this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
137 points (92.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36134 readers
1111 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

To give a serious answer: The short answer is probably, the long answer is no.

The opinion was deliberately vague on that issue. A dissent said they could under Roberts' opinion, but Roberts calls that "fear mongering" without elaborating whether that's true or not.

It's also a pretty complicated opinion so bear with me. The whole thing comes down to this vague idea of official vs. unofficial acts which are supposed to be immune according to the court. Really, there's multiple factual allegations and the court said each one has some level of immunity (and if you think these are full of contradictions, I know):

  • Asking the DOJ to pressure states to investigate obvious spurious "fraud" claims and pressure states to throw out their results, and threatening to fire them if they refuse - here Trump is "absolutely immune" because the DOJ is part of the executive branch and the president has power to fire them, I guess for any reason now.
  • Trying to get Mike Pence to refuse the vote count and throw the whole country into a chaotic power struggle - presumptively immune, because the president and vice president can talk about their duties. Can be rebutted if the government can prove a prosecution wouldn't pose a danger of intrusion into executive branch functions, whatever the hell that means.
  • Trump personally telling state officials to change electoral votes - here Roberts says there's no basis for Trump to claim immunity because there's no presidential power to try and coerce state officials. However, he then says it's up to the lower court to consider if it's official or not before proceeding, and is entirely unclear on who has the burden of proof here.
  • Using twitter and a speech to organize and then start a riot at the capitol - similar to the above, the president has official duties relating to speaking but yada yada yada it's sent back to the lower court to decide whether this is official or not.

Conclusion: Ordering an assassination of a rival certainly sounds most like the first - the president has several official duties relating to giving military orders, and the military is part of the executive branch. The FBI is also part of the DOJ, so if Trump can order the DOJ to do something criminal, that itself could be an assassination. But as described in the article below, one could make an argument that no, the opinion doesn't actually say he do that with the military specifically, because congress has some powers relating to war (not convincing). However, to be fair to that opinion, this immunity ruling is such a stinker that lower and future courts will limit its holding as much as humanly possible. Plus seemingly contradictory aspects to it (Trump can order the DOJ to do things he can't do himself?) could be used to argue for exceptions to the overall immunity. But reading the opinion at face value, yes the president could order an assassination, and even fire generals who refuse to pass along those orders.

Longer answer though: This is the real world. If Biden gave such an order, it would likely result in a coup and an overthowing of the Constitutional order as a whole. And if order were somehow restored and Biden brought up on criminal charges, you could be your life that the 6-3 Republican majority on the court would find a way to either limit or perhaps overturn their prior ruling as it pertains to Biden.

For an alternative perspective on the same topic, here's a center-to-slightly-right-leaning law professor's take on this which does a pretty plausible job sane-washing the opinion.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

First off, thank you for that write up. Would you mind sharing your opinion on 1x on trump and 6x justices simultaneously? At that point it's a coup or a culling, but it's a very loaded gun I don't want to hand to anyone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

The catch-22 is that the 3 liberal justices dissented from the opinion. So all 9 can be presumed to vote against Biden being immune for assassinating his opponent, and eliminating justices won't really help.