This is going to be remembered as one of the Wrong Decisions by the court, like the ones upholding slavery and such. The only question is whether it’ll be in the history of the USA as “dark times” or “the fall of.”
Not T****’s actions, though. Who paid for the Jan 6 rally? Were the busses Ginny Thomas paid for to bring in insurrectionists reported as a campaign contribution. T**** cutouts Bannon and Roger Stone were not part of the administration at the time, so those actions were unofficial. IIRC, the alternate electors were organized by state republican campaign officials, not elections officials.
That’s all very cut-and-dried unofficial actions, not official.
We’ve never had to codify or argue about these limits on power, because literally no decent human being would consider actually doing the things we’re talking about prohibiting.
I’d originally had some small hope that a Trump presidency would act as a smoke-test to find all the gaps in our laws about executive power we needed to shore up before someone equally amoral but significantly more competent rose to power.
Not only did that not happen, we’re now codifying the gaps instead of sealing them. And Project 2025 means a second Trump presidency will be ruthlessly efficient at exploiting every gap they can find.
I mean… maybe do that to some of the Supreme Court judges and see if they retain that opinion?
But he won’t. He won’t add judges to try to balance things out. The DOJ is moving their cases through the court, but we got the Trump appointed judge on the documents case which is mind-blowingly a conflict of interests. 
It won’t happen before the election and he’s getting extremely preferred treatment.
Doing the bare minimum of slowing down the bolder of fascism isn’t going to stop it from rolling down the hill. It needs to be diverted into a rocker crushing machine.
Ah, what the fuck.
“As the first official act of my presidency I hereby declare all unofficial acts taken by this office to be regarded as official.”
Regarding any assertion of “Biden wouldn’t/shouldn’t use this to constrain the opposition because he doesn’t want to become trump”, that’s a laudable point of view! however consider the Karl Popper conjecture/paradox that if you don’t show intolerance to those who will be intolerant then you end up with much more intolerance. …now where’s that cartoon? (-sigh-)…
The ruling included that nothing that was part of an official act could be used as evidence for other things that are not official acts. This cuts into a bunch of things to try and make large quantities of evidence inadmissible.
What I don’t understand is, what stops the President from saying to just use those things anyway. They said he can talk to the Justice department. It seems completely then an official act to say to use that evidence anyway. It’s knot of conflicting rules.
I really think we need an amendment that removes ALL prosecutional immunity.
Just like Math is Math, the Law is the Law and should apply to all.
You wouldn’t THINK we’d have to spell that out, but here we are.
Thankfully there was enough foresight at the beginning to say “just so we’re clear, cause some of you are dumbasses, let me spell out 10 or so things.”
I would like to see him order the department of education to forgive all student debt. That would clearly be an official act. Since he’s immune, isn’t it within his power to just ignore any SCOTUS ruling that said he couldn’t do this.
But, wait, they’ll just charge the bureaucrats with violating federal law if they do this. The president can pardon all of them. A thing that is also an official act with no limits.
No Seal Team 6, no jailing people, no punishing political opponents. All things Biden would be unlikely to do. Just a shortcut to helping people. Something completely within Biden’s character.
He should make it happen. Put the new power to good use.
For people saying that this cuts both ways … not true. Each “official” act will be determined in a lower court, then work its way up to SCOTUS. If Biden does something, the court can hear the case within a day. If Trump does something, the court can slow roll it pretty much as long as they want. Which is what they’ve done here. So this is exactly something that allows SCOTUS to decide what a president can get away with.
He could declare all SCOTUS decisions from 2018 on null and void. He could expand the court to 13 justices by fiat and nominate 4 new justices. He could declare the filibuster illegal.
There are so many things this opens up as options that don’t involve violence.
Flood the zone. Isn’t that exactly what we’ve learned?
Biden could use the power for good. Flood the courts not with one questionable official act, but with a hundred. Overwhelm the courts ability to hear them quickly.
Then his next official act is to declare unofficial acts official.
Your line of thinking makes sense if you accept the purported purpose of the Democratic Party at face value, yes. The more cynical (and perhaps realistic) take is that the Supreme Court has provided the perfect excuse for the Dems to continue their inexorable shift right and authoritarian for the benefit of the oligarchy. SCOTUS has just effectively greased the slides of the Overton window to a heretofore unprecedented degree. The question is how hard the Dems will chance to nudge it while attempting to maintain a homeopathic veneer of progressiveness.
Part of the ruling is that official acts are outside judicial review. Probably the batshit craziest part, TBH.
So the title of the office needs to be changed to reflect the new status.
Emperor.
Smoke Test…
If the lower court calls them unofficial, then the defense will appeal to the SC again who will say they were, in fact, offical. THE SC JUST ENDORSED ■■■■■ FOR OVERLORD.
SCOTUS: We take an originalist view of the Constitution, which is to say that we interpret it as the Founding Fathers would have done.
Also SCOTUS: We’re totally cool with the president having unrestricted powers. It’s what the Founders would have wanted. Those guys loved omnipotent monarchs.
I guess originalism only goes so far.
