this pairs nicely with the finding of the supreme court:

    Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

▲ hungryhobbit 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Or that's completely unrelated?

Look, you can't have a (working, democratic) government where one party can send the other to jail as soon as they get into power. If presidents could go to jail for doing their job, their opposing party would absolutely try to send them there.

This would then ultimately handicap the president: anything they do that the opposition can find a legal justification against could land them in jail, so they won't do anything that comes close to that. We do not want our chief executive making key decisions for the country based on fear of political retribution!

The Supreme Court has failed, miserably and repeatedly lately, and some of their decisions run directly counter to the law (often they even contradict past decisions!) But deciding the president won't face political retribution for trying to do his job was not a mistake.

	▲	pksebben 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Hard disagree. The metric ought to be whether they'll make it out of the court case clean or not - just having the ability to check power in a meaningful fashion when it goes off the rails is something you're only afraid of if you're a war criminal or other flavor of Massive Piece Of Shit. The reason the rules are the way they are is pretty obvious; we haven't had a not war criminal in office possibly ever, definitely not in my lifetime. It's time we faced the facts - we're the baddies.
	▲	padjo an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This is a really silly take. The whole reason for separation of powers is so that the executive can be bound by laws created by the legislative as adjudicated by the judiciary. Saying that the people in the executive are above the law undermines this completely.