Author Archives: eehines

Presidential Immunity

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor waxed hysterical in her dissent to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Presidential immunity from prosecution for alleged crimes committed while in office.

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.

Maybe some broader context is in order.

Consider, for instance, our individual right to commit piracy on the high seas, so long as that, too, is done with the express permission of our Federal government (the immunity parallel is that the sovereign, We the People, have granted a considerable measure of permission to a President by electing him to that office).

The Federal government’s authority to authorize piracy by us private citizens exists in so many words in Article I, Section 8, of our Constitution:

To…grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal….

It’s instructive that that clause comes immediately on the heels of this clause:

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas….

It’s hard to get any clearer than that: our Constitution authorizes our Congress to define what piracy is and then to authorize us private citizens to commit what otherwise would be that piracy by sailing as privateers under Congress-issued Letters of Marque.

Immune, immune, immune, indeed.

 

H/t AJ Jacobs, writing in The Free Press

There’s Another Reason

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Eric Felten had an op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal (I seem to be on a theme here) noting the weakness of the 25th Amendment in temporarily displacing an incapacitated President. He correctly noted that a majority of Cabinet Secretaries must vote to displace the President, and that those politicians [sic] owe their position to the man they’d be moving to displace. That debt likely would prevent a sufficient number of them from making the move.

There’s another reason, though, why the Amendment might not have the teeth it was intended to have. The Amendment also requires the Vice President to vote for removal. If that politician does not, even were the Cabinet unanimous in its vote to remove, the move would fail: the Vice President has that veto power.

What Vice President is going to put his/her own political future in jeopardy with such a move? That politician, by voting to overthrow the President, even temporarily, is too likely to be viewed as betraying his/her erstwhile ally and the one who put him in the role of Vice President. That politician, too, will be viewed as making a grab for personal power, since the Vice President voting to remove the President would himself ascend to the Presidency.

A Third Reason

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined at length on the need for Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection. Among other things, they described one of Party’s rationalizations for Biden’s staying the course:

Ignoring the ballots that voters have already cast for Mr Biden in primaries across the US would undermine democratic decision-making and anger the party’s core supporters.

The editors offered two reasons for why that rationalization is erroneous.

[T]he estimated 4,672 delegates to the Democratic national convention—most of whom were selected in primaries, caucuses, or local party conventions—are a microcosm of the party, not a self-appointed cabal of insiders.

And

[Delegates] aren’t robots. Although delegates pledged to a particular presidential candidate are expected to vote for that candidate, the official party selection rules leave room for judgment, saying that pledged delegates “shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” Delegates pledged to Mr Biden could conscientiously claim that new information has induced them to change their minds[.]

There’s a third reason, too, and this does directly address Party’s claimed concern for “democratic decision-making.”

Party went to great pains to limit primary voters’ choices to just one: Biden himself. Party pressured potential competitors against competing at all, and took active steps even to deprecate serious consideration for folks like Cornel West and Jill Stein, folks that most “democratic decision-makers” would have had no trouble assessing on their own. One potential candidate who was gaining traction, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, was interfered with and subverted so much that he felt driven to leave the Progressive-Democratic Party altogether and mount a separate, third-party campaign—where he’s getting anywhere from 8%-15% support in the polls. The one alternative candidate who was allowed into the primary campaign, Congressman Dean Phillips (D, MN), was sufficiently timid that he chose not to enter until it obviously was too late for him to have any sort of impact.

A MAGA Supreme Court?

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Who says the current Supreme Court is a MAGA court? Relatedly, who objects to Making America Great Again?  The Wall Street Journal‘s editors provided some insight to the Court’s rulings for last year and this.

First, an aggregate statistic: of all the cases decided in 2023, nearly 46% were decided unanimously, the second highest percentage of unanimity of the prior four years—second only to 2022’s unanimity rate. And both of those years had those evil Trump appointees Justices Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. That court also had the Progressive-Democratic Party’s darlings, Justices Sonya Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Some 2024 cases decided unanimously:

  • Colorado can’t remove Donald Trump’s name from its ballot as an “insurrectionist” under the 14th Amendment
  • pro-life doctors lack standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration over the abortion pill mifepristone
  • the National Rifle Association can sue a New York regulator for coercing insurers to stop doing business with gun-rights groups

Among the 8-1 and 7-2 cases:

  • Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the Court to uphold Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (MA) CFPB funding scheme
  • a refusal to close the constitutional door to a wealth tax
  • government can, indeed, disarm an alleged—not convicted at trial—domestic abuser via a civil restraining order

Of 22 cases decided by 6-3 votes, 11 had “mixed” majorities. Among these:

  • three conservative and three liberal Justices ruled that the federal government had unconstitutionally pressured social-media websites to delete user posts
  • six Justices, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, ruled that prosecutors had stretched the law too far in charging a number of January 6 rioters with obstructing Congress

Who says, and who objects? The Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians dishonestly proclaim this Supreme Court, which adheres to the text of our Constitution and the statute(s) before it, an extremist and MAGA court, using the latter adjective as though it were a pejorative. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians object to Making America Great Again—here demonstrated by their sneering at the concept of MAGA.

Independence Day

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I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.

On this day 235 and more years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.

These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities.  At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.  Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.

And so, while fighting (and many dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government.  They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.

They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years—any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office.  This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.

We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, Benghazi, emails, immigration, viruses, our role in the world, a Presidential election, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial.  And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 235 and more years ago.

As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs and other meats in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.