.

I mean, if he’s even sorta a boot licker, that’s pretty awesome.

Hopefully that “lol, nice” makes up for that iota. :)

Because the legislatures power to impeach and convict isn’t dependent on the judiciary.

Criminal and civil charges are a judicial branch thing. Impeachment is a legislative branch thing. The legislature does not answer to the judiciary, and the judiciary doesn’t have the power to tell the legislature how or when they execute their constitutional authority. Basically the only restriction is that the need some manner of “due process”, or to be basically fair.

There’s the office of the president and the individual who is the president. Both are often called “the president”.

In this case, it was ruled that the individual cannot be criminally charged for doing actions defined as a role of the office in the constitution: constitution says the president can veto bills, so a law saying it’s criminal to do so is unconstitutional.
There are other activities listed, the “official acts” bit, that are to be presumed to be immune unless you can prove otherwise, like the president communicating with the justice department.

The ruling didn’t change the ability of the office of the president to be sued or constrained, only delineated when you can legally go after the individual. “Delineated” because this has never been relevant before, so it didn’t matter that we hadn’t answered the question.

It’s a bad ruling not because it makes the president unremovable, but because those “other official acts” are given way too much slack.

The rationale is that the powers aren’t unchecked, but that the check for official constitutionally listed acts of the president is Congress, not the courts.

Article 48 gave the presidentisl office the power to unilaterally bypass the legislature.
This supreme Court ruling delineates the line between the individual and the office with regards to the judicial system, not the relationship between the office and the other branches like article 48 did.
Rather than granting new powers or preventing restraint of the executive branch, it purely limits the consequences the individual can face out of office.
The concept of presidential immunity existed prior to this case.

The ruling essentially listed three categories and their immunity status with regards to the courts. In my opinion, two of them are reasonable and the third shouldn’t exist.

It’s reasonable to me to say you cannot sue the president for vetoing a bill, or criminally prosecute the president for commanding the military. The constitution says the president can do those things, and that the check on presidential power is congressional acts including impeachment. The office of the president or the government as a whole may be prosecuted, and Congress and the courts can hammer out the exact meaning of the core powers, but the individual is only liable if Congress uses their power to assert that something was definitely not a valid presidential act.

It’s reasonable to me to say that being the president doesn’t grant you broad immunity for non-president things. The president does not have the constitutional authority to drink and drive, so if they do they’re just a person subject to criminal prosecution.

It’s unreasonable to me to say that in areas where the president acts officially, but their authority is shared with Congress or an inherent power of the office that they might not have immunity depending on how it impacts the role of the president.
It’s weird to say it, but in this case I agree more with Coney Barrett that the more appropriate test is to see if the law applies to the official act and then determine if in this case it would interfere with a delineated core power.

In her own separate concurrence, Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed with the majority “that the Constitution prohibits Congress from criminalizing a President’s exercise” of his core constitutional powers and “closely related conduct.” But she would have courts approach the question of immunity for other official acts differently, by focusing first on whether the criminal law under which a former president is charged applies to his official acts and, if so, whether prosecuting the former president would interfere with his constitutional authority.

Applying that principle to the facts of this case, she suggested that at least some of the conduct that serves as the basis for the charges against Trump – such as his request that the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives hold a special session about election fraud claims – would not be immune. “The President,” she concluded, “has no authority over state legislatures or their leadership, so it is hard to see how prosecuting him for crimes committed when dealing with the Arizona House Speaker would unconstitutionally intrude on executive power.”

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/07/justices-rule-trump-has-some-immunity-from-prosecution/

I ultimately think that it would have been better to say that the president (individual) cannot be criminally prosecuted for exercising specifically enumerated constitutional powers unless Congress has impeached and removed from office and send it back to the lower court. They’re perfectly capable of deciding if a particular act was an executive overreach or not on a case by case basis, and the fact that this has never happened before is a pretty solid argument against needing to worry about a “chilling effect” on the exercise of presidential power. The president should be chilled, it’s practically in the constitution. Any power not given to the government is reserved to the people, clearly implying that the constitution should be read as stingy with power to the government, and generous with rights to the people. The president, as a member of the government, should be encouraged to worry about wandering around in legal grey areas.

So, national emergencies can do some of that, but this one has more to do with financing of programs, and the legal basis for financial sanctions relating to fighting terrorism. It also allows for more flexible hiring of military officers and for there to be more generals than usual.

The actual things being changed by the emergency declaration is listed in the order.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13224

It’s basically “we don’t need to ask Congress when the Treasury department tells a bank they can’t send money to specific overseas accounts”.

Oh, it’s totally freedom of speech. But freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom to broadcast your speech on public property without exception.

If they hung the banner on their house or private property, there would be nothing to be done to stop them.
But you can’t hang a banner from the governments property without their permission, which must be given in a manner impartial to the content on the banner beyond any compelling interests like “no hanging very distracting banners where it could cause accidents”.

They didn’t ask, so they can have their banner removed just as though they hung it from the flagpole in front of the courthouse.

They’re being prosecuted because a racial component to a crime is an aggravating factor that makes it more appealing to prosecutors.
So their claim is entirely correct: they’re being prosecuted because their crime was minor but made worse by being racist. We’ve already decided that it’s reasonable for the government to be particularly harsh on racist crimes because it singles out a type of behavior that’s particularly harmful to society.

Dude, have you actually read vermin Supremes platform, or rather his actual political philosophy and beliefs?

I read through some of them once, and had the horrifying realization that the contemporary political figure that I think I agree with most closely is:

• unelectable
• best known for wearing a boot on his head

I couldn’t find where a lot of his actual opinions got discussed a bit more formally, but this random video snippet from 2008 does a decent job capturing it.

If I had (got? Got. I’d love to need to make the choice) to pick between a democratic socialist or a social anarchist, I think I’d honestly lean towards the social anarchist, all things being equal.

They did a lot of the pre-selection of people beforehand. The headline most places are running with is “flash poll says trump won”, but if you actually read the conclusions, it’s that “flash poll says trump won, more Republicans watched the debate by about a ten percent margin, and no one changed their opinions about fitness for office or who they’re voting for”.

True. But they were going to have the same criticism of Biden regardless.

It’s part of the reason I didn’t even watch. Looking over the polling, the debate didn’t really change anyone’s opinions on anything to any significant degree.

See, you’re talking partisan politics, I’m talking “you literally have to pick someone”. We’ve had these candidates before. You already know which one you’re going to vote for. You picked your side four years ago when you were asked the same question.

Beyond that though, there’s “parties” and then theirs “sides”. One side is xenophobic, homophobic and actively wishes harm on a lot of people. The other side doesn’t, for all their flaws.
There are more parties than there are sides in the past few elections.

By saying you think you should vote for someone who will be good for everyone, you’ve picked a side. The side that doesn’t want to do good for only the “right” people, or make sure only the “right” people get hurt.
The only question is if you’ll vote for that side to win, or if you’ll let idealism or anger drive you to vote otherwise.

People keep saying Bernie could have won, but he didn’t beat Clinton.

… Picking a side is literally what an election is.

Does it really count as “lucid” if you enunciate your lies, fabrications, misrecollections about… everything?