The GOP’s outrageous lying has my spouse issuing full-throated growls.
Some claim that lying is part of the political process. While acknowledging that truth, what’s happening now seems different. The Trump led GOP spreads fictions as easily as others butter toast. It doesn’t matter how far their claims stray from facts, truth, or reality. No subject is sacrosanct. If it will win them a vote, they’ll lie about it, and then lie that they lied about it.
My wife offers a solution. President Joe Biden should use the Supreme Court’s newly forged presidential immunity and start having these people making outrageous claims arrested. She doesn’t know what the charges would be; she figures President Biden is president, so he’s immune, right?
Sure, that’s kind of what the Roberts Court said about presidential immunity, leaving it open to interpretation what goes over the line.
We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power requires that a former President have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity. At the current stage of proceedings in this case, however, we need not and do not decide whether that immunity must be absolute, or instead whether a presumptive immunity is sufficient.
My tack is different; I think doing as she suggests would undermine our democracy and weaponize the DOJ in ways that won’t shut down for many election cycles.
She’s willing to take that risk to keep Trump out of the White House. She’s willing to do so, she says, because she does not doubt that is what the Republicans would do.
Michael Seidel, writer 