“Unlikely Trump will ever be tried for the crimes he committed,” says ex-Judge J. Michael Luttig
It’s not a hard question, or at least it hasn’t been before: Does the United States have a king – one empowered to do as they please without even the pretext of being governed by a law higher than their own word – or does it have a president? Since Donald Trump began claiming he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, two courts have issued rulings striking down this purported right, recognizing that one can have a democracy or a dictatorship, but not both.
“We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power – the recognition and implementation of election results,” states the unanimous opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, issued this past February, upholding a lower court’s take on the question. “Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and have their votes cast.”
You can’t well keep a republic if it’s effectively legal to overthrow it. But at oral arguments last week, conservative justices on the Supreme Court – which took up the case rather than cosign the February ruling – appeared desperate to make the simple appear complex. Justice Samuel Alito, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, argued that accountability was what would actually lead to lawlessness.
They don’t. And politics isn’t so easily boiled down to a single axis - Democrats are focused on social issues that are easy to repeal. This will save the lives of minority groups right now, but allow billions to die from climate change.
What part of the Russia-Ukraine War, the Inflation Reduction Act, or the CHIPS Act strike you as “social issues”?
Climate Change is and always has fundamentally been an economic issue. We’re not trying to keep the Earth from spiking ten degrees because we’re obsessed with the Spotted Owl. This shit is threatening trillions of dollars of accrued real estate and trillions more of agricultural output.
I mean focused in the literal sense, and didn’t mean to imply exclusively. You did provide examples of things the Republicans can simply undo, rather than improving our representation in goverment.
It’s fair to say that everything has at least some economic component. Climate change is a bit more than that because our lives have no value in their calculations. The trajectory we’re on now already maximizes the net present value of real estate.