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Trump v United States

Roberts directed the lower court to sort through Smith's indictment, to sift official acts from unofficial ones. He tipped his hand though, classifying some of the charges himself.

Trump's attempts to leverage the Justice Department to convince states to replace their electors with fake ones — and his threats to replace the acting attorney general — fall under the purview of official acts, so Trump cannot be prosecuted for them.

As for the dissents, they strike a tone of chilling doom
that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually
does today—conclude that immunity extends to official dis-
cussions between the President and his Attorney General,
and then remand to the lower courts to determine "in the
first instance" whether and to what extent Trump's remain-
ing alleged conduct is entitled to immunity. Supra, at 24,
28, 30.
...
Conspicuously absent is mention of the fact that since
the founding, no President has ever faced criminal
charges—let alone for his conduct in office. And accordingly
no court has ever been faced with the question of a Presi-
dent's immunity from prosecution. All that our Nation's
practice establishes on the subject is silence.

The majority's single-minded fixation on the President's
need for boldness and dispatch ignores the countervailing
need for accountability and restraint. The Framers were
not so single-minded. In the Federalist Papers, after "en-
deavor[ing] to show" that the Executive designed by the
Constitution "combines . . . all the requisites to energy," Al-
exander Hamilton asked a separate, equally important
question: "Does it also combine the requisites to safety, in a
republican sense, a due dependence on the people, a due re-
sponsibility?" The Federalist No. 77, p. 507 (J. Harvard Li-
brary ed. 2009). The answer then was yes, based in part
upon the President's vulnerability to "prosecution in the
common course of law." Ibid. The answer after today is no.

Never in the history of our Republic has a President had
reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal
prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate
the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former
Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occu-
pant of that office misuses official power for personal gain,
the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not pro-
vide a backstop.

With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

Roberts directed the lower court to sort through Smith's indictment, to sift official acts from unofficial ones. He tipped his hand though, classifying some of the charges himself.

Trump's attempts to leverage the Justice Department to convince states to replace their electors with fake ones — and his threats to replace the acting attorney general — fall under the purview of official acts, so Trump cannot be prosecuted for them

Few things would threaten our constitutional order more
than criminally prosecuting a former President for his offi-
cial acts.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

...The sheer malicious hatred the elderly exhibit towards younger people is staggering.

They want to kill us via climate change.

They want to make us poor.

They want to keep us from retiring.

They want to let us die from lack of healthcare.

Yet, because "ageism" is a weaponized term that exists only to attempt to shame critics into silence, no one describes any of the vicious attacks on the young by the old as ageism.

The real thing, actual genuine discrimination in the workplace based on age, is important and bad. But we can't talk about that because the word that used to be useful for discussing that issue has been turned into a political cudgel wielded against anyone under the age of 60.

So I wanna say this. At the debate on Wednesday, Joe Biden had a bad night. That's it. He had a bad night. Let's just say that.

Joe Biden had a bad night; Donald Trump is a bad person. There's a big difference between the two.

Joe Biden had a bad night; Donald Trump gave us the Dobbs decision.

Joe Biden had a bad night; Donald Trump called some countries "shithole countries."

Joe Biden had a bad night, yeah; Donald said that there were people in Charlottesville who were good people.

Joe Biden had a bad night; Donald Trump wants to take away your health care.

Joe Biden had a bad night; OK, how much we gonna talk about this? Donald Trump gave us four bad years and he will give us four more bad years very quickly.

You know how we know that? Because he's told us that with the Project 2025. He told us what he wants to do.

And one more thing: if Donald Trump gets four more years, he's gonna put more people on that Supreme Court, which would take him not just through our lives, through your children's life.

Joe Biden had a bad night; Donald Trump is a monster of a human being. Compare the two.

Everyone stop clutching the pearls, everyone get over it. Everyone get out there, make phone calls, knock on doors, and work.

Joe Biden had a bad night, but Joe Biden has had a very good presidency. Thank you everybody.

He wants to save our Democracy, not end it. I'm a bit disturbed by this idea of preemptively crowing Biden King to avoid King Trump.

If Democrats are really pro-democracy, they have to do more than argue only reelecting them can save democracy. They must bequeath to the public a system in which citizens actually have meaningful choices, rather than cling to and capitalize on an it's-us-or-Adolf dynamic. Are Democrats pro-democracy, or just pro conditions that help them win their next election?

The reforms I favor Congress could pass in a day. Elections for single-winner, at-large positions like Senator and President should be by approval voting, which favors candidates everyone can live with over candidates that members of conflictual factions most ardently support, and which encourages the emergence of multiple parties. Elections to the House of Representative should be by some form of proportional representation, whether it's my unlikely dorky favorite (random ballot), a conventional party-list based system, single-transferable-vote, or the clever hybrid MMP.

Perhaps you have different reforms in mind. This is a democracy! But you are not objectively pro-democracy if you are not working to reform a system that, by virtue of widely understood social dynamics, will predictably, recurringly, almost inevitably, yield polarization, gridlock, and incapacity.

[...]

We need state capacity now more than ever. We can do better than succumb to authoritarianism or gin up some war to find it.

But we will do one of those things if we don't do anything else to restore a capable state.

Electoral reform is possible. It is easy. Nothing is more urgent, or more hopeful.

If the measure passes, Colorado would join only a couple of other states that conduct their elections in similar ways. Voters in Alaska approved a similar new system in 2020 for its primary and general elections. A similar reform to primaries and general elections is up for final approval by Nevada voters this year after passing initially in 2022. Oregon voters will consider shifting to ranked-choice voting, too, and Maine recently instituted RCV. California adopted a version of "all-candidate" primaries in 2011.

Here are two very concrete things that should become, today, immediately, the standard position of any progressive: Getting rid of the filibuster, which allows a minority to thwart the will of the majority in the Senate; and either expanding the Supreme Court (best) or putting term limits on the Supreme Court (not as good, but better than nothing). There should not be a single day's extra discussion about these things. They must become rock solid planks of the party platform. In the long run of history, after many of Joe Biden's positive accomplishments as president have been dismantled and erased by right wing courts, it will become clear that his inability to get to the right place on those two issues was one of his administration's most deadly miscalculations.

So let us set aside the law, which has nothing to do with how the Court majority arrived at its opinion. I am here to explore the majority's mindset, which leads it down the path to utter lawlessness, and opens the door to dictatorship. Justice Roberts disparages this worry as overblown, much as Hindenburg imagined that Hitler was a mere blowhard, no real danger to the Republic.