Supreme Court Justice warns Americans: "The president is now a king".

He can do that by officially assassinating the conservative SC justices, nominating new ones, and then having armed marines inside the senate comittees to ensure they are confirmed immediately.

There's probably a few more steps, but this would get us back on track. He would have to be willing to give up his powers at a certain point, which means installing the legal apparatus (in the form of government officials) with the will to strip those powers.

Did you read the fucking dissent? That's a sitting SC Justice saying that quote, not some arm chair IANAL basement dweller:

“When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune,” Sotomayor wrote.

If one of the dissenting justices thinks it likely, we better pay attention. The whole "They were very clear that non-official acts are not covered." is a pillar built on sinking sand - what defines non-official becomes subjective real fast. Biden could assassinate every conservative justice on SCOTUS and get his own in there to make it all legal. Threats of the same to any in congress who won't play ball.

And if someone can't imagine Biden doing it (I can't), I'm thinking that there are quite a few citizens who believe Trump abso-fucking-lutely would pull that shit. With a majority on SCOTUS already he could just start going after political rivals and keep SCOTUS themselves in check with threats of the same. If SCOTUS has done anything they've painted themselves in a corner and only Congress can unfuck us with impeachment (as unlikely as that seems!)

Strong incentive to not step down if you can just keep being a crook. Watch how quick the republicans start to argue over what is “official” and what isn’t depending on who is president.

And they're going to quickly find out how much that illusion of power is worth when they try to contain or cross whatever right-wing fascist they help empower.

These idiots think their power structure isn't going to be gutted like some kind of Mortal Combat move as soon as it is convenient for the king of the US to do so. They have no enforcement of their own, the other branches barely have to listen to them as it is, and by the time whatever CIA maga thug clubs them to death in their bed it's going to be too late for them to render a judgement on whether it's an official act. They'll be dead and replaced with someone who values their life more.

So the POTUS gets to pick his jury, which Trump did.

So let's say, hypothetically.

The president thought that people shouldn't eat chocolate ice cream. It's anti-american.

And "for the good of the country" anyone who eats chocolate ice cream has to be isolated from the rest of society.

That's not an official act. It's not really on the periphery of official acts.

But because definitionally anything that, at the president's sole discretion, is "in the best interest of the United States" is now argued as an official act.

Biden likes vanilla ice cream.
But he isn't going to detain you for unamerican activities if you prefer chocolate ice cream.

Choose freedom! Choose chocolate ice cream!

Then why did they send the decision back to lower court to decide what “official “ acts are?

Well to be fair, it'd be King Biden.

Just a far less scary king who might even work to unking himself.

Or something idk.

This shits scary.

Have you seen the interviews with them? They literally want him to be king. They say yes when asked if he should be dictator.

Biden is the current God King and apart from a 2 minute speech he ain't doing much about it

Oh, indeed.

*assassinated

It would be a valuable teaching moment.

They wouldn’t even need to actually abuse power at all.

Just order the secret service to take over their personal security details, and attach members of the seal teams to each detail…. “As advisors”.

It would be an implicit threat, sure, but also, a totally legal one, and they could hardly argue that “ensuring their safety and wellbeing” is not an official act,

I'm not advocating for violence. But I'll put it this way. If I ended up on a jury for a murder trial for someone who killed one of the justices that decided for this. I would dedicate my life to nullifying that jury so hard. Not advocating. Just saying.

The argument, such as it is, is that impeachment is the remedy for a Mad King Trump situation, rather than the courts. In fairness, this is not a completely unreasonable reading of the Constitution, but the framers' intent is almost completely irrelevant to the reality of our current political system. As originally written, the federal government was basically designed to be a vaguely-representative oligarchy, with states free to appoint senators and presidential electors however their legislatures saw fit -- the majority of states did not consistently hold a popular Presidential vote until the 1820s, for example. Impeachment by 2/3rds vote is not an unreasonable bar to set when it's assumed that everybody in government is going the part of the class and social structure, and the President acting as a class traitor would put all of Congress into uproar. The founders did not anticipate more direct democracy, the two-party system, or the vulnerability to demagoguery that those things would introduce into the system.

So here we are now, with a nakedly partisan Supreme Court majority holding that the only way to interpret the law is to ignore the world as it is and instead imagine things are still as they were at the end of the 18th century (mostly because that philosophy plays into the hands of the right wing) and pretending that a 2/3rds vote in the Senate is still a reasonable bar, when in fact the present political reality is that you will never peel 12+ sycophantic Senators away from a dangerous demagogue's camp for long enough for an impeachment process to succeed in removing him from power. Of course that's by design, but textualism and originalism paved the road to this ruling.

At this point I'm not even ironically suggesting that Biden should call their bluff and start offing prominent right wingers. The Roberts court is clearly working in the assumption that Democrats won't play dirty with the tools they're laying out for their incipient god-king, and it's looking increasingly like the only way to keep those tools out of their hands is to strike first.

You can remove court justices via impeachment. They're not impeaching the president, they're impeaching the Supreme Court justices. They're nominated by presidents and confirmed by congress, so it falls on congress to remove them.

King Joe (crowned by his new subject, John Roberts) acts officially by not negotiating with terrorists.

Biden hasn't even parsed the news yet most likely, let alone magically grown a spine.

It's not within his powers to do so. But he could have the secret service assassinate them. Pardon the perpetrators and then assign whomever he wants the position with threats against the lives of the senate and congress as a whole for all who would vote against assigning this person. Elimate them and have the vote.

God I wish

Hey say that with more respect, okay?

That's His Majesty, King Dark Brandon to you!

I'm not one of those people who thinks Biden won't make it through the next presidency, but I think you're setting yourself up for disappointment hoping that he lives a long time.

One could at least argue that the Iraq invasion was within what was generally understood to be the role of the president at the time, specifically leading the military as its commander in chief. No one expected throwing a coup to be within the normal role of the president, but apparently that's also covered according to this decision.

Gas masks too. Look to the Hong Kong umbrella protestors for inspiration on how to prepare and what to expect from a fascist crack down.

start saving your beer bottles, fill up the gas cans, buy styrofoam and shop rags

Well the president is still limited in what powers he has, he just now has absolute immunity from legal repercussions to his actions and decisions.

If he uses government resources for it, yes.

Democrats don't have the f'ing stones to do anything with this ruling.

They'll just yell "High Ground" and expect idiot Americans to give them the win.

bidens too weak for that

Biden's security after his presidency is probably not in the top #1000000 of the problems if Trump becomes a president.

What I don't get is what would stop Biden from ordering the assassinations of Trump and 1000 of his closest supporters if this gives total presidential immunity?

That immunity is for every president including Trump. Hell yes Trump can assassinate Bidens and be immune from prosecution.

If it was immunity for Biden alone, then and only then would Biden be safe.

See we use something called "context" to make sense of the things being explained as sometimes words can be interpreted differently or literally.

In this case, the "context" of the ruling surrounds actions that Donald Trump took while president. It's because of this "context" that he is, in fact, the one in the illustration.

It wouldn't really make sense for Biden to be here in the "context" of the article, but I'm sure that it wouldn't literally be incorrect.

Does that help?

He was the subject of the case at hand.

So far