SwingingTheLamp @ SwingingTheLamp @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

That's a neat little Catch 22 there. You need a ruling that it wasn't an official act to be able to introduce the evidence that it wasn't an official act.

Do I think the average citizen should be worried about the President signing their death warrant? No.

That's not what anybody is worried about, but rather that this is the vanguard of a movement whose followers will happily kill us for any number of out-group reasons, take away bodily autonomy, labor rights, civil rights, and regulatory protections, and then, okay, yes, have the President sign our death warrants should we decide to protest all of this.

As one of the candidates has openly advocated and said he'd do.

You just have to convince a judge that the act was outside of his official duties. Oh, and by the way, the evidence that the act was outside of his official duties is not admissible in court.

Oh, and also by the way, if you somehow manage to convince a trial court judge that the act was outside of his official duties, he can appeal the ruling. All the way back to the Supreme Court.

I get the intent of such posts: To confuse and demoralize people with a "both sides" or "they're all bad" message. I object because they discourage participation in the democratic process and serve authoritarian interests, and in the abstract, truth matters.

So... no.

That is indeed a series of events. Did they ever come up with any evidence linking them in a causal way?

Biden withheld funds from Ukraine to halt an investigation into his son and nothing happened.

Bit of a refresher as it's so hard to keep all of the lies straight: Republicans claimed that an FBI informant said that Hunter Biden took a position on the board of Burisma, and the Bidens took a bribe, in return for Joe pressuring Ukraine to fire the government official investigating Burisma. Nobody can produce the evidence, and said government official wasn't investigating Burisma, after all.

Pres. Trump threatened to withhold funds from Ukraine unless Zelenskyy dug up kompromat on Trump's political opponents. He was impeached over it. So that happened.

Well, that's one way to look at it, but too, keep in mind Hemingway's famous description of how somebody goes broke: Slowly, then all at once.

No, it can be done "legally." Article 1, Section 9, Clause 2:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

If President Biden suspended habeas corpus as allowed by the Constitution as required to protect public safety from seditionists who, remember, have made public threats of violence, and rounded them up, that would be an official act and he would be immune from charges. Furthermore, there would no longer be the votes in the House to impeach him.

ETA: Scare quotes. This would buy quite a lot of time as the issue worked its way through the courts. It might even incite open rebellion, then the question would be essentially moot.

Why do you imagine that a President wouldn't get away with assassination of a Congressional leader? Say, for example, that Pres. Trump tells special ops forces that he has ironclad intelligence that Rep. Hakim Jeffries is a Chinese agent orchestrating an imminent attack on the U.S., and orders him killed on an overseas trip. That's a legal order from the commander in chief, on the face of it. (I mean, the track record of the military refusing orders is extremely thin on the ground, and it won't really matter if they install loyalists like Project 2025 calls for.) We've already established the precedent that the President has immense discretion to handle immediate threats.

And maybe it was a lie, but that's irrelevant. He has absolute immunity in the exercise of his Article 2 duties. End of story. The only possible remedy is impeachment, and, well, who's going to do that?

That's fine, I'm not going to accept the authority of a stranger in Lemmy to define what is and what isn't journalism. It really just comes down to a disagreement whether we should strive for rule of law, or accept the law of the jungle, where might makes right.

They can't take us back to the way things were on June 30th, 2024, to make this ruling like it didn't happen. It doesn't have the power. The best the that Congress can do is pass an unconstitutional law that may, at some future date, through a highly-fraught process in the courts, reverse it.

Yes, technically they could, but any suit under that law would be vulnerable to getting thrown out on summary judgement. Would you agree that it's more accurate to say that Congress can't fix the system by reverting to the old law?

No, Congress cannot pass legislation on this matter. The ruling says that the Constitution itself grants the President immunity, so it would take a Constitutional amendment to change it.

Yes, exactly. "They were insurrectionists bent on overthrowing our government, and it was a tough, but necessary, decision to protect the nation, which is my duty as President."

That claim isn't even entirely untrue.

The point is to explain what people mean when they say that nobody becomes a billionaire by their own effort alone. It's impossible for one, single human to generate that much value. Notch just got incredibly lucky.

You have a good point about the difference in risk versus reward of entrepreneurship compared to a job. People often choose the job because the alternative is destitution. It's not a free choice. Rates of entrepreneurship are much higher in countries that have a robust social safety net. Places like the U.S. actually have a relatively low rate.

They won't control the House after a few official acts.

If Biden did that the House might impeach him. I mean, the surviving members of the House probably wouldn't, but they theoretically could.

Exploitation is a loaded term, with many negative connotations. It's more neutral to state the same thing as, "Nobody gets to be a billionaire without accruing the surplus value of other people's labor."

And that's true of Notch, too. Minecraft wouldn't exist without countless people who built the computers, the OS, the Java language, built out the Internet, operate the electrical grid, operate the payment networks, litigated and legislated copyright law, et cetera.

Now, you might say that all of those people got compensated for their labor, and it's true. (That's why the negative connotations of exploitation don't apply.) However, the result of their labor unlocks immense value, which they do not share in because of the way the Internet developed. We could easily imagine a different scenario in which the online services won, an alternate reality in which Notch worked as a programmer for PepsiCo-Prodigy-AOL, and got paid a very good salary to create Minecraft for it. Then, it would be fair for the company to reap all of the subscription fees generated by putting the game on their network service.

We can say that in both scenarios, as long as we're imagining, Notch would have put in the same amount of work. In one, though, he'd live a decent, middle-class life, with a corporation reaping the surplus value of his labor. In our world, he's a billionaire, benefiting from the surplus value of others' labor.

Yes, but he gets so deep into character, he could turn American!