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I keep seeing post and comments like this.
You all realize it’s only immunity from criminal prosecution, right? It’s not instant dictatorship power over the nation. He’d have to order the assassination of Trump and members of SCOTUS to leverage the ruling for those goals.
You are correct. But the fact that the ruling enables those actions is batshit crazy.
Kill the SC then replace them with ones to sanction anything he likes?
That’s pretty much all this ruling liberates him to do. There’s no additional executive power.
State sanctioned murder of political dissidents doesn't seem like a significant additional executive power to you? I'm not convinced that's enabled by this particular ruling but that's how you're framing it and the fact that doesn't seem concerning to you is pretty wild.
Of course it’s concerning. It’s batshit insane.
All of the posts and comments I keep reading are making it seem like he was granted full executive control of the government. I’m legitimately almost as concerned with the literacy of people as I am the new criminal immunity of POTUS.
That's fair. That didn't seem like what you were getting at but I understand that point.
Not even order it, he'd have to do it himself
Anyone who'd hypothetically take the order has an obligation to refuse it, all he's doing there is passing the prosecution that he wasn't going to be in for anyways.
Yeah, but he can just pardon them.
Depending on the jurisdiction the assassinations are prosecuted under, and I can very well see the Judiciary hard intervening to keep that shit well out of reach of a pardon.
The precedent of sanctioned assassinations of judges might come across to them specifically as a rather especially bad one to set.
I mean yeah, but as long as they do it in dc, is there anything they could really do?
DC has it's own criminal court
Yeah, but the president has pardon power over the dc courts.
https://www.justice.gov/pardon/apply-pardon
Does a member of the military have the right to refuse the direct order of the president?
If the order is illegal, they'd be in hotter water if they didn't.
Is that so? I thought one main staple of military ranks was that if the soldier rejects an order because of judicial concerns but the superior tells them to do it anyways the judicial blame is on that superior
Indeed this is not correct. Practically speaking, the soldier should keep refusing the order and will be relieved of duty and thrown in the brig. They will then have to hope that by the time the court martial date rolls around their name has been cleared and the officer who gave the order has been or will be court martialed in their place.
Theoretically the officer should go through every underling and find nobody willing to execute illegal orders, but practically they'd only need to go through three or four at most before they had a volunteer.
Nope, I was just following orders is no valid defence.
It depends, if the soldier should obviously have known better courts are a lot less sympathetic to "but I was ordered to!"
Being ordered to assassinate a political enemy of the president is definitely one of those "you should know better!" examples.
That’s a really good point. They’d need plausible deniability to avoid being convicted.