If the president tells federal workers to illegally imprison me and hands them all presidential pardons, they're all safe from prosecution but in theory maybe a judge can get me out eventually. Somehow. If I can even talk to a lawyer.
But if the president instead tells federal workers to kill me...
It's like they don't understand that in actual authoritarian takeovers, rules get broken, actions taken look absurd & things happen because they are allowed to happen. And yet, preparatory steps that facilitate getting the ball rolling, such as an enabling act (which this decision is) set the stage.
President promising party for those following illegal orders = official act
President throwing opponents in jail = official act
President refusing to follow court order = official act
President jailing judge issuing order = official act
It also has the annoying law professor's law-as-abstraction thing going on: supposing judges will still let you out, how long do you sit in jail waiting for your hearing, how much is your life wrecked?
It's better to tell Presidents that they can't do bad things before they try, not after.
People are rotting in jail waiting, some not even charged, for their court dates in our current system. Oh, sorry, only poor people wait in jail for their court dates. The people who write this crap are utterly ignorant of life outside of their bubble of privilege.
Also, we seem to have lost the plot that the mere fact of spending any time in jail is destructive, as is spending time and money defending yourself from spurious charges. Part of the point of the USA is freedom from imprisonment and persecution, albeit inconsistently applied.
Court orders are also notably ineffective about ordering somebody to be un-shot.
And the Trump cultists have been agitating to send all sorts of people to Gitmo, which the Court has already said isn't their problem.
This ruling is horrible, so we need people who will explain just how horrible it is, and we also need people to think through how to navigate the decision to make it less horrible in practice.
Related, if trump is summarily deporting citizens under his new mass deportation regime, citizenship and an ability to appeal to the law isn’t going to get people back in the country. The executive runs border security
Yeah I don’t know what about this process of reckless power consolidation makes any of these scholars think anyone will be in a position to politely request their release on technical grounds when the gulags are established in earnest.
You would think this would be common sense, but here we are.
The rule of law can exist on paper while being stripped away in practice, just like how fascist dictatorships can still hold elections- it's just that the outcome is decided under the table, and the votes are just there for funzies.
Yup, first judge to let someone out that a president put in finds themselves in jail or worse and that ends any other judge’s desire to cross him.
These guys have never been the targets of “binds, but does not protect” to have the imagination to know what comes next. They shouldn’t be who we go to.
