I would have preferred that they draw a line on specific acts not being considered “official acts”, especially as we draw the line between Trump’s presidency and his 2020 reelection campaign. I’m just not seeing a lot of honest discourse as to what this decision actually means from a legal perspective.
Well, that’s exactly the problem that has everyone up in arms here. They have made this ruling but conveniently failed to rule on what constitutes an “official” act. Therefore whenever a major ruling has to be done about this, they can decide at that time whether an act was official or not based on what flavor of president they’re ruling for or against, and until then the lower courts can take the heat off the SCOTUS directly by just ruling that everything Trump has ever done is legal because he was president once.
It’s a very transparently partisan ruling, setting the stage for further partisan ruling in the future by being extremely vague about what their ruling actually is. This ruling boils down to “the president is allowed to do anything he wants when we say so, and is subject to rule of law only when we say so, and whether we say so will be determined after the acts in question.” In this way the conservative-packed supreme court can easily enable a conservative president or trap a liberal one.
Well, that’s exactly the problem that has everyone up in arms here. They have made this ruling but conveniently failed to rule on what constitutes an “official” act. Therefore whenever a major ruling has to be done about this, they can decide at that time whether an act was official or not based on what flavor of president they’re ruling for or against, and until then the lower courts can take the heat off the SCOTUS directly by just ruling that everything Trump has ever done is legal because he was president once.
It’s a very transparently partisan ruling, setting the stage for further partisan ruling in the future by being extremely vague about what their ruling actually is. This ruling boils down to “the president is allowed to do anything he wants when we say so, and is subject to rule of law only when we say so, and whether we say so will be determined after the acts in question.” In this way the conservative-packed supreme court can easily enable a conservative president or trap a liberal one.