Timeline for Can the US president legally kill at will?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 7 at 20:53 | comment | added | prosfilaes | @IllusiveBrian Sounds like you're saying that the immunity is toothless because it exists. Yes, people would like unbounded immunity, but the purpose of not giving immunity is discourage a President from taking actions that could be good for the President but is not in line with public policy. | |
| Jul 5 at 23:47 | comment | added | Michael Lorton | @IllusiveBrian — no state government could arrest the president. The DoJ technically has the authority, but long-standing policy is that it does not. It would be kind of like firing your boss. | |
| Jul 5 at 21:46 | comment | added | IllusiveBrian | Actually immunity only while the President is still President would be almost entirely pointless since no one would have the practical capacity to arrest the President during his term, other than a coup at which point law becomes irrelevant anyway. | |
| Jul 5 at 21:43 | comment | added | IllusiveBrian | @prosfilaes Because the purpose of the immunity generally is to remove personal consequences from some action that could be bad for the individual but is in line with public policy. In this case the purpose is to allow the President to make decisions without being concerned about getting thrown in prison later by an opposing party. If the immunity expires on leaving office then he may have to consider whether any decision he makes can be held against him criminally later. | |
| Jul 5 at 18:04 | comment | added | prosfilaes | @IllusiveBrian What do you mean by toothless? It means that if the President is engaging in a series of acts, they can't be charged and effectively stopped by a court until they've have completed everything and left office. It means that there's no longer urgency, and presidents have been pretty generous with pardons to their predecessors (Ford, George H.W. Bush). And people in their 80s often evade prosecution by natural death. There's a big difference between "can charge during presidency" and "can charge after presidency". | |
| Jul 5 at 6:23 | comment | added | phoog | @Obie2.0 judges and so on also have lifetime immunity for official acts, as this answer points out. Of course, there's no way that ordering an assassination could be an official act of a judge. | |
| Jul 3 at 18:35 | comment | added | Michael Lorton | @Obie2.0 — courts do not act sua sponte in criminal cases. The courts have not ruled because the Department of Justice has not brought any cases. Because they didn’t want to provoke a constitutional crisis. | |
| Jul 3 at 16:57 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | @MichaelLorton - It's significant because previously, there existed the possibility that a court might have held a former president criminally liable for official conduct during office that violated applicable laws, and now it is quite unlikely to do so. I would think the significance is obvious. | |
| Jul 3 at 16:55 | comment | added | Michael Lorton | @Obie2.0 — why would that be significant? Most landmark decision were novel — and in this one, there are only 30 people in history to whom it could have applied (presidents who survived their term). Plus, if you look at earlier criminal-presidents like Clinton and Nixon, their successors were clearly dodging the Constitutional issue. | |
| Jul 3 at 16:53 | comment | added | John Bollinger | @Obie2.0, there was no reason until now for there to be any case law about such immunity. I am troubled by the SC's ruling in this case, but the absence of relevant case law is not at all a concern to me. | |
| Jul 3 at 16:47 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | @IllusiveBrian - And yet, such immunity did not exist in US case law until the case in question was decided. | |
| Jul 3 at 16:47 | comment | added | IllusiveBrian | @Obie2.0 Immunity for a particular act would be largely toothless if it had an expiration date, or did you mean something else? | |
| Jul 3 at 16:44 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | A lot of people are misunderstanding the significance of these ruling. It's less that it grants the American president immunity while in office — there were already some cases establishing this for civil matters, and there was a Justice Department policy that made it the case for criminal matters (and obviously, what Justice Department is going to allow a federal prosecution of the president that appointed it?) It's that it produces a lifetime immunity for such acts, even when the person is no longer president. | |
| Jul 3 at 16:29 | history | answered | Michael Lorton | CC BY-SA 4.0 |