Donald Trump’s lawyers on Wednesday argued that as long as he’s president, Trump can gun down innocent pedestrians in the middle of the street with impunity.
“Would we have to wait for impeachment?”, Carey R. Dunne, the Manhattan district attorney’s general counsel, asked, during proceedings tied to Trump’s appeal of a ruling that required his accountant to comply with a subpoena seeking nearly a decade of personal and corporate tax returns.
Dunne was referring to Trump’s infamous claim from the campaign trail. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” Trump said in 2016. “It’s, like, incredible”, he added.
It is “incredible”. And, according to William S. Consovoy, an attorney for Trump in the state case, Trump wouldn’t just retain all his voters after a hypothetical murder spree, he’d retain his freedom too. In fact, he wouldn’t even be investigated.
Denny Chin, one of the three judges on the federal appeals panel reviewing the case, asked Consovoy to clarify his position.
“Local authorities couldn’t investigate? They couldn’t do anything about it?”, Chin asked. “Nothing could be done? That’s your position?”
“That is correct”, Consovoy said. “That is correct”. (He said it twice.)
Earlier this month, a lower court in Manhattan called the president’s contention that he is immune from criminal investigations “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values”.
Read more: Trump Gets Last-Minute Stay After Being Ordered To Hand Over 8 Years Of Tax Returns
The Supreme Court has never ruled on whether sitting presidents are immune from prosecution while in office, but they may have to, lest Trump should get the idea he can just roam the streets of the capital with a rifle.
“This case seems bound for the Supreme Court”, one of the other judges on the federal appeals panel said Wednesday.
SCOTUS don’t fail us now! Get this one wrong and Trump will get to live out any Grand Theft Auto fantasies he might be harboring.
And hell, with the GOP reluctant to countenance impeachment, and Trump repeatedly “joking” about serving as many as four terms, Fifth Avenue could be a dangerous place until at least 2032.
Recently read material:
“Finally, and most pertinently, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon: the first for obstruction of justice, the second for abuse of power, and the third for defying House subpoenas during its impeachment investigation. Article 3 obviously did not allege a crime. But even in the first two articles, which did involve some potentially criminal conduct, the committee was at pains to avoid any reference to criminal statutes. Rather, as the committee staff observed in its careful study of the question, “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is a phrase that reaches far beyond crimes to embrace “exceeding the powers of the office in derogation of those of another branch of government,” “behaving in a manner grossly incompatible with the proper function of the office,” and “employing the power of the office for an improper purpose or personal gain.”
In the end, the best argument against the claim that impeachment requires criminality is not the overwhelming weight of contrary history and precedent, but the sheer dangerous absurdity of the proposition.
… Or suppose that a president were to announce one morning that henceforth he would take no account of congressional statutes or administrative regulations and would instead rule by decree. That is, so far as I know, no crime. But does anyone doubt that such a decree would be impeachable?
Or suppose, to bring the case still closer to home, a president were to subordinate himself and the interests of his own country to a foreign power because he or his family could make money by doing so. Or because the foreign country agreed to help him secure reelection. Does anyone seriously suggest that the question of whether such behavior is impeachable turns on the niceties of ethics rules or campaign-finance laws?”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/what-does-high-crimes-and-misdemeanors-actually-mean/600343/
Yes, we are on the crux of simply having a dictator who can at will ignore elections and murder people or actually having a constitutional democracy still in crisis.
“SCOTUS don’t fail us now! Get this one wrong and Trump will get to live out any Grand Theft Auto fantasies he might be harboring.” If they do that, SCOTUS will be reconstituted at the next available opportunity.. More than likely they will come up with something half-ass.. rule on part of it vs the whole thing.. After all, who can question them?