The UCMJ doesn’t trump federal or state laws, it is rather corollary to them. Most violations of the UCMJ by a President would also be violations of other federal or state laws, so the question of immunity from them doesn’t really come up. And the President isn’t exactly immune to laws regarding classified information, he is rather the classifying authority.
Which other democracies? I’m not being argumentative (in this case), I’m genuinely interested.
The problem with the argument, “well, that’s what impeachment is for” is that investigations by a Special Counsel are a necessary prelude to any impeachment hearing - there needs to be enough evidence to convince a significant portion of the public that the President is guilty of something impeachable or you will never get enough votes to remove him from office. How do you propose to get that evidence if the President is immune from investigation?
This is mainly an exercise in blaming McConnell’s wankery on both sides.
Considering the enormous power that the Judiciary wields over the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans with their whims and decisions derived thereform, is this any surprise?
Someone arriving at a cataclysmically destructive decision like Citizen’s United through a careful and conscientious reading of the Constitution is still doing enormous harm to the nation, and if the Constitution allows for that, then on some level, it’s a flawed enough document that I don’t really care if it ceases to be the guiding doctrine of the nation until we get our shit sorted.
At every level, progressivism must succeed for the good of all. Having it as a litmus test for the judiciary, so long as their views nudge them along toward decisions that affect us all, is a necessary “evil” to avoid more decisions like CU.
Going down this road isn’t going to lead where you want it to.
Once you abandon things like the Constitution, you are just opening the door to have men like Trump and his cronies impose terrible laws that oppress you.
Once you abandon protection of the rights of others, you lose the protection for your own rights.
Well the trick is to do that only after liberals seize power and cement it for all eternity, duh.
That sounds like it’ll work out well.
This is an amazing bit of both-sidesism. ‘Partisan bickering’ on one side is characterized by pledges not to consider any candidate offered by the other side, ever, and then making good on that promise. ‘Partisan bickering’ on the other side consists of, well, asking the nominee questions and casting votes. Both sides do it!
I mean it’s literally the best thing that could happen for everyone. You should be grateful for the glorious forever-liberal future, comrade!
So, it’s just a happy coincidence that their originalist interpretation of the Constitution aligns with religious and corporate interests? Of course their rulings are informed by their conservative (and I use that word pejoratively) lens. The framers were not infallible demigods, and they knew it - which is why much of the Constitution is deliberately vague and open to interpretation.
The conservative justices that claim deference to the legislative overturns laws passed by said legislature and again, just a happy coinkydink it aligns with the donor’s class desires? (Unlimited money in politics.) You know how the Tea Party engineered their take over in 2010? To a large degree from Koch brother money used to take over local precincts with far-right tea party activists. Do you honestly think tea party flat heads came up with that idea on their own? (Google tea party 2010 koch funds for some fun reading.)
Time again they rule against civil liberties or against labor or against consumers because that’s the framer’s intent? Even Kavanaugh’s abortion ruling dissent that you say is “reasonable” is just another tool the anti-choice faction uses to remove agency from a group of people (in this case, women.) We know better than you so why don’t you just wait another seven days?
They cloak their political views with “freedom for the individual!” but in actual fact it’s just freedom from any responsibility for corporate America. I have no idea why some people keep thinking that they mean anything else.
(Here’s a brief Yglelsias twitter thread that covers some of this.)
But this isn’t the case. You could look at cases like Scalia ruling against laws banning flag burning. In most of the cases that enrage you, you’re angry because the government isn’t restricting the liberties of people as much as you would like. For things like the hated citizens united, the complaints are that the government should limit the ability of a corporation to communicating about elections within 30 days of an election.
The reality is, you want to limit the liberties of people you disagree with.
In that case, the girl who wanted the abortion was a minor, so saying “We know better than you” is not unreasonable. But even there, the dissent did not suggest that she did not have a right to an abortion (indeed, it said the opposite, and that if the state failed to expedite her processing it would be forced to provide the procedure, just as it does for women in prison). And it wasn’t imposing an arbitrary waiting period or something. It was merely saying that it was reasonable for the state to facilitate putting the girl in touch with her immigration sponsor, so that she would have access to some kind of support structure rather than making that decision on her own while held in detention by the state. Again this is not unreasonable to me.
Indeed. Roberts invented the idea that the Federal government couldn’t legislate a requirement on the states for which the Federal government paid out of whole cloth, and used it to make the Medicaid expansion voluntary and weaken the appeal of the law. Kavanaugh actually argued that the ACA was invalid because it ‘originated’ in the Senate, on the grounds that tax bills must be originated in the House. But the ACA is clearly not an appropriations bill or a tax bill; it’s a piece of legislation which has both non-financial and financial elements, as does nearly every law, and the idea that the individual mandate is a tax was invented by, well, Roberts, as part of his baby-splitting on the ACA. And I don’t think any law has ever been overturned on such grounds anyway.
Conservative Justices are like anyone else, they first decide what result they want, then look for some way to rationalize that result. The difference is that that results they want are usually bad.
This is a claim that you cannot possibly justify with evidence, and you know it. In other words, it’s simply a lie.
Well, parliamentary immunity from arrest is common in several democracies, and that extends to the PM. The example I was specifically thinking about is Italy, where immunity was enacted in response to the harassment of political opponents. On multiple occasions it was withdrawn by parliament to allow arrests to proceed (and Congress could of course withdraw it as well). Finally they more or less got rid of it, just in time for Berlusconi.
Immune from prosecution, not Congressional investigation.
I guess Italy doesn’t surprise me; executive immunity goes back to the Roman Republic. That said, I think it just facilitated corruption in modern Italy, and the fall-back of post-office prosecution is an inadequate remedy.
Italy is a dramatic example, but there are protections from arrest and/or prosecution in Spain, France, Iceland, India, Ukraine, Brazil…
That hardly makes sense. The President is under no less burden answering House or Senate subpoenas than those that come from a federal prosecutor. If the argument is that s/he should be relieved of that burden, then immunity from criminal investigation is insufficient to achieve that purpose. Kavanaugh’s says that the President is subject to impeachment as a remedy, but he’s silent on the question of what sort of Congressional investigation the President would be obligated to respond to under this hypothetical law. And the examples he offers as distractions during the Clinton and Bush Presidencies include many examples where Congress was the motivating force behind the investigations.
Just a small request, but could you be slightly less of a jerk? I get this is P&R and things get heated, but it’s not like Timex ran over your dog or anything.
The examples of India, Brazil, and Ukraine speak for themselves.
Lies are lies. What’s wrong with calling them out? Also, too, fuck off.