[hn_throwaway_99]

One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is to have laws that are virtually impossible to not break.

I hope this gets tested in court and declared unconstitutional for being overly vague and arbitrary. For example, Montana used to have some maximum speed limits that were just "reasonable and prudent", but they were eventually rejected by courts as being too vague (what's prudent to you may not be prudent to someone else). This is similar, in that the FAA has a no fly zone but they don't actually publish what it is.

Catch-22 and 1984 weren't supposed to be instruction manuals.

[gtowey]

> I hope this gets tested in court and declared unconstitutional

The rule of law has left the building. The SC is willing to rubber-stamp nearly anything right now.

Waiting and hoping for common sense to prevail is what allows authoritarian regimes to bulldoze through existing laws and norms. Even if the courts were an avenue for redress, they are being overwhelmed by the daily barrage of new illegal and unconstitutional actions. Once the courts get around to addressing these cases, the damage has been done and the precedent has been set.

[cosmicgadget]

Well, as an alternative to rubber stamping it they can overturn any injunctions and let him have eighteen months of moving drone bubbles until the issue has made its way through the lower courts.

See also Alito's outrage about deportations being fast tracked to SCOTUS.

[no_wizard]

Anything but an administration being able to manipulate the Fed, it seems. Most legal experts believe that will be a hard strike down on the administration

[scoofy]

If you think the SCOTUS has been arbitrarily rubber stamping the administration's goals, you haven't been paying attention. I'll fully agree with you it appears to have been fairly partisan, but less than a month again they blocked the administration from deploying the national guard to states:

>In one of its most consequential rulings of the year, just before breaking for the holidays last week the Supreme Court held that President Trump acted improperly in federalizing the National Guard in Illinois and in activating troops across the state. Although the case centered on the administration’s deployments in Chicago, the court’s ruling suggests that Trump’s actions in Los Angeles and Portland were likewise illegal.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-12-30/supreme-cou...

[bonsai_spool]

> they blocked the administration from deploying the national guard to states

That is not what the decision stated - there was even a quote from a justice saying that the administration could easily attain the same result with a different legal mechanism, all but encouraging such a change in behavior.

Edit: the ‘improperly’ portion of your quote is the operative term

[scoofy]

Yes, and my point is exactly that a rubber stamping SCOTUS would have literally allowed it even though it was "improper." That's what rubber stamping means.

[overfeed]

"Change this sentence, change the date and resubmit" is rubber-stamping - they just require a big-enough fig-leaf and are bold enough to publicly hint at the parameters of the fig-leaf they will accept.

[lotsofpulp]

But they also said the president can’t be punished for doing illegal things, so what difference does it make?

[tasty_freeze]

Trump claimed repeatedly and vigorously that whatever the President does is by definition legal. He also repeatedly and vigorously claimed that Obama had broken the law by spying on then-candidate Trump in 2016. I don't know if he himself noticed the contradiction but blustered on anwway or was too dense to notice.

[BTW, Trump wasn't spied on -- Russian assets were spied on and it turned out that some of those communications were with Trump's team. There are ~100 pages of these communications captured in the Mueller report. ]

[cosmicgadget]

Talking out of both sides of his mouth is kind of a daily thing at this point. But he's had a lawyer advocate the immunity point before the Supreme Court while he hasn't attempted to prosecute Obama.

[derektank]

They made that ruling while Biden was president. It seems hard to call that an example of rubber stamping for an administration that did not exist yet.

John Roberts and other conservative members of the court do have an ideological commitment to the Unitary Executive Theory of the presidency (foolishly, in my view) but this has the potential to benefit both Democratic and Republican presidents.

[avidiax]

That ruling[1] is even worse than rubber stamping. It's saying that no stamp is needed at all.

> It seems hard to call that an example of rubber stamping for an administration that did not exist yet.

The Trump administration absolutely did exist, both in the past and the present (waiting in the wings) in July 2024 when the ruling was issued.

While it's true that all past and future presidents are affected by the ruling, there's exactly one former president and presidential candidate at that time that was likely to face criminal charges for actions taken while in office, in either first or second terms.

It's a bit much to claim that the ruling doesn't have at least the appearance of benefiting Trump exclusively, especially given the timing. The ruling caused many of Trump's trials to be delayed to be effectively concurrent with the 2024 election.

We went 235 years without clarifying that presidents had presumptive immunity; all previous presidents (even Trump) acted under the presumption that prosecution for official acts might be unlikely but was possible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States

[CamperBob2]

And they will be perfectly happy to walk it back when (or if) a Democrat is elected president in the future. Stare decisis is no longer a thing with this bunch.

[expedition32]

This is all highly commical considering the US has black bagged a foreign president.

That is going to be the court case of the century by the way. Maduro will have lawyers begging to represent him. It will be America on trial and I'm looking forward to the Trump administration absolutely bungling it.

[free_bip]

What benefit does it allow for, other than the ability to turn the country into a dictatorship in a matter of hours with a single phone call?

For anyone unaware, one of the main criticisms of that ruling is that the president commanding the military is always considered an official act, and this ruling means the president enjoys "absolute immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate such as the pardon, command of the military, execution of laws, or control of the executive branch."[0]

The ruling made no carveouts or exceptions for blatantly illegal orders. The president could unilaterally eject or kill any member of opposing political parties and future administrations (if there are any) would be completely unable to legally hold them accountable for their heinous crimes.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States

[derektank]

The benefit is that the president is not subject to retaliatory lawsuits (similar to what the Trump administration is now doing against e.g. James Comey, et al), the threat of which might prevent them from performing their duties effectively while in office.

I’m sympathetic to your concerns, agree that it was a poor ruling, and frankly think we need a constitutional amendment to address the excessive power the presidency has, but the justices aren’t making these rulings without having a real, justifiable rationale behind them and they aren’t making these rulings because they’re in the tank for Donald Trump (Justice Alito excepted)

[halfmatthalfcat]

That’s not what they ruled.

[seattle_spring]

How so? The ruling was that he had full immunity during "presidential duties", which has many times been interpreted by the SC as "anything he wants to do while president."

[fzeroracer]

And notably, before any further disagreement pops up the other dissenting judges literally said as much. The relevant quote:

"When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today."

[terminalshort]

> The ruling was that he had full immunity during "presidential duties"

Yes. This was basically agreed upon before that the president has legal immunity for exercising his constitutional powers, but was never explicitly ruled on by the court. If the president does something outside his legal authority, then that isn't his presidential duty, and he can be punished.

> which has many times been interpreted by the SC as "anything he wants to do while president."

This part is just false

[wtfwhateven]

It is what they ruled. What do you gain from lying about this?

[yieldcrv]

that perspective is not backed by data, and the administration doesn't appeal everything

very few supreme court cases make it to headline news, and the ones that do are the ones you're thinking about it. those are the ones split by ideological lines, which are less than 10% of what SCOTUS rules on. the government loses many cases unanimously as well. there are some unsigned opinions that do punt things back to lower courts that may be in the government's favor, or not.

all to say, its more nuanced than that. the trend, as a last and compromised bulwark, is there, but that's not how the court consistently behaves.

[penultimatename]

This is literally backed by data. 21 out of 25 emergency docker cases taken up with the Supreme Court were ruled in the Trump administration’s favor. Only one of the cases against the administration was unanimous.

At the appellate level, Trump appointed judges vote in favor of his policies at a substantially higher rate than any previous president at 92% of cases.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/01/looking-back-at-2025-the-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/politics/trumps-appeal...

[ggggffggggg]

And the emergency docket is exactly where one should look for these very recent very blatantly illegal actions and lawsuits aiming to counter them.

So yes the data is in, and yes it’s bad, and emphatically yes it’s exactly what this thread is saying. In case anyone reading in good faith was wondering.

[atonse]

Is there a reason you’re only choosing the emergency docket in your sample size though?

[acdha]

The emergency docket is a preferred method for blatant partisanship because it lets them immediately prevent lower courts from stopping the administration but doesn’t require them to set a binding precedent or even explain the ruling. If it looks like they might be losing power, suddenly those “emergency” decisions which were subsequently back-burnered can be dropped to prevent a Democrat from using the same powers.

[mothballed]

The gun free school zone act has been upheld even though you could be within 1000 ft of one with no real indication there is one there. Supposedly you can only be convicted for doing it knowingly, but IIRC knowingly has been interpreted to mean as little as you live near the area so reasonably should have known.

Also note, i.e. stuff like statutory rape has been upheld even in cases where the perpetrator in all good faith thought the victim was 18+, the victim initiated selling the services, and the victim provided fake ID showing they were 18+.

So there is not necessarily any need for mens rea in the US legal system.

[hn_throwaway_99]

But your examples are markedly different to me. Yes, those examples do put the onus on the individual to ensure there are no schools around or that an individual is of legal age, but those are at least discoverable things - school locations are public info, and I think for any adult it's not that difficult to steer clear of anyone who looks mildly close to underage.

But in this instance, the movements of ICE are specifically hidden by the government - heck, they've even threatened to prosecute people who publish this information!! It is the literal definition of a Catch-22.

[jjav]

School buildings don't randomly and secretly move around all the time.

So while there isn't a line drawn on the ground, it's completely different.

[UncleEntity]

>> Also note, i.e. stuff like statutory rape has been upheld even in cases where the perpetrator in all good faith thought the victim was 18+, the victim initiated selling the services, and the victim provided fake ID showing they were 18+.

You had me up to the "selling the services" part.

If you are 'engaging' with someone in a criminal enterprise it's probably reasonable to assume they might misrepresent certain facts to make the sale.

[gcanyon]

One time I was racing across the country in a moving van because my wife was injured. The truck was speed-governed to 75 mph, which I was sitting at for most of the trip. I have a picture of the back of a school bus that handily passed me by on highway 90 :-)

[assaddayinh]

Speed limits are biology and physics derived. The eye has a max speed, over which it starts to rewrite the history of what you saw. Everytime you have been "frozzen in fear" the first few milliseconds are just the eye rewriting the logs.

So you take that the saccade speed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade) + speed of visual buffer reaction + reasonable time to break and you get a max speed for that.

Same goes when you have two points of attention, like traffic in front of you and merging traffic, the speed gets reduced to compensate.

[jjk166]

Weird that when you're in Nevada the eye moves fast enough for you to react when going at 80 mph but in Arizona your eyes can only move fast enough for 75 mph, and in California no ones eyes move fast enough to react over 70 mph.