I’ll write a more detailed post once I get through this whole opinion but WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT this is bad.
Watch the video above and watch this space. Also, I have no opinion on the Biden drop out debate but I think it would be wise to focus our efforts at this point in making sure he wins this November, and not doing anything to distract from the choice voters will be faced with regardless of who the Democratic nominee is: Democracy or autocracy. Take your pick.
P.S. Watching this and I see that the audio/video gets misaligned at some point but hopefully you can still follow what I am saying!
Given Trump as the alternative I will vote for Joe Biden pickled in a vat of formaldehyde. And I wish all the talking heads blathering about the judgement of history would just STFU. Authoritarians don’t GAFF about how history views them, especially since they will just have the history books banned or burned..
Never difficult for anyone to do the right thing at the right time. The right time has come.
Authoritarians don’t GAFF about how history views them,
Because the victors write the history books. Also because the authoritarian in question is dead, and nothing exists unless he (yes, he) is there to define it.
I think it is your head that is pickled.
Now we HAVE to win in November. What in the hell has happened to this Court? History will never forgive them for this.
Gee. It almost seems like SCOTUS said that the president--who, today, is Joe Biden--can take *any* action as chief executive. Seems, then, that the chief executive can cancel the presidential election currently scheduled for November 5. Apparently the chief executive can fire every male justice on SCOTUS. He would simply be administering the governance of the US. Biden could implement a new protocol by which SCOTUS justices serve a limited term, and actually conform to the letter and spirit of the constitution, rather than pursue the fiat by judiciary we see from the Roberts' court. He would have immunity to unilaterally reset governance of this nation to what was intended by the founding fathers and what we've mostly practiced since 1789.
Yes, the constitution only allows Extreme Court justices to continue on "good behavior." They can only be REMOVED from office by impeachment, but nothing stops a president from issuing an executive order saying that Thomas has not shown "good behavior" and therefore he can be prevented from actually voting on any decision--conflict of interest or not. Ditto Congress, though that's a lost cause without a blue wave. I will say I haven't looked specifically at what powers an individual justice actually has--does the Constitution say they can always vote on a decision? If so, what about recusal rules?
Apparently, Barret, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Roberts and Thomas are on Trump’s payroll (or the R NC super pac, since Trump wouldn’t pay what they require). A new day is dawning, and we really have to get out there if there is any chance of stopping this runaway train!
They don't care about History. They are getting their needs, er...greeds, met in the here and now.
President Biden has a Constitutional Duty to protect our nation from our enemies, both foreign and domestic. He should do so immediately.
Definitely a horrifying, but predictable verdict.
SCOTUS justices are King makers. Nice going, America.
Thanks Asha. FYI, about half-way through the recording got out of sink but was still able to hear all the audio
Yes sorry I have no idea why it did that!
So much appreciate you taking the time to do this. We are all on Pins and Needles. Considering the 1st bucket of Absolute Immunity… Core Constitutional powers….it seems to me like SCOTUS is signaling…intentionally or not…Presidents can self- pardon.
We are headed for very very Dark Days. Buckling seat belts won’t help…. we need an airbag
There is very little even left to self pardon with all official acts now immune and cannot be shown as evidence in court to juries.
This is outrageous and Supreme Court reform has to be at the top of the agenda if we are lucky enough to squeak out a Democrat victory in November.
The situation is so bad I would be fine with even a Weekend at Bernie’s type second term for Biden.
SC reform has been at/near the top of my list of Democrats' "to do" list for years. IMO much of the blame for inaction rests on the shoulders of Dick Durbin (primarily) and Chuck Schumer. They're too busy protecting the dignity and traditions of the upper chamber to actually respond forcefully to anything. How many Senate hearings have there been this term with the impact of the House J6 hearing?
The point of having power, as MAGA knows intimately, is to USE it. Senate Democrats don't seem to understand this.
While the decision may horrify some, it should not prevent Jack Smith’s Washington DC prosecution, since the fact already confirm that the attempt at the criminal overthrow of the government was being coordinated by Trump’s CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE. The political obscenity of the opinion is in the timing of its release— the last possible day of the Spring term.
One day the records of the justices will be available for inspection.and the date of the draft (s) opinion will be exposed.
The delay in its release will condemn this court to hell.
Deliberate sabotage of the electoral process.
Devastating on so many levels.
Frankly the states of the Great Lakes region should secede and join Canada at this point. We would at least swap a wannabe kingdom for an actual one while taking the water with us.
Canada does not want us and would be nuts to consider taking a large portion of the fascist US states! Canada is a democracy in spite of King Charles, et al. The Royals are simply figureheads. They do not make policy. They are leaches.
Corrupt court. Thank you for all you do for democracy!
President Biden's next steps:
1. Incarcerate 6 supreme court justices
2. Nominate 6 new ones
3. Send the seal 6 team to do their job
It's a perfect triple 6 action
I'd settle for removing 2 for cause and immediately appointing 2 by executive order. I'd already wondered if it might help more than harm for him to express intent to expand SCOTUS to 13, matching the number of circuit courts (or whatever they're called), and announce at that time his first 2 nominations.
It's hard to argue we aren't in a true constitutional emergency, between this and the destruction of Chevron deference- a complete setup for the planned civil service purge. I would trust almost no one other than Joe Biden to utilize a rebalanced SCOTUS, flipped House and strengthened Senate (please Lord God 🙏) to eventually return executive authority to the founders' intent (vs getting used to being a monarch smh).
Thank you so much, Asha. I was moved to tears this morning when I heard the news (and it takes a lot for that to happen). OMG WTF and anything else applicable for the end of the world. Girding my loins so to speak for the coming days and glad we have you to educate us.
I’m feeling like the coup already happened and we’re now seeing the denouement.
The extreme Robert's court has officially granted a permission slip to any president to become a dictator.
Trump will take the title of King and insist on a gold bejeweled crown and ermine trimmed robes. oh, let us not forget the royal throne and coat of arms!
Once the dust settles Biden may need to test the waters. Let the citizens know exactly what this new ruling could look like.
On evidence: Scenario: Trump and his loyalist DOJ plot to kill an opponent. (Maybe even the publisher of the NYT????😉) On the president's recommendation one member actually goes out and hires a hitman to do the killing. Under this ruling, that meeting cannot be used as evidence to show the President took part in the conspiracy. He is free to discuss the means of the assassination and even DIRECT it and no evidence can be introduced to show this.
Question about immunity implications:
How does the presidential immunity ruling relate to impeachment? If a president has immunity for official acts, how can they commit high crimes and misdemeanors?
Thanks for your insight.
Joe, Biden should pack the court right now. He has a good reason to do so... The preservation of our democracy
President Biden should have done that in the first two years of Presidency. This is a total disaster!!
By “preservation of our democracy,” you mean implementation of Leftist totalitarianism?
No I do not. I am a left leaning centrist. What are you? Are you a supporter of project 2025, The plan to cram Christian nationalism down our throats?
What will seniors do without their Social Security? The Repubs have been trying their best to get rid of it since its inception and king Trump is their way of finally getting the job done! Entitlement they call it. Well, yes it is because we are entitled to the money that came out of our pay checks for decades of hard work! Watch Canada and Mexico close their boarders! I'd laugh at all of this if I wasn't already in tears!
Scary stuff, explained in a way that makes it quite easy to absorb, as always.
Excellent breakdown. I just realized another quirk by Roberts' quote below. Did they just essentially create a "speech and debate" clause for Article II where done existed before? I did not think amending the Constitution is an Article III function.
"Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts."
Asha, do you respond to your readers’ questions in the chat directly? Asking honestly….first time posting
I try to when I can!
I know you have a lot to deal with and multiple comments just on one of your posts, so TY! I’m sure I’m not the only one with the “what do we do now?” question stamped on their forehead, so there will be more to come. I am sad, angry, terrified and extremely motivated….all at the same time. I have been trying to voraciously consume as much information as possible (with a a healthy filter, of course) recently and have had my eyes opened to the fact that this has been a multi-decade effort to get to this point. That effort includes the current SC composition….it is by design. I hope we are not too late.
I am an optimistic realist….so I will hold out hope until the very end, but this very much looks like the end of our Democracy. “3 co-equal branches of government” no more. “All citizens subject to the SAME rule of law” no more. A Monarch with “absolute immunity” is exactly what our founders were running away from.
Sadly the only thing we can really do is use our votes to make sure we don’t put a dangerous person in the Oval Office.
Yup, it is amazing. While all sorts of nonsensical conspiracies and T.V. plots have been circulating for years this little gem of vengeance and greed has been metastasizing away right in front of everyone since the 1970's. I feel sad for you all yet more disturbed for the rest of the planet without the USA as a functional republic come November.
Do the Supreme Court justices truly have full immunity from any blowback about their decisions? This is insane! Besides voting en masse, what can we do? I’m asking more directly about a broken judiciary….
No they don't have immunity, each of them is subject to impeachment by the House and trial by the Senate. And of course they have to consider the real-world consequences of their decisions on real people. Haha, I kid.
Good luck getting 67 Senators to convict even one of them, let alone all 6.
So I guess I've talked myself into changing my own opinion. Yes, they have complete and absolute immunity for anything they do, and are accountable to no one - not even those who bankrolled their nomination and confirmation let alone their subjects. I'm sorry, citizens of the US.
Afraid you're right- effectively, they do. I think even most semi-normal non-MAGA conservatives are angry about a lot of this garbage. RvW was truly only the beginning of apparently bottomless corruption, left unchecked.
By any unbiased measure, one SCOTUS nominee was stolen from Obama, and another from Biden. These groundless decisions seem to be real reasons to set this right, with or without removal of the two most corrupt justices. They fooled around with our country and would seem to be in line to find out. We need expansion of SCOTUS anyway, the Constitution doesn't specify its size and it's varied over the years.
Color me horrified. Contribute to the Biden campaign. Do we really want Trump to appoint MORE right-wingers? "Originalists"? ....Sotormoyor is right in her dissenting opinion re: the Founding Fathers when writing the Constitution were well aware of the fallibility of a leader and didn't want a Trump being a King George III maniac.
I think too much is being made on whether President Biden should drop out because of his age and ability of doing the job until age 86. If he is re-elected and cannot finish his term, that is why we have a vice president, Kamala Harris. If he was to step aside, the only reasonable replacement is Kamala Harris. Trying to have a divisive candidate free-for-all 4 months before election day is a recipe for a political disaster. What is needed at this moment is clarity on what the stakes are: Democracy or Autocracy. Thanks!
Asha, I am intrigued. When President Biden won the election why on his first two years did not pad the SC to offset series of ill feted draconian judgements by conservative majority of the Supreme Court (SC). I remember Biden in his first or second week he elected a commission to look into that. 6 months later the committee members of the commission declined to recommend padding of the SC. I know they were naive but why President didn’t see it differently? Was his hands were tight? If a SC judge can be sworn in two weeks before election, why President believed Moscow Mitch & wasn’t more forceful about it! Did Biden had a viable opportunity to pad the SC? If so Row V Wade would still be in the books. This is totally disgusting, I appreciate if you kindly look into this if Biden could have done it or not!! Thank you very much!!
Thanks for letting us know that “Democracy” only means “abortion.” Roe was one of the Supreme Court’s worst decisions. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Left-leaning Justice whose (alleged) dying wishes Democrats told us should supersede the Constitution, was an early critic of the decision.
Elective abortion is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution and was illegal everywhere in the U.S. when the 14th Amendment was ratified, so the basis for the Court’s ruling was fundamentally flawed. The right to keep and bear arms is explicitly mentioned, second in importance only to the rights acknowledged in the First Amendment. Maintaining that right for blacks was a matter of deep importance to the authors of the 14th, as is revealed in the discussions around the drafting of the Amendment.
Democrats are on a jihad against the 2nd Amendment, precisely because it stands in opposition to totalitarian government ( though it’s never “totalitarian” when the Left do it, just like hitting someone over the head with a bike lock is “peaceful protest”). Convincing us to become unfit for self-government, by becoming slaves to our passions, makes us easier to rule. If “1984” wasn’t meant to be an instruction manual, neither was “Brave New World.”
If we actually had a function, Congress, they would take this ruling and identify what those areas are of where president is immune and not immune and codify that into law just like every other major judicial ruling that comes out but instead now they don’t do that they just use caselaw and then that caselaw can get overturned 50 years later for good or bad.
This Congress can't rename a f*cking post office let alone codify presidential powers. And if they did this Supreme Farce would say they did it wrong, guaranteed.
Unfortunately I think this analysis is exactly on target. American Democracy is now at DEFCON 1 and, who knows, this would mean that the current President could order that the upcoming Presidential Election be cancelled in order to prevent Civil Unrest and Insurrection, or even follow the WHISKEY-TANGO-FOXTROT scenario and direct SEAL Team 6 to assassinate Trump and be completely immune from any legal repercussions.
Well done Asha. One of the best expositions of the decision that I’ve read.
Substack.com/@markmansour
So Joe Biden is “king” at this point? Could he call Seal Team 6 to assassinate a pair of Supreme Court judges?
Please. The good professor or anybody who understands about law...., can the justices individually be disbarred? Even if it didn't matter it would be a symbolic victory
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is on my coffee mug-my favorite way to say it!
Asha, for the record, it was one of the judges on the appeals court during a presidential immunity hearing who first made the Seal Team 6-political opponent reference. … Trump made the “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters” comment.
I’m not sure how anyone could vote for a democrat after they killed/maimed so many people with that [experimental gene transfection product thing stuff]; hopefully that Chevron deference decision puts an end to what we experienced there.
Good news is, with that immunity decision, the freaks won’t be able to go after Obama for directing the [Russian interference thing in 2015/16] in order to get rid of the murderous people that were at the top of the DNC ticket
You better watch it or I'm going to get you with my space laser!
Is there an argument here that you’re trying to make, Michael—is “get you with my space laser” supposed to be a threat of some kind?
The space laser will be bloodless, if you allow it to be!
Is this video repairable or repostable? The out-of-sync stuff halfway through renders it unwatchable. And it Should Be Watched.
One more comment from the “outside” of the opinion: Judge Chutkin now knows that the Conservative 6 on SCOTUS are acting in bad faith. Chutkin AGREED to suspend the trial proceedings while the immunity defense made its way to SCOTUS. Of course, the ruling itself opens the door to additional multiple appeals relating to official and private acts—
So what.
Proceed to trial and verdict while the other appeals are pending in higher courts.
Jack Smitth has at least until January 20th, 2025 to obtain a conviction.
Saddle up.
OMG