The word "nevertheless" does a lot of heavy lifting here and makes it clear that "party convicted" is not meant as a universal precondition for further prosecution. It makes it clear that the article means "the immediate consequence from conviction in an impeachment trial is removal from office, but further legal consequences shall nevertheless be possible".

It's impossible to square the interpretation of "impeachment has to result in conviction for further prosecution to be possible" with the word 'nevertheless'.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 11 2024 02:52pm

Okay this is weird.

Black the conservative and Thor the leftist are having to tell snipa the centrist that the Republicans arguments are baseless.

Did I go through a wormhole last night?

i could alternatively read that to say they want to see if Trump loses before they take the case. they're not going to jump it up the ladder prematurely. and with many people claiming the SCOTUS is a group of Trump lackeys its probably smart. imagine if the SCOTUS jumped appeals to bail him out.

im not saying i believe that, i dont think the theory that the president is criminally immune sans-impeachment holds water, but its not illogical entirely.

the entre legal process rests on the simple idea that if u break the law without an excuse the LEGALLY holds water, you are held accountable. and the impeachment process isnt legal, its political. civil cases stand outside the legal process, or run parallel to it really. if the SCOTUS sees this case i'd hope they redefine the constitutional interpretation to void "conviction" entirely.



well, im not arguing my personal opinion. just a possible legal loophole from sadly vague language. one that i think both should and would be closed under SCOTUS scrutiny.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Jan 11 2024 02:55pm

If you haven't you really should listen to Trump's team getting questioned by the judges. They really blew out every part of their case during oral arguments.

TBH the most disappointing part of this whole thing is that it allowed Trump's team to stall the case. They do not think for a second that these arguments hold water, they just want to stall the case, and that's exactly what was allowed to happen.

Nah, I'm generally willing to give Trump a lot of leeway, but this stuff right here is just pure bullshit. And if an argument coming from team Trump is too much for even me to defend, that's saying a lot...

Snipa is right, however, that law can be really weird and it can't be totally ruled out that the courts arrive at an interpretation contrary to formal logic or a plain reading of the text of the Constitution.
I mean, there was a time in US history when a constitutional amendment which included the line "No person shall be [...] deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" was used to argue a pro-slavery position...

ive followed it distantly, mainly because as you say its moving so slowly. but i have a high tolerance for stalling, after reading corporate case law going back a century where the corporation just stalls until someone doesnt have the resources to fight anymore. thats sadly too common. doing it against the govt tho, bold strategy cotton.

lmao

But by the same token of denying the antecedent you mentioned, that language does no more to say the president is not immune than it does to not say he's immune. If you can follow all those negatives
By any reasonable imagination, the strongest claim to executive immunity doesn't stem from the mere existence of impeachment, it extends from the reason why impeachment exists as a political recourse- because the unitary executive represents the ultimate enforcer of laws and congress is meant to be given a safety valve in case they find an executive repugnant, a means to remove that power over the law he holds and thus hold him accountable. Trump doesn't have executive privilege because he can be impeached to remove it, he has executive privilege because he's the whole of a branch of government and any attempt to curtail his plenary powers and deliberative process would infringe on the separation of powers.

The founders never thought or cared about this truly inane concept of how personal vengeance could be carried out against an individual once they are outside of government. They cared about the balance of powers in a democracy and who actually gets to pull the levers. It matters how a president is chosen and what their powers are and how those powers can be removed, its a true irrelevancy how they could be punished after resigning or sanctions applied to them. The constitution simply wasn't written with such pettiness in mind. Its clear that a president has to hold immunity while in office, for their official acts, which could be stripped by a successful impeachment, because otherwise the separation of powers just doesn't work, and that's how its written. But the question of how executive powers carry into a post presidency and what lens they could be viewed from, particularly with a personal vendetta in mind- its just a completely uncharted grey area of law. The kind that never should be tested in a reasonable and functional democracy. January 6th and the ballot removal cases weren't the first test of this, raiding Mar-a-Lago over Trump's documents was. There's no precedent for how claims of implicit presidential classification powers are exercised or rescinded, nothing to stop Trump from claiming he implicitly declassified anything he took home and nothing to explicitly refute that from Biden and no precedent to guide us through that grey area. Because this kind of shit never should be put in a courtroom in the first place, because its insanely petty and tyrannical.

It seems reasonable to me that the guiding principles of any court trying to resolve these cases should be to favor the functional separation of powers without creating some major new avenue for one embittered branch of government to infringe on another- and for any case in a grey area where no settled law exists, they must answer that no criminal sanction can exist in overly vague or unprecedented law, because prosecutors making shit up as they go along is the antithesis of the 5th amendment.

Dude, when you have to rest your argument on "well, it doesn't say he can be charged!" you need to just sit down.

It does. That's what laws are. That is literally the thing laws do. They say you can be charged.

A president trying to use his position for personal vendettas was exactly the kind of thing the founders envisioned. They explicitly envisioned a tyrannical ruler that would try to retain power. It was an explicit concern they had with the position and why there were so many that were against having a single executive.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Jan 11 2024 07:04pm

The basic premise of course has to be that everyone (including ex-presidents) is liable before the law UNLESS explicitly stated otherwise. This is implied by "rule of law" itself. For prosecution to be possible, the Constitution doesn't need to explicitly state that the president, or ex-president, is not immune - all it needs to do is not state that he is immune.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 11 2024 08:13pm