I still have not got around to reading the judgement yet, so please be charitable, but my understanding is that one of the problems of the judgement is that few of the important terms are defined properly, and the bias of the judgement is towards increasing the power of the US President, and to reinforce their lack of responsibility to the American people.
After the Court’s decision, the President is immune from criminal prosecution for all acts that can be interpreted as part of their official “core” duties, and given “presumptive” immunity for all other official acts. This appears to allow the official Presidential core or other capacities to be stretched to provide immunity anywhere. Assuming the President has good advisors, it will be very hard to argue that any action is not a core activity or one with “presumptive immunity”.
So if Trump or anyone else says, “As part of my core activity of protecting the constitution and the stability of the Country, I will declare Martial law and suspend all elections” or “I will prevent all Marxists from participating in elections,” defining Marxists to be people who do not vote Republican (which is pretty much the current FOX position and that of many Republican politicians). He can then suspend all elections and remove all non Republican voters and candidates, to cheers from his media.
We can be sure that the President’s party will ignore impeachment, especially if he can have them killed. So no President will ever be impeached, and the President could presumably have the witnesses or prosecutors ‘disappear’ to protect the State from insurrection.
It already seems to be recognised by the Court that Trump’s attempts to force Pence into not certifying the result, is part of his official job of communicating with the VP. His attempts to force the DoJ to overthrow results is part of his core duties as supervising the DoJ. Possibly his ‘talks’ with the governor of Georgia are part of his duties as President to ‘prevent’ electoral fraud, and so on. We have been told he can only obstruct congress by refusing information, so arranging the assault of members by followers does not count. His earlier attempts to obstruct justice in the Mueller inquiry have been ignored anyway.
In other words, because of vagueness over his core capacities (even without presumptive immunity), it should be relatively easy to rule that the President could assassinate someone, or imprison them without trial, as long as he made the connection to a core activity. What a future this opens.
The judgement should have given hypothetical examples of what might be a crime, especially given that it gave comments which are clearly directed at stopping the cases against Trump, but I guess that would have undone the purpose of the judgement. The members of the Court could, for example, have replied to justice Sotomayor’s objections, by saying the president could be prosecuted for organizing a military coup, trying to overthrow an election, shooting unarmed people, starting a war without consulting Congress, or for taking a payment (or gift) in exchange for a pardon etc. but they didn’t. This implies that the judgement potentially recognises such acts as non criminal when committed by the President.
If any of what I’ve written is remotely correct, then I really had expected better of the Supreme Court, even this one. They, at best, show a remarkable lack of understanding of consequences of their actions. If not now, then later, they have made it legal for the USA to be seized by a dictator. This is a decision which supports the Deep State and tyranny.
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I may be being too narrow. It may be that the Supreme court wants to make it so that the rich-power elites can be immune from buying up the government
Earlier this month they essentially legalised bribery by saying in Snyder v United States that a bribe had to be paid before an advantage was given to the payer, and that gratuities, tips, gifts and other signs of appreciation given afterwards were perfectly legal.
This ruling guts most corruption legislation, and previous cases of corruption.
It also frees some of the Supreme Court from challenges of being corrupt themselves. Which is convenient
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