volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@LouisIngenthron the CIC who is nonetheless restrained by law.

He's not a dictator. The president has only the authorities vested by law, including with regard to the military.

The top bureaucrat charged with implementing congressional preferences as to how the military is to be used as well.

@gkmizuno No, because the Supreme Court left open congressional ability to create a process by which 14A 3 would be enforced.

Congress is not required, Congress is authorized.

And Congress is authorized to create remedies.

It's not cut off, it's the opposite, it's emphatically allowed.

@bigheadtales Glad to help!

@LouisIngenthron meh. I wouldn't say this is about justice. That's more a matter of criminal law.

This is about choosing the administrator of the executive branch of the federal government.

Justice is about figuring out who needs to go to jail. This is about figuring out who we want to trust to tell the IRS how to mail refund checks.

@WorMP3 exactly.

I'm eternally frustrated by friends who simultaneously complain about what Congress does even as they keep excitedly re-electing the exact people doing the thing they are complaining about.

So I try to highlight the importance of electing better congresspeople, or more to the point, the importance of ending the reelection of bad ones.

@bigheadtales careful with those assumptions about my political leanings. No I'm a emphatic liberal and I sure wish the rest of y'all would stop being so authoritarian.

But anyway, I did correct you. The court didn't say that. There's your correction.

@LouisIngenthron they will if we stop re-electing jerks.

But we keep re-electing jerks.

And so we get the government we elect.

We should stop re-electing jerks, but history says we will keep doing it, so.

@iuculano this decision didn't favor Trump. It favored voters and the federal design of the US as the justices laid out in their opinion.

This was not about Trump.

@micchiato@mastodon.social I don't know why you think expanding the court would make a difference when the decision was unanimous.

Sounds like it would be a 12-0 decision instead of 9-0.

@LouisIngenthron That's not at all what SCOTUS ruled.

Not only do presidents remain susceptible to legal penalty under this ruling, but the ruling even laid out the path for Congress to impose additional penalties against any president who would commit insurrection.

@Stinson_108 not so much Trump's hands since he's not in Congress...

@WorMP3 Well, impeachment or, more realistically, the statutes regarding the counting of electoral votes.

Congress remains free to simply not recognize Trump as eligible for office, if it wants, setting aside any EC ballot that lists him.

@SonofaGeorge Well they decided that states CAN remove a candidate from a presidential ballot but it has to be done through a federal process for a federal election.

The presidential immunity question is a very different sort of issue, so there's nothing strange about the two different things being handled in two different ways.

@Nonilex Well not quite.

It's not that decision is put in their hands, but that they can set up the process to make the decision.

@bigheadtales No, that's not what the court said at all.

Yes, there's a lot of people putting out falsehoods about what's happened at the court, and we need to push back on those misleading claims.

@vij Well it's really the opposite.

It's not that the court opened a green lane but that it prevented states from closing it without federal authority.

@RejoinEU firstly, that has absolutely nothing to do with the Supreme Court ruling today. They were not addressing that question. It could very well be insurrection and yet the Supreme Court is pointing out that it's not up to states to make that determination.

Secondly, by the definition posted, it was not insurrection as it was attacking the wrong branch of government. You can't control the government through the legislature.

@hermitary@mastodon.world it's pretty orwellian to describe allowing more ballot access to be against democracy.

The Supreme Court is wrong, but it's pro-democracy, not anti.

The design of the US system puts guardrails around democracy and the Supreme Court is wrong to allow democracy to run amok. But let's be clear that this is a pro democracy ruling even though it shouldn't be.

@blogdiva well no, since the president doesn't have authority to be a dictator.

Yes, the president has all the authority of the office. No, it is not an authority of the office to declare dictatorship.

@McPatrick in the arguments the point was made that there is a difference: something like age is generally uncontested while something like guilt for insurrection is contestable and judiciable.

Except in outlier cases, every state will agree on the age of a candidate. But different states might conclude differently on the question of guilt for insurrection.

That's the difference.