logoalt Hacker News

vkoulast Thursday at 12:58 AM2 repliesview on HN

You're conveniently ignoring all the wild shadow docket decisions in Trump's favor with no provided justification. None of that sets a precedent.

There's also a giant bloody spectrum between 'policy that had a bad outcome for someone (hint: That's every policy)' and 'blatant pay-to-play corruption and criminality and treason' when it comes to that immunity. The court, of course, went all in on enabling the latter, instead of finding any kind of rational ground, because any rational ground would have put Trump in prison.

By failing to give any qualification of what the fuck an official act is, they've given him blanket immunity. And blanket immunity for an executive means that the constitution is as good as a piece of toilet paper. There are no consequences to him violating your rights.


Replies

rayinerlast Thursday at 1:35 AM

There’s nothing unusual about the use of the shadow docket. It’s being used in response to district court orders that are being issued without trial and often with very short or no opinions. Why should the Supreme Court spend a year on the full rigmarole for some preliminary injunction a district court fired off after a week after no discovery, no trial, and minimal briefing?

> There's also a giant bloody spectrum between 'policy that had a bad outcome for someone (hint: That's every policy)

Yeah, that’s exactly why there’s presidential immunity for official acts! Because otherwise you could easily shoehorn one of those bad outcomes into the letter of some broadly written criminal law.

In Texas, there’s a deadly conduct crime: “A person commits an offense if he recklessly engages in conduct that places another in imminent danger of serious bodily injury.”

You think some Texas prosecutor couldn’t get a border county Texas jury to squint at that text and convict Biden under it for throwing open the border to illegal aliens? All the Supreme Court decided was that some things the President does can’t be prosecuted under the criminal laws like he’s an ordinary citizen. That’s obviously true, which is the same reason Congress has immunity for official acts and judges have immunity for official acts.

> By failing to give any qualification of what the fuck an official act is, they've given him blanket immunity.

No, it’s exactly the opposite. All they decided was that official acts immunity exists. You can’t prosecute Obama for involuntary manslaughter because some executive action he took got someone killed. They then remanded to the district court to decide what counted as official acts and what didn’t count. That didn’t give Trump “blanket immunity”—it left it to the district court to decide what was covered by the immunity and what wasn’t.

show 1 reply