My training and profession was municipal planning. Outside of undergraduate classes in Con Law and Civil Liberties fifty years ago, my legal knowledge danced around zoning and planning issues. So did some research and found you to be correct, as usual. The president does have sovereign immunity. I do have a question though. Is that immunity limited to official acts?
“Trump appealed that ruling, arguing to the D.C. Circuit that virtually all of his speech on any matter of public import as president fell within the “outer perimeter” of immunity from civil suit, per earlier Supreme Court precedents on the issue.”
This is the circularity/tautology they are trying to achieve:
Whenever the POTUS speaks on matters of public import, it is automatically within his official duties and therefore he is immune from civil suit for what he said.
And
Whenever the POTUS speaks about ANYTHING, that makes it a matter of public import.
ERGO
POTUS can say anything he wants, no matter how abusive and tortious or unrelated to governing the country and running the executive branch, and is immune from civil suit for having said it.
If it was part of something presidential, possibly. But that would be a criminal case, which the current lawsuit is not. Nobody has ever previously tested presidential immunity as a defense in an actual criminal case.
False. With the monarchy, the king and government were one and the same. No daylight between them. While it is true that the GQP MAGAt KKKult desperately wants to achieve that with the fabricated, cockamamee Southern Strategy nonsense of the unitary executive theory, this decision itself illustrates the difference in that the Court appears to be saying that the POTUS only enjoys such immunity when he is acting in his official capacity, making room for the fact that there are times when POTUS is not acting in his official capacity, meaning that POTUS and the gov’t are not one and the same. There is daylight between the two.
ETA: This, of course, is setting aside the likelihood that CJ Colorblind and the Fascist Five will eviscerate the entire concept in furtherance of their Southern Strategy project.
Neither am I a fan of Hamas. For the record, and given history, I think Jews need a state of their own. That said, both sides have bloody hands, neither are clean.
One thing that bothers me greatly is that Israel is punishing an entire population for the actions of a small subset. I would have hoped that Israel, of all countries, would be keenly and deeply sensitive to itself imposing collective punishment.
Sure, they can file their suit the first Tuesday in November, 2024 and get relief by the end of the night when the vote out every damn Republican they can. That should send a shiver down the spines of the eighth circuit and other courts that are doing all they can to deny individual Americans access to the Federal Courts.
There has been a drift to requiring “standing” in more and more cases and continuingly defining “standing” tighter and tighter so only the “right” people can have access to Federal Courts.
Yes, we don’t define sovereign immunity as being the same as royal immunity. The immunity is limited to his official acts, but sadly this guy is claiming that overthrowing the constitution is an officiial act. So far he hasn’t had any success with that claim.
Apparently the Israeli game plan is to overlay a checkboard of zones in Gaza. Residents in a given targeted zone will have about 10 minutes’ warning before the zone is bombed. If they don’t get out in time, or if communications are down and they don’t get word in time, then Israel is absolved and the dead civilians are declared to be at fault for their own deaths,
Try texting in Gaza. And when standing in rubble how does one tell where a safe zone is? Also shrapnel from exploding ordinance does not observe “safe zones”. Neither do bullets. It’s like asking a virus to not infect you. A virus lacks ears, eyes and a functioning way to think. Seems Israel missed this point. Gonna be a lotta dead innocent folks who may not have a working phone because of no way to power it. Cut electricity and ask folk to power up their phones just is not logical.
Neither Hamas nor Israel are in any way innocent in this war.
Hamas is forcing the situation by using civilian infrastructure to hide behind, using the civilian population as human shields. The deaths of civilians in Gaza would be on a much smaller scale if they were not doing this.
Both sides are to blame for the civilian deaths, but not equally in my view. It didn’t have to happen this way.