Hoping your wrong. Totally sooo fucking wrong. Never would have believed something like this would even be discussed.

of grammar

even if DOJ refuses to indict him.

Say he shot someone and then just started to walk around and shoot other people randomly. Could no one arrest him?

Would we have to throw up our hands and say, guess we need to convene a house trial then after that get the senate to convict him all while he continues to shoot people? The 25th amendment takes about the same if he protests.

All this is absurd. He can be arrested and indicted now, there is nothing that says he cannot be impeached after arrest while in prison.

Except for the Supreme Court because I think it would come up.

While he continued to shoot people?

I don't think so.

It is an exercise that illustrates the absurdity of the president being above the law.

... but the principle is critical. As impeachment is a political process, what if the President’s party is in power and refuses to check his misdeeds? If career law enforcement officials cannot indict or arrest the President, then he is effectively above the law, as their is no recourse but elections, which might not timely enough to prevent further damage.

The principle that no one is above the law is fundamental to a functioning democratic republic.

there were other means available of dealing with problems. Not all options available have been used before either. The most obvious have been discussed a great deal here, on the screen, and in print media, though. Maybe sit back and admire the pros at work?

there's no impeachment. There's just indictments.

You are going to have to make up your mind what sort of world you want to live in:


1. One in which the President can only be indicted after being impeached by the House and the Senate, which are fully-elected bodies having the Constitutional power to do that.

2. One in which the President - any president - can be indicted by any unelected US attorney in any district, or by an unelected special prosecutor.

Here's where you are going wrong....


If you think that the President should be able to be indicted by any US prosecutor, then please explain to me what makes you think that sort of mechanism would not be immediately weaponized and employed by politically motivated holdover prosecutors in any future administration - or by a special prosecutor appointed for that purpose.

You don't think a US prosecutor somewhere would have found some reason to go after, say, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton during their presidencies? Of course it wouldn't happen, because they can be directly fired.

But you can bet your ass that's exactly what Ken Starr would have done.

So, explain why you believe the outcome would have been better for Clinton to have proceeded directly to a criminal proceeding, instead of an impeachment trial.

If you don't have an explanation for that, then you can't just say that the rule of law should depend on who is in office.

Ken Starr had an unlimited scope, so he kept expanding it to more and more until he entrapped Clinton into perjury. The current SCO regulation limits the scope of the investigation and requires approval to expand it.

There could also be special legal procedures set up that allows a judge to quickly dismiss politically motivated prosecutions.

I can think of several other ways to do it, but I think you get the picture.


And consider the alternative. Without being able to indict the President, he could simply bribe 34 Senators to vote for him and promise pardons not to prosecute if they get caught. So the President plus 34 Senators make an oligarchy.

"allows a judge to quickly dismiss politically motivated prosecutions" - Preferably an unbiased judge. However, if you are going to have "a judge" make that decision, then that simply boils down to the Supreme Court deciding whether the president can be indicted in any particular instance.

There is a way of thinking that there is "someone in charge of that", which seems to come into play with things like "we should have someone determine whether a presidential candidate is mentally healthy", etc., which usually boil down to having an unelected person or small group of persons holding considerable power.

"So the President plus 34 Senators make an oligarchy."

Well yes, but that's better than the President plus 5 Justices.

Last edited Tue Dec 11, 2018, 09:24 PM - Edit history (1)

None of which will be perfect. But the judiciary and civil servants are more insulated from politics than any other institutions we have precisely because they are not elected and their sole mission is to uphold the law, so we must make due with what exists and human nature allows.

On edit: What stops any low level prosecutor from making baseless indictments against you right now? Answer: the rule of law. Which should apply to the President as well as any other citizen. He should not be entitled to special immunities by virtue of his office.

Some of Nixon's cohorts are still causing problems today. Nothing really happen to Nixon. Nixon, Reagan, and others should have been in jail. The same goes for war criminal Bushco. That's why we keep getting the same.

Just like in Russia the citizens really have no recourse in getting Putin arrested.

situation

So, this notion that a president can't be indicted is bullshit.

Then orders DOJ not to investigate. Shouldn't we have a way of handling that doesn't involve the President controlling the investigation into himself?