this pairs nicely with the finding of the supreme court:
Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.
Look, you can't have a (working, democratic) government where one party can send the other to jail as soon as they get into power. If presidents could go to jail for doing their job, their opposing party would absolutely try to send them there.
This would then ultimately handicap the president: anything they do that the opposition can find a legal justification against could land them in jail, so they won't do anything that comes close to that. We do not want our chief executive making key decisions for the country based on fear of political retribution!
The Supreme Court has failed, miserably and repeatedly lately, and some of their decisions run directly counter to the law (often they even contradict past decisions!) But deciding the president won't face political retribution for trying to do his job was not a mistake.
Hard disagree. The metric ought to be whether they'll make it out of the court case clean or not - just having the ability to check power in a meaningful fashion when it goes off the rails is something you're only afraid of if you're a war criminal or other flavor of Massive Piece Of Shit.
The reason the rules are the way they are is pretty obvious; we haven't had a not war criminal in office possibly ever, definitely not in my lifetime. It's time we faced the facts - we're the baddies.
This is a really silly take. The whole reason for separation of powers is so that the executive can be bound by laws created by the legislative as adjudicated by the judiciary. Saying that the people in the executive are above the law undermines this completely.
This doesn't say the executive is above the law, it says you can't prosecute the president for doing his job, just like you can't prosecute judges for their rulings on the bench or members of congress for their votes on the floor.
The equivalence is that in all three cases those are the official duties of the office.
I would agree that the scope of the president's job description has gotten overly broad over the last century as congress has delegated more and more of its powers to the executive branch, but I don't think a prosecutorial Sword of Damocles is a good solution to that problem. Certainly it's not the constitutionally prescribed one anyway, which is what the court's ruling affirmed.
