No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Theoretically, Biden could do it and not be prosecuted.
But if he ordered a member of the military to do it, they are required to refuse illegal orders. I don't know the rules about illegal orders but I bet this would fall under that. At the same time, the President can pardon people convicted in military court so that's not much of a deterrent.
Similarly if he ordered a civilian (say, CIA) to assassinate Trump, that person could be tried. But again, the President's pardon power makes federal charges not much of a threat.
BUT — the President cannot grant pardons for convictions in state courts. So anyone involved would be in trouble if it happened in a US state. And if the Supreme Court did not make the President immune from state-level prosecution, Biden could be tried for being involved... but it seems unlikely that they would go for "the President is immune from federal prosecution but not state prosecution."
Of course, all this show how insane and dangerous the idea of Presidential immunity is. It's a terrible idea.
Sounds like the answer is for him to pull the trigger himself?
In theory that gets around the legal issue but then you're getting into practical issues: Trump is protected by the Secret Service so either it will be extremely difficult from a practical perspective, or you would have to get quite a few people to go along with the conspiracy. Again, this highlights what a terrible idea immunity is because the possibilities get horrifying really fast.
Could Biden order the secret services to not protect him?
What if Biden orders his Secret Service detail to tackle Trump's Secret Service detail?
Also have the Secret Service tackle themselves so that they dont follow illegal orders....
This looks like a warrior president future timeline.
Not in our timeline
But the argument is that if the President orders it, it's not illegal. Nixon tried that and got shot down.
What about DC as opposed to a state?
I am super duper NOT an expert but I believe the President can pardon crimes in DC, so that would get around the state court issue. Same for outside the US: I'm not sure states can punish crimes outside of the US. Even if they can, they may not have laws on the books to handle that sort of thing.
It is much more likely to find Trump in DC, than abroad. That was the motivation to my my question.
The next time I need to qualify a statement, I will steal the phrase “I am super duper NOT an expert”. Thanks in advance.
Do you mean theoretically according to Trump or theoretically according to real life?
US law keeps being interpreted in more and more absurd ways it seems!
According to the arguments currently being made to protect Trump from prosecution. The premise of the question was "If presidential immunity is absolute."
Ok, so this is according to "Trump side".
They argue many things, but very few of them really hold up to real life, so I personally don't put too much weight on them any more. I trust that the legal system will shoot those arguments down if not fast, then at least efficiently. IMO it is basically just is a method of extending these cases for last as long as possible, and I am surprised that nobody can do anything against that!
True, but the original question was a hypothetical about the absurd consequences of ruling in their favor.
I didn’t realize the CIA was considered civilian. What about the NSA or the Secret Service?
NSA is civilian, they work closely with CSS which is the military side. The determining factor for civilian vs military is whether the people working there are enlisted soldiers/commissioned officers or civilians who just get hired like other jobs.