02

For the second day in a row, all of the most active topics were posted in the "Political Discussion" forum and all but one are related to the presidential debate. The shortest of these threads is 12 pages and the first one is over 50. So I am unable to read all of the posts in the threads and will only provide an overview of the topics. The most active thread yesterday was titled, "The President is Above the Law". This thread was started back in January after oral arguments before the Supreme Court regarding the question of whether former President, current cult leader, and convicted felon Donald Trump has immunity for his actions related to the January 6 insurrection attempt. During the hearing, Trump's lawyer was asked whether a president could order Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political opponent and enjoy immunity for the act. Trump's lawyer argued that Congress would surely impeach a president who did such a thing, but short of impeachment the President would have immunity. This led to the original poster creating this thread. Yesterday, the Supreme Court released its decision in the case, granting considerable immunity to the President. In her dissent, Justice Sonya Sotomayor returned to the example of Seal Team 6 being used to murder a political opponent, claiming that the majority ruling granted immunity for such an act. The majority ruled that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for "core constitutional powers", those duties specified in the Constitution. In addition, the Court ruled that presidents have presumptive immunity for "official acts", actions undertaken in the course of acting as president. Finally, the court confirmed that presidents enjoy no immunity for private acts. On the face of it, this sounds fairly reasonable. But, as they say, the devil is in the details. The Court also ruled that evidence involving acts for which the President is immune cannot be used against him. This presents a significant hurdle to prosecuting a president for crimes that were unofficial acts and for which even the Court agrees, there would be no immunity. As Sotomayor explains in her dissent, imagine that the President gave an official speech during which he stated his intention to prevent a political rival from passing legislation by any means. That would be an official act for which the President would have the presumption of immunity. If the President later hired a private hitman to murder the rival, that would be a private act, but the President's public admission of intent could not be introduced as evidence to support a murder charge. As things stand, the case against Trump has been remanded to the lower court where Judge Tanya Chutkan will have to review the case in light of the Supreme Court's decision. If the actions for which Trump has been charged appear to core constitutional acts, he will have immunity. It is very unlikely that any of Trump's January 6-related actions will fall in that category. However, there will certainly be an argument that the actions were official acts for which Trump should have the presumption of immunity. It will be up to Jack Smith to demonstrate that the acts were, in fact, private. One thing that is already clear is that some evidence, such as that involving Jeffrey Clark, will no longer be admissible because it involved official acts.