Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

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Supreme Court Judges have careers that outlive Presidents.

I think people consistently misinterpret the overturning of Roe (a calculated, focused effort that took decades and overturned specific judicial precedent that basically had created a right-to-privacy from whole cloth) with "Trump has SCOTUS in his pocket." He doesn't. The GOP got the two things they wanted from tilting the SCOTUS in their direction; there's no reason to believe this SCOTUS is about to start looking at the bare-face text of the Twenty Second Amendment and decide there aren't any words there.

The incentives just aren't there. Especially because it's pretty obvious that if they do ignore that text, it becomes pitchfork time and their necks are no less vulnerable than the President's.

(ETA: And that's ignoring that individual states are not obligated to put him on the ballot if he's inelligible to run for a third term, and by-and-large, Americans do not vote for names not on the ballot because they don't know their own civil rights).

For me, it was the assertion of presidential immunity that lost my trust.

That's complicated, but not actually unexpected. The Constitution lays out the process and authority to check the President's power, and that process flows from Congress. SCOTUS essentially said "If Congress didn't even find a violation that moved them to invoke their maximum penalty of removal-from-office, why on Earth does anyone think we would impose the law to punish the President's official actions where Congress did not?" SCOTUS can restrain Presidential action (by saying, essentially, "that order is illegal" so nobody need comply) but they've never claimed to have the authority to punish the person in the office for doing the job as best he can. Granted, this was new territory because no previous administration had opened the question of such a sanction... But it's not surprising that SCOTUS responded "Jail the President for doing Presidential stuff? Hold on, let me check the Constitution... Nope, don't see it."

I get what you're arguing but isn't "Jail the President for doing Presidential stuff" a bit charitable? "Nope, don't see it" isn't so simple, I think a lot of people would argue that this follows from the rule of law set down in the constitution in the form of things like the supremacy clause and implied by our entire legal/political structure.

> isn't "Jail the President for doing Presidential stuff" a bit charitable?

One of our Presidents, against the will of Congress and in an era where the right to levy war on the part of Congress was far more closely tied to troop deployment (because we weren't yet in the era of Pax Americana with permanent overseas bases on every continent, much less the post-9/11 era of massive power delegation to the Executive), moved our Naval assets away from the Atlantic coast toward Europe and basically tried to hide it from Congress. It would have been extremely impeachable... But then we ended up in a World War soon after. A war we, conveniently, already had our Atlantic assets positioned to fight, over the previous desires of an isolationist American representative legislature.

That President never came under question of whether he should be jailed for putting Americans in harm's way when we were not involved in the European conflict (yet), and Congress had no intention of involving the country (yet). The things Trump did in office were far less risky to life and limb. I'm not implying they were correct or just things; I'm saying that when we talk about whether the other branches should be able to jail the President for malfeasance in-office, this is the realm of decisions and standards we're talking about.

This is assuming one needs to campaign in an election in order to continue their command of the executive branch and the military. I'm pretty sure the president's claim that he can serve a 3rd term means he'll serve for however long he determines, as an official act. Any court that dares issue an order to the contrary will have as little power to enforce their order as they are demonstrating now.

He could certainly kick off a Constitutional crisis by just ignoring the law, on that we agree. But that's always a risk. He could make a kill list of Congress members to assassinate starting alphabetically and it would be the same category of problem.

And the same people would defend it as not a constitutional crisis for whatever reason Fox News ran with.

He was ineligible this time based on the 14th amendment, but SCOTUS told Colorado they couldn't keep him off the ballot.

Unfortunately, he was never convicted of treason or any other crime that would involve the 14th Amendment.

I think we can understand why SCOTUS would ban Colorado from making that decision themselves, for much the same reason it bans Mississippi from having its own interpretation of the parts of the 14th Amendment about due process or citizenship.

In contrast, the 22nd Amendment is plain-letter law, so obvious that it brooks no interpretation.

I disagree it's as obvious as you think. He could run for VP and then act as de-facto President. It says that "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice" - in that case, he would have been _elected_ Vice President, not President.

And as as far as the 12th Amendment goes, "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."

The 22nd amendment doesn't explicitly say he cannot serve as President, it just says "no person shall be _elected_ to the office of President".

Yes, the spirit of the constitution clearly prevents a 3rd term, but it could be possible to employ a very literal interpretation that allows the above.

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