ArbitraryValue

Do you remember how prisoners were kept in Guantanamo Bay, even after they were no longer suspected of any wrongdoing, simply because there wasn't a country that would both accept them and treat them in accordance with US law? Many of those prisoners ended up nowhere near where they came from.

Some countries refuse to accept deportees. Some countries are so likely to mistreat deportees that sending them to those countries is illegal. Some countries simply don't exist anymore.

"Obligatory charity." Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

The computer that controlled all the doors refused to open any of them, including the door to the room in which it was physically located.

It wasn't quite HAL 9000 because doors could still be opened from the inside, but control over the computer was regained only with the help of a locksmith.

No, not the bees. My eyes!

Or so I've heard...

Bezos looks pretty good for a man his age.

Built to fail? The Constitution worked, more or less, for over 237 years and 44 different presidents. It hasn't even failed yet now, although it is in a lot of danger.

It's the job of Congress to stop the President from doing this, via impeachment. However, in a democracy the people get to choose their leaders and if the people elect not just a man like Trump to be President but also a majority in Congress to support him almost unconditionally, then the people get what they voted for.

Even now, Republicans in Congress fear that they will not be re-elected if they oppose Trump. Thus they're still carrying out the will of the people.

That's a good point, and I suppose that someone sympathetic to Trump might think that he was being unfairly prosecuted after other presidents hadn't been.

I disagree with your implication that a former president should always be punished for having broken the law. The rules do need to be different for presidents than for ordinary people.

A prince, when by some urgent circumstance or some impetuous and unforeseen accident that very much concerns his state, compelled to forfeit his word and break his faith, or otherwise forced from his ordinary duty, ought to attribute this necessity to a lash of the divine rod: vice it is not, for he has given up his own reason to a more universal and more powerful reason; but certainly ’tis a misfortune: so that if any one should ask me what remedy? “None,” say I, “if he were really racked between these two extremes: 'Let him see to it that it be not a loophole for perjury that he seeks.' He must do it: but if he did it without regret, if it did not weigh on him to do it, ’tis a sign his conscience is in a sorry condition."

Montaigne' Essays, book 3 chapter 1

It's one thing to break a law with the belief (perhaps unjustified) that doing so is necessary for the good of the nation and quite another to do to because power protects you from deserved punishment, but how can the law itself make this distinction?

Even the Trump appointees seem like the sort of people who would want to defend the rule of law at least to preserve their own (and therefore the court's) power, so I wonder how each of the six "conservative" judges was convinced to rule the way that he or she did. I don't imagine all of them doing it for the same reason. Maybe some were rewarded for their votes and others wanted to see Trump wreck things (Alito and his flag come to mind) but did some actually think that it was a good idea or the correct legal decision?

Yeah but he also said to love each other, and people quickly realized that he was wrong.