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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Yes, this is probably the real motive. “Arrest and execute my political opponents” cannot be ignored by the military without a coup or being in dereliction of duty. I think another nefarious change here is not that the actual power has changed but that the Supreme Court has given face value validity to illegal acts. The President has always has unmitigated pardon power for federal crimes. They could order the military to commit illegal acts and pardon them preemptively so that they were not punished. A reason why that hasn’t happened is that the optics of that are horrifying - the President and military must admit to a crime being committed to pardon that crime. With this ruling there is no admission, no face value legal wrongdoing, and plenty of plausible deniability.

    SCOTUS knew precisely what they were doing. This is a significant expansion of presidential power, yes. But they know that the real issue is political. What they want is the President to be able to argue that illegal things are legal because the President did it, instead of arguing that illegal things are not punishable because the President pardoned the criminals.

    The President can literally shoot someone in cold blood, in public, and as long as they can deem it an official act it is de jure legal.

    You might be asking why the right isn’t worried that Biden will abuse this - the answer is because they know he doesn’t have the balls. The left still thinks we’re in 1968 fighting for rights with mostly peaceful protests. We’re in 1938 and we’ve already lost.










  • Those are not the minimum qualifications. They should be read as “anyone who meets them is eligible” rather than “no one who fails to meet them is eligible.” The Rehnquist court found that states could not add a felony exclusion for Congressional candidates in the 1990s and that is broadly considered to extend to the Presidency as well. https://www.oyez.org/cases/1994/93-1456

    If the constitution doesn’t say it, it’s not typically intended to be assumed true. The constitution doesn’t say that felons can’t be president - so we can’t assume that the states or congress could pass laws forbidding them from being president. It specifically says you can’t be president if you’re 34 or were not born a US citizen. If the writers wanted to exclude felons, they would have said so.









  • I mean in the literal sense the president is commander in chief of the armed forces. Disobeying their orders is defying their constitutional authority.

    The issue is obviously more complicated than that just-so story. My point is not that if the president says to shoot the speaker of the house, soldiers must do it or they are behaving unconstitutionally. My point is that the president has the authority to direct the military to do things, and when the president uses that authority to undermine democracy in the US that act is a constitutional crisis because it pits two branches of government against each other in an irreconcilable way.


  • You say that but that isn’t how it would happen.

    There would be months or years of prep work, spreading propaganda that Canada was the source of our woes, that they were wronging us. By the time we invaded there’d be just enough “legitimate discourse” about the invasion that the Presidents supporters could claim any effort to stop him was political.

    There was a time not long ago where people said you couldn’t do lots of things or you’d get thrown out - then Trump did many of them, even got impeached (twice!) and stayed in office. In practice, these limits are at best inconvenient for a dedicated lunatic.