This ruling is about after leaving office, when they don’t have the power anymore. Biden is still covered under the Justice Department policy that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted, but presumably the fear of being prosecuted after leaving would help restrain the worst and most blatant violations.
I’m not mad about it, that’s usually how incumbent primaries go. No one believes single-contender votes are sacred expressions of democracy though. Maybe no one except you, but as previously stated, that’s a you issue.
The one act outside of the explicit constitutional powers that they gave absolute immunity to was him communicating with his Justice Department. So it 100% would be.
The ruling specified he was absolutely immune for conversations with his Justice Department officials, who would either be the people he was instructing to not act or a pretty exact match to whatever other department is being told not to act.
Nobody of consequence ran. Literally anybody could have run. They didn’t.
Yes, exactly. That’s why no one considers their vote in the 2024 primary to be a real indication of preference. If you think your vote for a forgone conclusion was some solemn compact, that’s a you issue. Votes without meaningful choice aren’t meaningful votes.
No one considers this primary a real vote, or that a vote from four years ago indicates current preferences. If it did, 50% of Democrats who watched the debate wouldn’t want him to step aside.
I read their point as being “because official acts are not defined and they’re the ultimate deciders, the Court can provide or withhold this immunity at will”. Turns out killing Republicans is not an official act and killing Democrats is.
Oh no! A bad precedent. Wouldn’t want to have one of those. Surely precedent will protect us from having reproductive rights stolen, or declaring the president a king, or declaring the regulatory state invalid. The fascists are already on the march and have demonstrated they’re willing to trash precedent without the Democrats making the first move.
But none of that matters. Is this an existential issue or not? If it is, a constitutional crisis is warranted to solve it. You can’t say something is existential and then worry about not doing anything too extreme.
You don’t need them to comply. All they can do is write words. If you tell them they’re making a power grab and you’re not going to just cede power to them, they don’t have anything they can do but write more words.
There’s plenty that can be done about the Court. Just tell them no. They made a massive precedent-defying power grab overruling Chevron. If the climate is an existential problem, a constitutional crisis is warranted.
My guess would be they were arranging calls to rally support and force the alternatives to say they’re not interested in replacing him.
Read the dissents. No one who’s deeply involved in politics or law thinks this is a nothingburger.
I also do not know what motivates him, but when his actions and impacts are indistinguishable from someone actively aiding fascism, I don’t think it’s really important for us to parse that. He’s an educated man with no known mental impairments, regardless of motivations he knows what effect his campaign will likely have.
Old article about West being funded by Harlan Crowe. Whatever he believes, he thinks it’s worth doing something the worst people in our society want in an election that’s between a conservative Democrat and a fascist. He knows he’s not going to advance left wing causes, he could go on Sunday shows for that, and he doesn’t mind advancing fascist causes in exchange for their money. He may just be delusional rather than a deeply indebted sell-out, but if it were the latter his actions wouldn’t look any different.
“What we are learning is that the president’s age was already priced into the decision-making process before the debate, and the debate itself did not cause any substantial reconsideration of the voters’ decision-making process,” Garin said.
So if we replaced him with someone younger then we could reverse that pricing in? I would like that please.
Independent polls before and after the debate showed that large majorities of the country do not think Biden is up for the job or has the mental competence to carry it out.
The debate was supposed to fix that! Status quo was not the needed result!
This whole issue is about replacing the shitty candidate with one that is less shitty because the other guy winning is literal fascism. It shouldn’t be a close race!
The one thing we have going for us is that it’ll be a race against mortality to accomplish these things. And I don’t think his failson is likely to be installed as the next Great Leader. Usually the dictators start much younger.
They’re only pre-approved for explicit constitutional duties, but they’re presumed immune for all others and their reasoning can’t be questioned. “I believed they were an imminent national security threat and took the hard choice.” It’s like “I feared for my life” for gun nuts, but you can apply it to nearly anything because the president has expansive emergency responsibilities and the only way to prove he wasn’t actually taking an action “officially” would be using his private communications, but any communications with “advisors” are precluded from being used.
And anything that makes it through that gauntlet to the Supreme Court rather than being dismissed earlier will be decided on ideological grounds.
Kicking it to the lower courts is a boiling the frog tactic. They’ll give him immunity once the appeal gets back to them, but they want to spread out their shocks. Just like they leaked the Roe ruling so there wouldn’t be as singular a rallying event.
This is just braindead gaslighting. We all saw his performance. Dedicated Democratic cheerleaders like The Pod Save America guys think it’s the worst debate performance ever and needs to be carefully considered whether he can turn things around (and frankly, are leaning toward the “he can’t” side). Democratic leaders have been giving guarded answers about how they support Biden’s decision on whether to stay in, not that he should of course stay in. This isn’t remotely “media moguls” doing. The wagon circling is transparent and stupid and not working.