Incorrect. The Presidential immunity decision for example is why Texas can’t prosecute Biden for reckless endangerment for throwing the border wide open.
You're conveniently ignoring all the wild shadow docket decisions in Trump's favor with no provided justification. None of that sets a precedent.
There's also a giant bloody spectrum between 'policy that had a bad outcome for someone (hint: That's every policy)' and 'blatant pay-to-play corruption and criminality and treason' when it comes to that immunity. The court, of course, went all in on enabling the latter, instead of finding any kind of rational ground, because any rational ground would have put Trump in prison.
By failing to give any qualification of what the fuck an official act is, they've given him blanket immunity. And blanket immunity for an executive means that the constitution is as good as a piece of toilet paper. There are no consequences to him violating your rights.
There’s nothing unusual about the use of the shadow docket. It’s being used in response to district court orders that are being issued without trial and often with very short or no opinions. Why should the Supreme Court spend a year on the full rigmarole for some preliminary injunction a district court fired off after a week after no discovery, no trial, and minimal briefing?
> There's also a giant bloody spectrum between 'policy that had a bad outcome for someone (hint: That's every policy)
Yeah, that’s exactly why there’s presidential immunity for official acts! Because otherwise you could easily shoehorn one of those bad outcomes into the letter of some broadly written criminal law.
In Texas, there’s a deadly conduct crime: “A person commits an offense if he recklessly engages in conduct that places another in imminent danger of serious bodily injury.”
You think some Texas prosecutor couldn’t get a border county Texas jury to squint at that text and convict Biden under it for throwing open the border to illegal aliens? All the Supreme Court decided was that some things the President does can’t be prosecuted under the criminal laws like he’s an ordinary citizen. That’s obviously true, which is the same reason Congress has immunity for official acts and judges have immunity for official acts.
> By failing to give any qualification of what the fuck an official act is, they've given him blanket immunity.
No, it’s exactly the opposite. All they decided was that official acts immunity exists. You can’t prosecute Obama for involuntary manslaughter because some executive action he took got someone killed. They then remanded to the district court to decide what counted as official acts and what didn’t count. That didn’t give Trump “blanket immunity”—it left it to the district court to decide what was covered by the immunity and what wasn’t.
Yep, all 4 charges remained in the superseding indictment (filed Aug 27 in 2024 by Smith).
One of the problem is the "the DOJ's policy of not prosecuting sitting Presidents", while it's understandable it's definitely not great for the rule of law.
And the other is it took too many years for the whole shit shower to drip down. (Garland appointed Smith in November of 2022, and it took ~10 months for the indictment.)
Jack Smith also just fucked up the prosecution. The Supreme Court was going to find some sort of official acts immunity existed. There is implied official acts immunity for judges in the U.S. And official acts immunity for executives is typical in the developed world. The EU for example has official acts immunity for “officials and servants,” though the scope is fuzzy: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-high-flyers-face-fresh-do....
Jack Smith’s indictment mixed together conduct, like the sitting President consulting with his AG about suspected voter fraud, that clearly would fall within the scope of immunity, with stuff that was clearly not an official act. I don’t know if he was dumb or arrogant, but it was an insane tactical error.
Official immunity is tough and there’s no clear answer. The old canard that “a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich” has a lot of truth to it. As between a potentially criminal, but duly elected President, and a potentially corrupt, and unelected prosecutor, which one is the bigger risk? There’s a strong argument that it’s better to have elections be the final backstop rather than the judgment of unelected prosecutors being able to override voters.
