Well he did make it so tha tnothing he does in office is illegal, even if it’s illegal.
It’s also legal to give someone money after the fact for a job well done, and it’s definitely not a bribe.
From June 26 2024:
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a federal anti-bribery law does not make it a crime for state and local officials to accept a gratuity for acts that they have already taken.
We live in the stupidest timeline.
In many countries it is legal to promise a tax rebate when you are in office. Many cons (oops, I mean conservatives) use this as voting bait for people with no critical thinking skills, and then turn around and give their corporate masters and billionaires huge tax cuts that make those same voters loose critical services that makw them pay out of pocket.
In other words, “Heres $200 to vote for me so i can make your life way more expensive on a yearly basis through medical care, less regulation, less infrastructure repair”.
This is the same grift, but more blatant and obviously something that would never get fulfilled, which is why the number is so big. Bigger numbers make critical thinking fail harder, especially when times are economically tough. It tends to get cons reelected even when they are not doing well in polls, speaking from the Canadian experience in this.
Step 1: Have money.
Step 2: Rape children (and adults).
Step 3: Put an “R” next to your name.
Congrats, you are now immune from consequences.
Law means nothing in a coup
They won’t even let you stand outside a polling place and hand out water bottles to people waiting in line.
If you’re a Dem. Saw Maga groups outside our local voting polls last election. They were cooking and handing out water.
The law only matters to us poor folks. It isn’t applied to the rich.
If no one prosecuted you for it, it might as well be.
Technically, the equivalent would be you standing outside a polling place with a sign saying “I will give every adult in the area $500 if Candidate X wins”.
Ostensibly, you could just be lying (just like Trump) - and that would probably be covered under your 1st Amendment rights.
It’s stupid, but there is enough of a disconnect between action and reward that it might skirt past.
No, that’s not how that works.
18 U.S.C. § 597 - U.S. Code - Unannotated Title 18. Crimes and Criminal Procedure § 597.
Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and
Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
“I will give you money if you vote for me”
Is different from
“I will give everyone money if I win”
The first is paying someone to vote and is outlawed by the law you cited. The second has a disconnect between the money and the vote. Everyone gets the money, even those that voted for the other guy. Thus it might be legal.
Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate;
“I will give everyone money if I win” is offering money to people for voting. Voting for the candidate is implied, yes, but offering to pay everyone is still offering money to people for voting.
Sounds to me like this has to be tried in court (unless it has not already) for a legal president to be made, and thus decided if it is legal or not. IANAL
Oh I’m REALLY playing devil’s advocate on this one
Promising everyone, no exceptions, 5k if you win, is kind of a campaign promise rather than a bribe.
I’m going to shower for 2 hours to get the stench off me now
That seems pretty straightforward. So the law is correct, it’s just useless because the system founded on these laws is broken.
I didn’t realize Ayn Rand’s ghost had a lemmy account.
This isn’t broken at all. Unless you think every form of government social spending should be illegal, then you shouldn’t try to make it a felony for politicians to run for office promising to establish government programs or give people money through acts of Congress. You’re advocating for full on libertarianism.
Though this becomes wishy with politicians/parties. You offering to pay for people’s healthcare costs if they vote for your favourite candidate would probably be illegal, but a candidate promising to institute universal healthcare is just a campaign promise, so this law leaves a very legitimate open question of when something a candidate says stops being a campaign promise and starts being a legally problematic bribe, because ultimately all campaign promises boil down to “vote for me and I will do something good for you/something you like”.
You could very much argue that a candidate promising UBI is effectively not very different from what Trump promised.
I should look forward to Trump getting charged with that, then?
But more seriously, there would be countless lawyers happy to argue that a general statement such as “$500 to every adult in the county if John Smith wins” does not technically break that particular law because it’s not explicitly targeted at any one individual recipient, nor is it contingent on them participating in an election whatsoever.
Just as I’m also sure there would be more than one sympathetic Trump-appointed judge to side with the defendant too.
US laws mean nothing if they aren’t actively being followed.
People in this thread forget that the Supreme Court already gave Trump immunity from prosecution.
Welcome to America
do you have supreme court immunity?
It’s very different. One is “I will give YOU money if you vote for me” and the other is “I will give EVERYONE money if I win”. The main difference is that one is not discriminating against who people voted for. The first is buying votes, the second is a campaign similar to “I will retroactively lower taxes for this year if I win”, which I don’t think anyone would see as problematic but it’s exactly the same outcome as the one you’re finding problem with, i.e. give people money.
It’s a stupid campaign because anyone with half a brain understand that he’s not going to do it and that that money would have to come from someplace else, but it’s still a campaign promise similar to any other promise politicians make to ask you to vote for them.
It’s still illegal; it’s just that nobody will enforce the law against the orange bastard. The motherfucker was literally convicted of 34 felonies and hasn’t paid any fines or faced a minute of jail time, FFS.
He had a whole goddamn sentencing hearing where they sentenced him to nothing. Explicitly.
Was it illegal for Bernie Sanders to campaign on free medical and college?
Rather than tilt and rave let’s approach this from another angle: Trump promised funds from DOGE and balanced budgets on multiple occasions and you’re never going to see any of it. He is a liar.
Was it illegal for Bernie Sanders to campaign on free medical and college?
No because that would have been done through normal policy change and actually a thing an elected official should try and do. What Trump is doing (even if it is a lie) is bribery. It’s not even remotely the same, and it speaks volumes of your character that you would even try and equate them.
Trump’s and Bernie’s plans would both require congress because the president literally has no access to funds without it.
I worry about people spreading these lies because it is in fact a great policy stance.
Your suposition is that the power of the purse still applies here. Trump has operated the executive as a collective slush fund, many times using horrible arguments that fail in court and then proceeding anyways. Also he’s allocated money from military coup projects like Venezuala to funds not under congressional control illegally.
Bernies plan is to first expand Medicare to all ages. Going off Trump’s logic this would be done by directing CMS by executive order to adjust the rates, the treasury department to allocate the necessary trust fund expenditures, the IRS to apply the necessary taxes, and the justice department to aggressively target every single possible violation in the private health insurance industry. Bernie’s actual plan is to use the bully pulpit as intended to pressure congress to act in accordance with those changes ahead of time, completely different. That’s because Trump moves to erode government into the pockets of the rich and Bernie seeks to build it stronger to benefit everyone. Executive overreach expansion has only been applied to benefit the rich effectively where everywhere else it had failed.
The DHS and especially ICE also lost funding and shut down a lot of offices for over a month until the GOP passed a reconciliation bill.
Even if overreach is occuring he is not going to pull 1.5 Trillion Dollars out of his ass.
What a moronic take. Like genuinely.
The guy is a huge troll, I have tagged them thusly and he has continued to live up to that moniker
rofl imagine being the fucking clown pretending free medicsl and college would be a bad thing.
Again: Fucking. Clown.
Americans refuse to apply the law to trump for some reason
Edit: Y’all acting like he’s been POTUS his whole life. Dude is a career conman-rapist-fraudster
No. It’s just moronic to argue that this is or should be illegal. For fuck’s sake, people in this thread are arguing it should be illegal for politicians for run for office promising to establish new government programs or give people money. They’re letting their campist impulses cloud their judgment.
Conservatism is entirely about the laws applying differently to different people. The king is special. The nobles are a little less special. The peasants are trash. The slaves are worse. That’s the conservative world. Hierarchy. So of course they don’t want to apply rules to their chief.
They are worse than children.
I’m unwilling to post the rules for thee quotes anymore because it doesn’t seem to get through to people.
How do you expect that to happen when the fascists own and operate all three branches of government and are hands on with DoJ?
Americans have no choice in the matter, if we’re talking about legal channels.
For real. Like yeah, lemme just waltz my ass on over there and issue a citizens arrest. That will go over splendidly.
All the idiots who say this shit think they would be the one to kill Hitler if they were born in Nazi Germany. There’s a reason it took a foreign military invading to push him to do it himself.
I’ve even heard dipshits say “Well America had a Civil War in the past” as if that war was declared by the people and not their governments and fought by their militaries.
That reason was decided by the Supreme Court
there’s a major error in that the president, according to legal experts, can’t be arrested by anyone but congress and the house, which makes no sense. he should simply be president from a poison at this point.
