For the military thing, I think there’s coverage for that. The constitution gives Congress the authority to govern the conduct of the military, as well as when it may be used. The president’s “just” the commander, but they’re bound by the same rules for the military that Congress made. I think the best case a rogue president could make there would be that they should be court martialed rather that tried in a civilian court, and I’m unsure if that’s better.

Since Congress has authority over the conduct of the military, I can’t actually think of a situation where “being commander” was the defining thing, and not their conduct as commander. Closest I got was some sort of negligence resulting in death, but that’s derilection of duty and part of conduct.

I believe the executive power thing is essentially “control of the executive branch”. I think that one is actually fairly well fleshed out since it’s the leading source of disputes, since it’s all about what the president can tell a part of the executive branch to do.
It would essentially be “the president is not criminally liable for firing the attorney general”.

So yeah, I think the sane conclusion would be that the president is de facto immune to laws that currently don’t exist, and likely never will that are insanely narrow in scope.

I unfortunately don’t think the court is playing a game.
I think their slow handling of the case was partly avoiding claims of the courts influencing the election, and partly it just being complicated and unprecedented.
I think they were very clear that the other acts are basically anything the president does “as president”, particularly since they ruled that it’s okay for the president to ask the justice department about options for replacing electors, because the president gets to talk to the justice department.

I think it’s also worth reiterating that this doesn’t prevent the courts from preventing an action, or other checks against presidential actions, only the consequences the individual may face afterwards.
The president has the same authority to order the military to disband Congress as they did before, I just might be harder to sue them for it.

I’d agree that that would also be a valid way of accomplishing the same thing. Given the history of how we’ve handled things like civil immunity for the presidency before, it’s at least consistent to call it an extension or clarification of existing practices, rather than something new.

Those are all great points.

To be clear, I don’t agree with the notion that the president requires immunity in order to be “undistracted” while being president.
I think that immunity for explicitly delineated powers makes sense purely from a logical point of view: the constitution says the president can do a thing, therefore a law saying they can’t do that thing is either unconstitutional, or doesn’t apply to the president.
If they’re impeached it wasn’t a valid use of their powers and they are potentially personally criminally liable.
I feel like it’s less traditional immunity and more an acknowledgement that the legislature can’t criminalize things in the constitution, and someone can’t be guilty of a crime under an unconstitutional law.

It’s the not-enumerated official acts bit that’s wonky to me.

I don’t think anything that trump did would even remotely fit under an enumerated power of the president, which are pretty clearly and narrowly defined. Nowhere does the constitution empower the president to futz about with elections. If Congress delegated that power to the president, then the president is acting in the bounds of a law they can break.

I mean, if he’s even sorta a boot licker, that’s pretty awesome.

Hopefully that “lol, nice” makes up for that iota. :)

Because the legislatures power to impeach and convict isn’t dependent on the judiciary.

Criminal and civil charges are a judicial branch thing. Impeachment is a legislative branch thing. The legislature does not answer to the judiciary, and the judiciary doesn’t have the power to tell the legislature how or when they execute their constitutional authority. Basically the only restriction is that the need some manner of “due process”, or to be basically fair.

There’s the office of the president and the individual who is the president. Both are often called “the president”.

In this case, it was ruled that the individual cannot be criminally charged for doing actions defined as a role of the office in the constitution: constitution says the president can veto bills, so a law saying it’s criminal to do so is unconstitutional.
There are other activities listed, the “official acts” bit, that are to be presumed to be immune unless you can prove otherwise, like the president communicating with the justice department.

The ruling didn’t change the ability of the office of the president to be sued or constrained, only delineated when you can legally go after the individual. “Delineated” because this has never been relevant before, so it didn’t matter that we hadn’t answered the question.

It’s a bad ruling not because it makes the president unremovable, but because those “other official acts” are given way too much slack.

The rationale is that the powers aren’t unchecked, but that the check for official constitutionally listed acts of the president is Congress, not the courts.

Article 48 gave the presidentisl office the power to unilaterally bypass the legislature.
This supreme Court ruling delineates the line between the individual and the office with regards to the judicial system, not the relationship between the office and the other branches like article 48 did.
Rather than granting new powers or preventing restraint of the executive branch, it purely limits the consequences the individual can face out of office.
The concept of presidential immunity existed prior to this case.

The ruling essentially listed three categories and their immunity status with regards to the courts. In my opinion, two of them are reasonable and the third shouldn’t exist.

It’s reasonable to me to say you cannot sue the president for vetoing a bill, or criminally prosecute the president for commanding the military. The constitution says the president can do those things, and that the check on presidential power is congressional acts including impeachment. The office of the president or the government as a whole may be prosecuted, and Congress and the courts can hammer out the exact meaning of the core powers, but the individual is only liable if Congress uses their power to assert that something was definitely not a valid presidential act.

It’s reasonable to me to say that being the president doesn’t grant you broad immunity for non-president things. The president does not have the constitutional authority to drink and drive, so if they do they’re just a person subject to criminal prosecution.

It’s unreasonable to me to say that in areas where the president acts officially, but their authority is shared with Congress or an inherent power of the office that they might not have immunity depending on how it impacts the role of the president.
It’s weird to say it, but in this case I agree more with Coney Barrett that the more appropriate test is to see if the law applies to the official act and then determine if in this case it would interfere with a delineated core power.

In her own separate concurrence, Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed with the majority “that the Constitution prohibits Congress from criminalizing a President’s exercise” of his core constitutional powers and “closely related conduct.” But she would have courts approach the question of immunity for other official acts differently, by focusing first on whether the criminal law under which a former president is charged applies to his official acts and, if so, whether prosecuting the former president would interfere with his constitutional authority.

Applying that principle to the facts of this case, she suggested that at least some of the conduct that serves as the basis for the charges against Trump – such as his request that the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives hold a special session about election fraud claims – would not be immune. “The President,” she concluded, “has no authority over state legislatures or their leadership, so it is hard to see how prosecuting him for crimes committed when dealing with the Arizona House Speaker would unconstitutionally intrude on executive power.”

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/07/justices-rule-trump-has-some-immunity-from-prosecution/

I ultimately think that it would have been better to say that the president (individual) cannot be criminally prosecuted for exercising specifically enumerated constitutional powers unless Congress has impeached and removed from office and send it back to the lower court. They’re perfectly capable of deciding if a particular act was an executive overreach or not on a case by case basis, and the fact that this has never happened before is a pretty solid argument against needing to worry about a “chilling effect” on the exercise of presidential power. The president should be chilled, it’s practically in the constitution. Any power not given to the government is reserved to the people, clearly implying that the constitution should be read as stingy with power to the government, and generous with rights to the people. The president, as a member of the government, should be encouraged to worry about wandering around in legal grey areas.

So, national emergencies can do some of that, but this one has more to do with financing of programs, and the legal basis for financial sanctions relating to fighting terrorism. It also allows for more flexible hiring of military officers and for there to be more generals than usual.

The actual things being changed by the emergency declaration is listed in the order.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13224

It’s basically “we don’t need to ask Congress when the Treasury department tells a bank they can’t send money to specific overseas accounts”.

I want to agree with you, but… We have decades of that just not working.

Anyone able to be persuaded by what you’re describing would have been persuaded by the obvious hypocrisy of the answer itself.

Mockery is a rhetorical device that can be persuasive, and we don’t always need to be nice to people when their open hypocrisy is destroying lives.

I think it stems from his argument being not about what the law says, but about if the law is constitutional.

Very often things that involve political figures are much more likely to get a very generous interpretation of the first amendment, which is why you get stuff like “elected officials can’t always block people on social media even with their personal accounts”.

They claimed that preventing him from trademarking the slogan limited his ability to monetize it, and that made it a limitation on his freedom of speech, specifically regarding a politician. Therefore the government should need to provide explicit, compelling reason for the law as applied to politicians. Recently, trademark rules were shot down over first amendment grounds when the supreme Court found that rules saying you can’t trademark insulting or vulgar things amounted to the government prohibiting speech in a way it’s not allowed to.

With this ruling, they found that the rule in question is viewpoint neutral and therefore isn’t the government disfavoring an idea or viewpoint. It’s unbiased since it’s based on (hopefully) objective facts about if people are alive or not, unlike “is FUCT a vulgar word” or “is it disparaging to name a band The Slants”?

That’s the worst idea I’ve heard on so many levels.

Drafting people is immoral.

Also, it’s politically stupid because the draft is just… Extremely unpopular. Universal mandatory service will be radically less popular.

Then, you’re filling the military with a bunch of people who don’t want to be there. Suddenly a sizable portion of the US military is composed of new recruits who don’t want to be there. If only half the people who come up for mandatory service actually get drafted, that’s still more people than are currently in the US military. This will do wonders for effectiveness and morale.

Finally, once they get out, you have an insane amount of GI bill benefits to pay out, to say nothing of the long term VA costs that come from more than doubling the size of the military. (Potentially up to a 10x increase, assuming four year term of service and roughly 4M 18 year olds per year).
Or you can change the law to deny GI bill benefits to draftees, which is definitely going to be popular with the people whose life you’re stealing.

I suppose “draft everyone” is technically a way to give everyone subsidized college education and universal healthcare, but I think there’s better ways.

Just the dumbest possible people.

The mean number of US presidential felonies is .75.
Trump is truly an extraordinary president, since he’s single handedly raised that number from zero to where it is today, and he’s not even done yet.
Truly providing an excellent education in why statistical means are sometimes very misleading.

I don’t want to befriend someone who thinks my other friends are child molesters and should actually die. I get the impulse to say we should seek friendship and common ground, and I do where possible, but I just can’t with people who don’t see people I care about as even being people.

And that’s not a hypothetical, that’s actual “I have talked with these people” decisions.

Bless your heart.

It’s not their intelligence I’m concerned with my dude, but their inability to hold precision tools.
I hate to be the one to remind you, but they can only use their mouths, and it’s really hard to mine or build complex machines underwater.

They don’t have legs my friend.

They also overheat without the water to keep them cool.

Humans.

We can be “not at sea” and still kill sea life, but dolphins can’t get on land.
We’re currently trying not to kill sea life and doing a pretty poor job of it. If we were trying we could do a number on marine mammals just by having the navy use their crazy powerful sonar all the time, instead of “minimally”.
“Ah, you’re trying to boop my ship. Have you considered having your inner ear destroyed so you can’t tell up from down, use echolocation, or communicate, resulting in a horrible death by drowning or beaching?”

Humor of it aside, the emu was was an attempt to kill the emus eating farmers crops where they used military resources to try to do pest control for people given vaguely subpar farmland. Turns out that stationary machine guns are not the best way to kill emus. After a few attempts only killed a couple thousand, they switched back to just having hunters do it and that got tens of thousands.
Later, they just used “fences”, which proved insurmountable to the emus, which were forced to just walk around the farms instead of cutting through.

See, it’s that sort of partisan thinking that’s dividing this country. A policy like that specifically designed to disproportionately target and imprison Republicans is the sort of decisive culture war nonsense that’s the problem nowadays.

I think I just poes law’d myself.

I mean, even just saying a minors paternal rights are something that needs to be mediated by family court doesn’t sound particularly terrible to me.
If you’re a minor, we’ve already decided that you’re not able to make a lot of legal choices for yourself.

It’s actually not uncommon in industrialized countries, and a lot of countries have similar active projects to phase them out. Flint was a wake-up call to places outside the US as well, so everyone has been accelerating their efforts, since there’s a good example of how bad a “normal” error can make things.

Other countries don’t often have to advertise that their governments are doing their jobs as much as the US has, since they don’t have as much “all public spending is waste” rhetoric.

Flint actually does have clean water by most metrics and independent measurements, but public trust is reasonably deeply, deeply shaken.

This, and I don’t mean this as a bad thing, isn’t actually a thing Biden started. It’s a massive disbursal of funds allocated by the infrastructure bill to a program started in 1996 for upgrading water infrastructure and specifically removing lead pipes.

So this is something great to do, and we should keep doing more of it (there’s $12 billion more waiting for future rounds), and we can be slightly happy that we’re not complete fuck ups since we actually started nearly 30 years ago.

We shouldn’t have to live in a world where we need to advertise that the people entrusted to be basically competent at managing our public works are doing their jobs, but here we are, and we should probably advertise this stuff better.