Law Supreme Court makes watergate legal? President now has near immunity

[jeremyemilio]

easiest answer is that the iranian general is NOT a US citizen, therefore not directly protected by the constitution or the body of law. the justification for droning trump would have to be 1000 times more complex than the iranian general.

I've not commented on Sherdog in a looooong time... but I can't for the life of me figure out why no one, democrat or republican, has pointed out that this is the exact doctrine that Holder detailed in his justification of Obama's targeted assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. Holder's legal advice and opinion was basically that the president can kill whomever he deems a threat with no requirement to prove, before or after, that the target actually is/was a threat. Also, that his actions are not vulnerable to judicial review but, rather, that it is a political matter (to be dealt with through impeachment and/or elections).

As far as I can tell, that's exactly the nightmare scenario that people are claiming the supreme court just opened up... but that nightmare scenario already played out 13 years ago, under Obama, and hardly anyone batted an eye.



Here's Holder's take according to the NY Times. [Edit: Originally linked the wrong article.]

I'd like to be clear here. I'm not defending the ruling. I thought it was a crazy take then and I think it's a crazy take now. You can't have a circular defense that a president can do whatever s/he wants, so long as it is:

a) in the name of national security and/or;
b) an official act,

...and then ipso facto leave it up to the executive branch to unilaterally determine whether the act was in the name of national security or and official act, due to the fact that you can't bring the President to trial to prove the national security threat or officialness of the act, as per their prior claim of it being an issue related to national security or an official act.

It's nutso. But it's not anything at all new. And it was equally nutso when Obama used it to literally kill an American citizen without trial (the most wild scenario that is now being floated as this "new paradigm"), not to mention the Bush regime and their penchant for disappearing people without trial to Gitmo.

What a circus.

 

[Sinister]

I've not commented on Sherdog in a looooong time... but I can't for the life of me figure out why no one, democrat or republican, has pointed out that this is the exact doctrine that Holder detailed in his justification of Obama's targeted assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. Holder's legal advice and opinion was basically that the president can kill whomever he deems a threat with no requirement to prove, before or after, that the target actually is/was a threat. Also, that his actions are not vulnerable to judicial review but, rather, that it is a political matter (to be dealt with through impeachment and/or elections).

As far as I can tell, that's exactly the nightmare scenario that people are claiming the supreme court just opened up... but that nightmare scenario already played out 13 years ago, under Obama, and hardly anyone batted an eye.



Here's Holder's take according to the NY Times. [Edit: Originally linked the wrong article.]

I'd like to be clear here. I'm not defending the ruling. I thought it was a crazy take then and I think it's a crazy take now. You can't have a circular defense that a president can do whatever s/he wants, so long as it is:

a) in the name of national security and/or;
b) an official act,

...and then ipso facto leave it up to the executive branch to unilaterally determine whether the act was in the name of national security or and official act, due to the fact that you can't bring the President to trial to prove the national security threat or officialness of the act, as per their prior claim of it being an issue related to national security or an official act.

It's nutso. But it's not anything at all new. And it was equally nutso when Obama used it to literally kill an American citizen without trial (the most wild scenario that is now being floated as this "new paradigm"), not to mention the Bush regime and their penchant for disappearing people without trial to Gitmo.

What a circus.

This is a good post. That being said, this is an example of why actual leftists always maintained that there is no viable political left in the United States. And I say that confidently because mo t leftists, Obama was heavily criticized for sh*t like this, and continuation of Neo-Liberal policies. This Country has engaged in a concentrated political effort to stamp leftism out of the picture because there's nothing the donor class hates more than growing egalitarian sentiment. So with a political landscape dominated by Rightist sentiment, and centrist Liberal sentiment, the only outrage over this is going to be from the isolationists on the right.

That said, Trump's administration also got American citizens killed, with silence even from the isolationists.

 

[jeremyemilio]

At the very least, the biggest issue with the ruling is the notion that conversations that take place between the President and other people on the Government payroll are, by default, "official duty" and inadmissible as evidence.

As an example, some of the greatest sources that Trump was doing anything wrong were White House staffers, and by staffers I mean pee-ons who overheard incredibly brazen sh*t. Now, the claim is going to be made that because THEY are on the Government's payroll, nothing they heard is admissible, and the conversations themselves are inadmissible even if the person the President said some heinous sh*t to WANTED to testify against him.

The way Roberts wrote the opinion seems foreshadowed by what Nixon said:

"Well if the President did it, its not illegal."

Yeah that's a King

I don't disagree... but... these are precisely the arguments used by Eric Holder et al when refusing to release documents related to Obama's assassination order on American Citizen Anwar al-Awlaki.

Many of those documents were eventually released via order of the court, but they were never used as evidence in a court of law, seemingly because Holder's legal opinion that the President can kill whomever he wants to kill in defense of "national security," without ever being required to prove that the target was, indeed, a threat to national security.

To be clear, I though that was crazy then and I'm not about to change my tune; it's still crazy. But it's not new.

 

[jeremyemilio]

This is a good post. That being said, this is an example of why actual leftists always maintained that there is no viable political left in the United States. And I say that confidently because mo t leftists, Obama was heavily criticized for sh*t like this, and continuation of Neo-Liberal policies. This Country has engaged in a concentrated political effort to stamp leftism out of the picture because there's nothing the donor class hates more than growing egalitarian sentiment. So with a political landscape dominated by Rightist sentiment, and centrist Liberal sentiment, the only outrage over this is going to be from the isolationists on the right.

That said, Trump's administration also got American citizens killed, with silence even from the isolationists.

I disagree somewhat, simply in the fact that leftism has never been above totalitarianism. It is true liberalism that is dead.

 

[Sinister]

I disagree somewhat, simply in the fact that leftism has never been above totalitarianism. It is true liberalism that is dead.

I don't think totalitarianism is compatible with leftism, in the same sense that Nazis and the CCCP cant favor corporations and simultaneously claim to be communist or socialist, tough to claim to be egalitarian when you favor the wealthy. But that's getting a bit in the weeds with terminology.

What I'm getting at is how the people who would most vocally have opposed this here are viewed and demonized by both sides. I do agree though that modern American liberals arent all that liberal.