Yep, we’re fucked.
I chose my words carefully with that title. Their “reasoning” for the decision granting absolute powers to presidents is equivalent to the work of a confused college sophomore. I knew right away that this decision couldn’t be good for us, but I decided to hold my tongue for a while.
I have now listened to the Serious Trouble podcast, by defense attorney Ken White:
https://www.serioustrouble.show/p/donald-trump-wins-the-immunity-idol
And to LegalEagle’s take on the matter:
We’re fucked indeed.
I invite you to listen to both. I knew the decision was a bad one, but I had no grasped just how sophomoric it is. So sophomoric that I now have no qualms saying that the conservative majority is in the pocket of the GOP and Trump. There is no other plausible explanation for such a turd of an opinion.
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These so-called “textualists” are in fact cherry-pickers. They assert that the Constitution does not say anything about presidential immunity. This is true, on its face, but also misleading. The framers of the constitutions did bestow immunity explicitly elsewhere in the Speech or Debate Clause of the constitution. If they remained silent about the president, that’s because they did not want to give the president immunity.
This is textual analysis 101. To insist otherwise is to ignore the very text of the Constitution and intellectually dishonest. I’ve done textual analysis as part of my master’s and my Ph.D. This type of shitty logic would not be tolerated there, but it is tolerated among the conservative justices, because it is a means to an end.
The court’s decision is utterly vague about how the lower courts should interpret any of it. If I were a lower court judge, I’d play dumb with the lack of guidelines that SCOTUS has provided, and give a ruling that will most likely be appealed to SCOTUS. Let them deal with the bloody mess they created.
This is sophomoric.
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