The people harmed here were the US public and they are just going to continue to be harmed. The right answer is people go to jail. Until people start going to jail, being disbarred, etc, this will keep happening. This isn't a remedy. This is continuing the cycle.
You want to put politicians I. Jail when the courts find their action violated laws?
Thats pretty much every President in the last century.
They all lose court cases.
They probably should have been. But the presidential system putting de-facto unchecked power into the president is just asking for such abuses to happen. Almost by design one might think.
It's not unchecked power. The very fact the courts overturned it proof the power is checked.
That's true in theory, but really missing the point. In practice these checks come far too late. The court system is notoriously overworked and slow. In this case, most of these tariffs will not be returned because the government will make it an administrative nightmare to claim it back. In other matters the damage is even harder to roll back.
It’s a ton of work to put together a case and bring it to court - we’re talking months of research and writing for complex cases.
It’s not realistic to assume the courts can strike down something days after it happens if it takes months to put an argument together.
But I’ve been rather impressed by how fast the Supreme Court makes decisions when cases are brought quickly (likely much less complex).
I fully understand why the courts are slow, and they should indeed not rush decisions (especially since they have a huge weight in common law law systems), but because of this they are not able to restrain another powerful institution that has no problem with moving fast and breaking things.
Trump is the only one convicted of felonies and found liable for civil wrongdoing.
No other president violated laws (and please don’t start with Monica Lewinsky or that time Obama wore a tan suit…)
People? Trump is the only actor here who deserves punishment for these illegal tariffs, but there is no grounds to jail a sitting president.
Ultimately yes. But every one of his enablers is complicit and should be tried if we are ever able to extricate ourselves from this mess.
If the lesson by now isn’t “be careful wishing for powers you don’t want the other side to use against you” then I don’t know what will drive that home…
The law applying to powerful high level people is a good thing. The state where law binds only weak people and can be safely broken by rich and powerful is the bad one.
As of now, the law applies to me. I am on that "other side". It officially does not apply to Trump at all. And billionaires and administration can safely ignore it, although there is at least pretension of the law technically maybe applying to them.
Which actual law should send them to jail?
The law is constantly applied to Trump and his administration. The judicial branch keeps reining him in: National guard, ice, tariffs—-literally TFA for Pete’s sake.
Parent post isn’t about any specific law, it’s about wanting to see a result and working backwards from there: my political opponents should go to jail.
Guess what will happen? The administration after that will send your politicians to jail. And the bananificiation of the US will be complete.
If you genuinely want Trump to go to jail , get Congress to create actual laws that he’d be breaking, with actual clear unmistakable language about its consequences. Raise the votes in the midterms. SCOTUS will enforce it: they have done so, every time, when Congress is clear and decisive. They have indicated as much!
The judicial branch is the only one left doing its job. The law applies. You don’t like how it looks, and you’re not alone, but it applies.
Edit: Let me rephrase: rather than try and find a single law by which to hang the executive , of which I’m sure there are a million, my impression is that for every one of them there’s a commensurate law which exonerates them. Congress keeps protecting the president. Congress is the most powerful of the three branches, by design . To genuinely see someone going to jail, From The executive branch , Congress needs to make a clear, unequivocal, statement.
> If you genuinely want Trump to go to jail , get Congress to create actual laws that he’d be breaking, with actual clear unmistakable language about its consequences. Trammel up the votes in the midterms. SCOTUS will enforce it: they have done so, every time, when Congress is clear and decisive. They have indicated as much! The judicial branch is the only one left doing its job. The law applies. You don’t like how it looks, and you’re not alone, but it applies.
So much good will here but oh so misguided. First of all, the judicial branch is not doing its job and hasn't done so in quite some time. The SCOTUS in particular is just an extension of a political party now and not judicial branch in any way. You give me a case and 99% of Americans will tell you exactly how each judge on SCOTUS will rule, 99% of the time. This is not "judicial branch is the only one left doing its job" - they are currently (not a recent thing though but now it has become comical) just an extension of a political party, nothing more and are absolutely not doing any job at all other then rubber-stamping shit based on their political dogma.
The "get Congress to create actual laws he'd be breaking" is even more comical. You think they can write laws that clearly state where the power of the Presidency stops in some sense and then legal ramifications of going over that power? C'mon mate...
I wish you made some concrete points rather than condescendingly rephrasing your opinion different ways a few times.
SCOTUS has actively thwarted the current administration’s efforts :
- tariffs
- national guard deployment
- foreign aid
- deportation of man to Salvador
These cases , as well as the cases they’ve ruled in favor of the administration , have been couched in reasoning based on the actual laws passed by congress so far. Read the majority opinions and the concurrences and it is clear that this is not some arbitrary “hey he got us here so let’s do what he wants” (In particular Gorsuch), but they’re actually basing their rulings on the written text.
Meanwhile there is a body whose literal job it is to arrange those texts. And you can elect them come fall. I don’t know how to answer your last , ostensibly rhetorical?, question , other than: yes how do you think any of the current laws got here? That’s what congress does.
Go vote in the midterms for the love of god.
Occasional rare result like that does not prove or show or even imply supreme court is not ideologically driven or heavily biased.
And suprene court justices themselves literally say so in their dissents.
Ok fair point.
1.) Supreme court literally decided that Trump can not commit crime while in the office. Full stop.
2.) Trump was convinced of felony. That does not apply to him, because he is a president.
3.) This administration ignores the courts.
> If you genuinely want Trump to go to jail , get Congress to create actual laws that he’d be breaking,
They actually did made those laws. Supreme court decided to either rewrite those law or that they simply dont matter.
> The judicial branch is the only one left doing its job. The law applies.
Not the supreme court.
> 2.) Trump was convinced of felony. That does not apply to him, because he is a president.
There are cases for which Trump should have been tried, but the NY one about mislabeling funds was not one of them. It was a massive reach, and I bet you <10% of the people clamoring about how he's now a "felon" know what he actually did wrong.
Meanwhile he pressured georgia secretary of state to "find votes", in a recorded call; he should have been tried for this but it didn't get brought to the courts. This was a failing of the executive: you cannot expect courts to rule on a matter which is never brought to them.
Half the country voted for this. At some point this is democracy in action. If you commit election fraud and somehow nobody charges you, i guess the same will apply to you. :(
The NY case had poor facts but was well fought. The Georgia case had good facts but was poorly fought.
> Half the country voted for this.
Actually, not half the country.
> At some point this is democracy in action.
Actually, no, winning election in democracy does not mean you get to be a tyrant to whome laws dont apply.
Also, seems like my point about law not applying to Trump stands entirely. None of your arguments actualy disagree with that claim.
Yes just to be clear I edited that original commnt from “there’s no law he’s breaking” to “for every such law, there’s another one which exonerates him/them”, so technically speaking I think we agree: he is breaking laws.
my impression from more closely following the actual Supreme Court (and federal) cases and reading the opinions as a total layman is that the laws and cases are rarely clear cut, nor isolated. They constantly pull in context and other laws and try and guess what congress meant. And many times the judges make very fair points. Things I thought were clear , actually aren’t. And I’m happy that they’re erring on the side of reticence when it comes to punishing the executive because that is a power that can (and will!) be used against the other side, in a constant escalation of partisanship. That was my original point.
This all is why I’ve come to the impression that a congress with a strong point of view is the most robust way out. If congress passes clear laws with unequivocal language about what should and shouldn’t happen in which specific transgressions of power, the judiciary will uphold it. They may be partisan in the details if that’s how you want to see it, but they will absolutely not ignore clear language from congress. These are still real judges.
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Why not? I have no idea why people were thinking corporations are overpowered when twitter banned trump. I thought it was great and showed nobody is above the law/tos. Likewise if the president has done crimes, he should pay the time.
Unfortunately, it has been ruled that the president is immune to legal prosecution on this matter, regardless of whether it is legal or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
> the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their core constitutional purview
It turns out that "checks and balances" meant "the president is unchecked and unbalanced".
Predidency is an Institution which needs to be protected at all costs. The checks and balances wasn’t meant to setup a system where Presidents can be sent to prison but to prevent “crimes” (for the lack of a better word) to happen to begin with. Of course our current “party over Country” system has practically killed any semblance of checks and balances…
> Predidency is an Institution which needs to be protected at all costs.
That sounds a lot like a king.
Last I checked, our founders were pretty against the whole king thing.
I would be shocked if a single one of them said that a President should be immune to prosecution for crimes they commit.
> I would be shocked if a single one of them said that a President should be immune to prosecution for crimes they commit.
They said or they haven’t said it, no? If they did we’d have paper trail.
They did. Hamilton even argued that presidents should be subject to “forfeiture of life and estate” if crimes deemed it so. Federalist 77.
Article I, Section 3, Clause 7 of the constitution makes it clear that while impeachment is limited to removal, but that after they are fair game for criminal processes.
Wilson wrote 'far from being above the laws, he is amenable to them"
Anti-federalists went even farther - they believed that the Federalists' reliance on the impeachment process, for example, left far too wide of a gap to be exploited.
(They seem to have been correct.)
Federalist Papers. Go read them. Anti-Federalist Papers too. At the end of the day, we're still trying to hash out the same old song.
Does Trump want to be Mussolinied? It should always be legal to jail and hang the head of state, otherwise the head of state risks going by a much funnier way. Its not about politics, it's simple game theory.
By "people go to jail" you mean Trump, right? Right?