Carey Dunne, New York District Attorney Cy Vance Jr.'s general counsel, said the president's position is too absolute.
There could be examples where a state should be able to conduct a criminal investigation of a sitting president, “if, for example, he did pull out a handgun and shoot someone on Fifth Avenue.”
Asked about that, Consovoy said a president could be charged with such a crime once he was out of office or if he was impeached and removed from office. “This is not a permanent immunity,” he said.
“I’m talking about while in office. Nothing could be done? That’s your position?” asked Judge Denny Chin.
I actually wish he would shoot someone in the streets and then immediately pardon himself. They keep saying, “Nobody is above the law!” to the public while they’re claiming “Yeah, the law doesn’t apply to HIM!” in the courts. They need to settle this once and for all instead of what Republicans normally do, let it ride when they guy is doing it and act like it’s the biggest outrage ever when the other team does it.
I’m glad you have said so because I have secretly hoped the same thing … that one tragic event would wake people up and hopefully prevent much more tragedy.
Well, I don’t want T rump to shoot a baby. That is a waste of a perfectly good baby. But my top reason for wanting to save the baby from being publicly murdered by T rump, is that he might actually get away with it.
You know what? I would totally volunteer to get shot. I don’t even have to live. If it makes the world my kids will inherit a better place, I’m game. Because that’s my “god”. That’s my “eternal life”. My children are my reason for existing. They are the purpose in my life. They are what I leave behind after my death. They are my Heaven if I did a good job and my Hell if I did not. If you need more purpose than that, I feel sorry for you. If you’re willing to replace that purpose with an imaginary sky boyfriend, you sicken me.
Don’t do it. If I thought for sure it would work, I would cheer your self-sacrifice on. But if it didn’t work T rump would be a lot closer to being a lifelong dictator of the USA. If he can get away with murdering you, he is unquestionably above the law. And a POTUS like T rump who is at liberty to break any laws he wants, will become a dictator.
The T rump thralls (virtually any White House Staff who are still with him), have pretzel/surreal-logic legal rationalizations for how T rump can do anything he wants at any time just because he is POTUS (and because he is T rump).
And the MAGAheads out in the public? They will support T rump doing anything he wants at any time.
So far, T rump has gotten away with any crimes he has committed. So, T rump is above the law for now. But he is apparently very highly motivated to make it true that he is completely above the law while POTUS. If/when that is solidified, he only has to make it so that he is POTUS for life (thus also above the law for life).
There would be no controls on him at all, except his own sense of morals and ethics, iow, there would be no controls on him at all.
The truly scary thing is that there seems to be absolutely nothing we can do about him completely breaking the way the government is supposed to work. Hell, nobody even seems to notice it’s happening with the “three scandals a day” minimum his administration seems to have implemented. There are two VERY BIG problems with the way the government is working right now. They are government-breaking problems.
The first, people working in an “acting” capacity for jobs which require confirmation. If you can appoint an “acting” head of an office which requires confirmation, and you can do that indefinitely, then the Senate loses all power to confirm appointments. This is a HUGE deal. This massively changes the balance of power in our governmental system.
The second is even worse. Using executive orders the president has switched our system of government from a “majority to pass, one to confirm, supermajority to override” system to a “one to pass, supermajority to override” system. The Congress is supposed to pass legislation, the president can veto it if he doesn’t like it, then the Congress can take another crack at overriding him. Instead the president dictates something and only a supermajority in Congress can prevent a veto. That ALSO fundamentally shifts the balance of power in our country.
If these things aren’t addressed I don’t think you’ll recognize this country after just 2 more Republican presidents with Republican Senates. I seriously think this is that big a deal.
Yes, I think you are right. T rump purposely does not replace dept heads because the acting directors are more malleable and as you point out, he doesn’t have to get Senate approval. And he has done other things to make the roles of Congress moot.
As far as the other branch of govt, the judicial, they are, so far, proving to be more problematic for T rump. But he has gotten a strong start on undermining that as well. He has quietly gotten a record number of federal justices appointed of his choosing. And he has 2 Supreme Court Justice appointments already.
As far as the media goes, he controls half of it and demonizes the other half.
He is gutting the depts staffed by everyday Americans, calling them the Deep State. When he does replace them, it is with a crony or an obsequious kiss ass.
He has worn down the military leadership, so that now, they will immediately go along with his impulsive and extraordinarily bad military whims. Look out next time T rump wants to nuke a hurricane.
I just want to float this here, since it could be kind of dangerous to say at a cocktail party.
If Trump was anybody but Trump, he would have resigned by now to preserve his own integrity and the country’s. But he’s not, and we have seen how the issues he raises can be used to whip up a lot of anger so we are entering a period with a lot unknown possibilities. Pelosi is managing a fine line, not only to save fellow Democrats in contested districts, but to show the entire country that the work they are doing now is legal, complete, fair, transparent yet secure, and of course results in a just verdict.
If the goal of people like Stephen Miller is to encourage people to commit random acts of violence, he won’t stop when Trump is gone. So the process has to be so well executed that it will counter that with a sense of trust in government. So much trust that it spreads down to the local level, getting people to work with law enforcement.
I agree 100%. And only a few months into Trump’s term, I became concerned about the country post-Trump.
Someday he will no longer be in office. Whether he is impeached and removed, whether he is voted out, whether he dies… a segment of the US population (that conveniently is heavily armed) will not believe the narrative.
If he were to die tomorrow of natural causes, the word would be out in an hour that it was a murder and a coups.
When he is gone, there will also be an energy vacuum. In a way, Trump in office has been like crack. We have all been in a manic high. Anger and anxiety are manic reactions too.
I am not kidding when I have said that a year ago, I had to move out because the very normal, educated, average Evangelical family from which I was renting a room was actually creating a shelter in their basement in case Hannity was right and the Liberals start a civil war.
That is sad. People like Hannity would be shunned as self-serving assholes in a just world. In an intelligent world people as a whole would do and believe the opposite of whatever someone like that said because they would be smart enough to just assume he was lying until proved otherwise. But in the real world unstable people hear the garbage that spills from his mouth and become more unstable.
I really don’t see this lasting more than a couple of years past Trump, though that estimate might change if the next president after him is anything but a white man. As I have mentioned before I see a lot of parallels in history with what is happening right now. If our last president hadn’t been non-white I don’t think we could have ever gotten Trump. Eventually it will sink in that women and minorities in positions of power doesn’t end the world and people will get over it, at least with their public face. The crazy shit that’s out in the open today, that was always there. It was just talked about in whispered tones and only among like-minded people 20 years ago. They tend to recycle the same conspiracies over and over. For example, there were 2 conspiracy theories, revised only slightly, that I heard of both Clinton and Obama.
One, they were both building secret concentration camps. Clinton was building them for Christians, Obama was building them for our kids. Clinton just wanted to lock up all the Christians while Obama wanted to take our kids from us once the got school age and then completely control what they learned, allowing them 2 week visits a year with parents until the indoctrination was firmly established.
The second, near the end of each president’s second term, Clinton and Obama were both going to declare martial law to prevent elections from taking place. That’s both stupid and scary. When a Democrat is in office it’s stupid that they think a president can really do that. When a Republican is in office it’s scary that they think a president can really do that.
Don’t get me wrong, there WILL be consequences to Trump leaving office unless he comes out and says that he doesn’t want to do it any more, which he very well may do if he thinks he’s going to lose. Republicans HATE to lose. They don’t care how much they have to cheat to prevent that from happening. And they are getting less and less shameful about it. Merrick Garland was the perfect example of that. They absolutely COULD NOT let the dickhead who died (I have a great story about that, by the way) be replaced with a moderate. He HAD to be replaced by a bigger dickhead, if they could find one. And they made up new rules so that they didn’t have to allow it, many of them (Ted Cruz) openly admitting that they were not going to follow those rules if Hillary had won and now McConnell openly admitting that he will not follow those rules in Trump’s last year. They are REALLY hoping RBG dies soon.
If RBG can make it one more year, she will have served her country beyond measure. I don’t want to think about what will happen if she dies soon.
If T rump doesn’t die, or resign, or get kicked out, or lose the election, then we are really in danger. Some Civil War skirmishes will be the least of our worries.
You jogged my memory, W. Remember when Obama wanted to speak to school kids nationally? The Repugs were yeowling in rage that Obama would dare try to indoctrinate our children by encouraging them to do well in school.
T rump, I think, could care less about children, unless they were somehow good for his re-election chances.
Oh, I remember that vividly. People were keeping their kids home from school because there was going to be a black man in the school that day. That’s how I saw it, anyway.
Trump has showed some interest in children. Granted it was a creepy “call me when you’re 18” sort of thing said to a 10 year old girl, but some interest.