But yes, it’s essential. I’ve watched a few elections with lower stakes and been appalled at the candidates My Team chose. “Him? As Prime Minister? He needs to be a spy instead: I forget what he looks like when I’m looking at him.”
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There’s the reason right there. Hunter deserves to face consequences, but he doesn’t deserve MAGA-level consequences. And the media is playing up the outrage while they ignored T**** auctioning off pardons to the highest bidder. Fuck that shit.
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I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean. Yes, the initial investigation was the result of a politically motivated witch hunt but it wasn’t MAGA that was actually finding him guilty. That was a jury of his peers in one case, and a guilty plea in the other. And we don’t know what the consequences were even going to be since we didn’t get to sentencing yet.
You should definitely do something about this.
Will you be protesting at the White House or his Delaware home?
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What world have you been living in? He was going to be tortured and killed. There, I said it.
FFS.
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WATCH: “I’ve had 0 Republican help. Not a single Republican signed on.”
MEMPHIS’ Rep Cohen says his constitutional amendment to ban pardons for POTUS’ “family/staff/crimes committed for their benefit” got 0 GOP support from those suddenly very concerned.
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I don’t think you quite understand what everyone is saying: whatever the sentence handed down by the jury, it would probably have been just, even if others wouldn’t even have been brought before a jury for it. But that’s not the concern. If he ended up in prison under the Trump administration, he would have never left it.
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Legally mandated apologies are always the most sincere.
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Also… do you guys think we should have a thread on organizing in the Democratic party?
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But despite that, sure sounds like a plan.
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I don’t see anything problematic about the jury verdict in of itself. The jury did their jobs. This wasn’t a complicated case with complicated facts. There was nothing there to dispute that he committed a crime and the only hope was for a jury nullification. It would have only been surprising if he hadn’t been found guilty.
The problem is everything else that got from point A to point B. Don’t forget that all of this even happened because Trump himself committed crimes (that he was ultimately impeached for) in attempt to hurt Joe Biden politically and subvert him running for office in 2020.
Even after being impeached, he appointed a special prosecutor to go after Hunter Biden to dig for any sliver of criminal wrongdoing in the hope that could be linked to Joe Biden, again subverting a 2020 run.
Once Biden was in office, he could have/should have just fired that special prosecutor. Being the institutionalist that he is, he wanted to maintain the appearance of an independent judiciary and avoid the appearance of executive overreach. Hindsight and all, I would imagine simply firing the special prosecutor (that was clearly appointed for political reasons and involved in a partisan witch hunt) probably would have been far less controversial than the subsequent pardon. (Although I maintain that a few years or even months from now, very few will remember or care about this.)
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Presidential pardon powers as they are defined in the Constitution today are extremely broad. I think it would be great to add some clarity and guardrails to them. While we’re at it, let’s explicitly disallow things like selling pardons (either for money or influence), using pardons as a carrot to encourage criminal behavior, or pardoning yourself.
I can’t imagine why Republicans wouldn’t like these ideas!
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It would certainly be nice if we could prevent future self-pardons, among other things. But unfortunately even the most extremely criminal president probably wouldn’t even need to do that anymore thanks to SCOTUS’ decision in Trump v. United States where they declared that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for just about anything that they do while in office, up to and including sending Seal Team 6 to murder political rivals. We shouldn’t need a constitutional amendment to prevent a president from doing that, but apparently that’s where we are now.
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Maybe we should get a Constitutional amendment to fix that while we’re at it.
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even the most extremely criminal president probably wouldn’t even need to do that anymore thanks to SCOTUS’ decision in Trump v. United States where they declared that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for just about anything that they do while in office
Isn’t that subject to judicial review, review that can go all the way up to the 6-3 conservative leaning SCOTUS?
If so, that would mean that for a long time, Tromp and other Republican president’s will effectively have immunity, and Biden and Democratic ones don’t and won’t.
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The framers were pretty clear that the President isn’t King, but clearly the current SCOTUS has other ideas. And with the SCOTUS decree that created new powers out of whole cloth, a Presdient can do blatantly illegal shit by using the “it’s coming right for us” justification by saying anything they do is an official act. While I have no problems with the President having broad criminal protections for the things they do, there’s a big difference between making a bad decision that has bad outcomes, and knowingly committing crimes.
That’s what you get when you have a far-right leaning SCOTUS packed with people who subscribe to the Unitary Executive theory, and are more than happy to place the Presdient above the law as long as it’s their guy in office and as long as it benefits them.
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Some good news. Apologies if these have been posted elsewhere:
File the next story under Bwaaaaaahhahahah!!
(excerpt): Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vented his displeasure Monday after two Democratic-appointed federal judges reversed their decisions to retire in what appear to be efforts to stop President-elect Trump from nominating their successors.
Mitch McConnell criticizes Democratic judges’ unretirement after Trump victory
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Die mad, McTurtle.
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