[ctrlp]

That matters little. It's a category error. People say things like "no one is above the law" but that isn't true. Not because of corruption, but because of the nature of politics. Law is downstream from politics and therefore in a very real sense subservient to it. To apply the law to political figures can never be done in a clean or unambiguous way, since it will always support the suspicion of lawfare, which degrades confidence in the law for the rest of us. To preserve the law for the common stock, we can't use law against political figures without debasing the currency of law. It is also the case that trying to constrain political figures using the law is anti-democratic. If the will of the people can be overruled by the shrewd use of legal challenges then you have a juristocracy, not a democracy. The legal system can and will be abused when it is used politically.

Not only is it a category error, it is undesireable. Let them fight it out in the special realm of politics and leave our legal systems alone so we can enjoy their benefits.

[GrinningFool]

This is either clever satire or seems to be saying a politician should be able to shoot somebody on 5th avenue without legal consequence.

[pqtyw]

Well as long as he declares that it's an "official act" he is certainly able to do that perfectly legally.

Given that the precedent is that the president can arbitrarily decide that the country is in a permanent state of national emergency and suspend the constitution indefinitely (which is literally what happened with the tariffs) that seems quite reasonable.

[ctrlp]

It depends on the politician. And not whether they should but whether they could. That's the critical distinction. One that gets lost when ignorantly amplifying misquotes. The actual quote from Trump was that he could do so and not lose votes. About that he was correct. QED.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Law is downstream from politics and therefore in a very real sense subservient to it. To apply the law to political figures can never be done in a clean or unambiguous way

This is untrue anywhere that has the rule of law. (One can run a system where the law is secondary to politics. But it doesn't have the benefits of rule of law.)

> To preserve the law for the common stock, we can't use law against political figures without debasing the currency of law

The entire history of the rule of law runs in the opposite direction. Prosecuting current and former politicians strengthens the rule of law. What it weakens, temporarily, is stability. You need strong institutions to take on and survive prosecuting a former politican, particularly a former head of state.

> If the will of the people can be overruled by the shrewd use of legal challenges then you have a juristocracy, not a democracy

You have a republic. Pure democracy doesn't work.

> legal system can and will be abused when it is used politically

Which is exactly what shielding politicians from prosecution causes.

The Roman Republic had this flaw. One of the perks of magistracy was immunity from prosecution. This not only encouraged corruption, it incentivised lawbreaking during office for politcal advantage and ultimately led to the downfall of the Republic when expiring politicians chose violence over losing immunity.

[ctrlp]

There is no such thing as the "rule of law." It is a political myth useful as an organizing principle for regime change or as a legitimizing myth for an established political class seeking stability, but that doesn't make Law sovereign. Political Will (in the form of those who control institutions) rules and makes the laws. The laws are "parchment barriers" if there is no political will with the force to impose laws.

It is 100% false that prosecuting current and former politicians strengthens law when we're talking above a certain low threshold of corruption. In those cases, it's up to the ruling class to police its own by using the legal code against low-level political figures and officials. The Chinese Communist Party operates this way more overtly but same principle. The incentive to do so is to strengthen the legitimacy of that ruling class, not because the law says you must.

According to the Law, you and I are committing "Three Felonies a Day". If the law were en vigueur then you and I and everyone else would be prosecutable 1984-style. It's at the whim of The Prosecutor to decide whether or not to pursue. Sound good to you? Me neither. The only thing stopping that is politics. When the political will is on the side of prosecution, then there will be prosecutions. We saw this with some heavy-handedness during the early days of the GWOT, 2020, Covid, hate speech legislation, many such cases.

The point being, interpretation of laws is a point of political conflict, often very sharp-elbowed. Even in the cases where laws are unambiguously stated (rare), there's still interpretation of the evidence, which doesn't happen in a political vacuum. Who would disagree?

You don't have to look far in history to see the abuse of the legal system in politics. Watergate is a prime example. Uninformed people think Nixon committed crimes and had to go. Anyone who spends just a little time looking at the details of that episode understands it as a political coup executed using lawfare. Whatever you think of Nixon's politics, the facts support that he was taken down by the anti-communist hawks in the defense establishment, largely in consequence of his opening up China. (The reasons were anti-USSR but given that China subsequently went from an agrarian backwater to a global competitor, one could debate whether they were right for the wrong reasons.)

Impeachment as a check/balance was just recently burned in Congress as a political tool to remove a sitting president. Extremely shortsighted. Or perhaps it just exposed it as a paper tiger. I thought it was burned when it was used against Clinton but it was only singed. Now it's completely discredited and no one will take it seriously ever again. That's the effect of abusing the law for political purposes.

What happened to the Roman Republic was overdetermined, but the Senate's threatened political prosecution of Caesar is historically understood to have been a motivating factor in his "crossing the Rubicon". If they hadn't threatened him with lawfare, would the Republic have survived a little longer? Perhaps.

[qwytw]

> To apply the law to political figures can never be done in a clean or unambiguous way

Well yes. That's certainly the case when the system is deeply corrupt and only superficially democratic. They shouldn't be above the law nor their opponents should have the power to abuse it.

[cjfd]

This is not correct. Very many laws live much longer than the term of a politician. They are as much upstream to politics as downstream to it. A correct way of talking about this is as co-equal branches of government. Also 'politics' lumps together the executive and the legislative branch.