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Sotomayor: "pretty please Mr. Trump, follow our guidance :( "
This doesn't mean jack shit. SCOTUS does not enforce policy - it interprets it.
So many stories of pundits saying "But but but... Trump cant do that 😡. That goes against established norms and precedent!"
News flash: he can, and he is, and he will. It's as out of touch as someone saying "I think Mueller is still going to bring Donny down!"
You're talking about two different things.
One is the legal side. Legally, you cannot go out in the street and punch the first child you see in the face.
The other side is purely practical. For sure you are capable of punching children, so if you also have the intention of doing it the only thing that remains to be seen is whether anyone is capable of stopping you.
Justice Sotomayor is not claiming that Trump cannot do this practically, she's merely saying that it would be illegal. And sure, it probably won't stop Trump from trying, but as a Justice of the SCOTUS, she's kinda supposed to comment on the legality of stuff.
As for pundits, they should have realized a long time ago that Trump didn't give much of a shit about the legality of things, and focused more on what he is practically capable of doing than what he's legally capable of.
SCOTUS does not enforce policy - it interprets it.
So, in theory, a SCOTUS ruling allows bureaucrats in the various agencies to ignore a Presidential command. But in practice, we've got the Doggy Department stepping in behind the scenes and unhooking any individual disloyal to the President from their security badges and sign-in credentials. Power is being centralized via the mechanism of IT.
This is, incidentally, a strategy Balaji Srinivasan and his friends at Y-Combinator lay out explicitly in "The Network State" which is a favorite book of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
What they're building is a real technical means by which a new kind of technocratic institution can do physically what a judiciary simply orders and hopes is fulfilled. A verdict from Musk has material consequences - access suspended, accounts disabled, money transfers halted - that a judicial appointee cannot physically obstruct.
It’s as out of touch as someone saying “I think Mueller is still going to bring Donny down!”
Mueller laid out the terms by which incoming President Joe Biden could have prosecuted Donald Trump. And Biden's AG Merrick Garland just... didn't do it. This isn't a question of "can" but of "will". Do people in positions of power wish to utilize their authority to change the country?
Elon and Trump are 100% serious about changing the way the federal government functions this time around. President "Nothing will fundamentally change" Biden - the most institutional of the institutionalist Democrats still alive - was not.
I don't even think this is a Donald Trump thing anymore. He's just a vehicle for the Move Fast And Break Things Silicon Valley crowd to take control of the federal bureaucracy. But guys like Srinivasan and Thiel aren't fucking around. They are using the mechanisms of power that the administrations of Biden, Trump, and Obama just kinda sat on. Remove Trump and you'll just get JD Vance who is even more servile and pliant towards the Trillionaire Class.
Again, where there are no consequences, there is no law.
At the most obvious, SCOTUS said that presidents cannot be prosecuted for "official acts."
But never mind that, it doesn't even matter.
Who would prosecute the president for laws they break while in office? The Department of Justice. DoJ has traditionally been well beyond arms' length from the rest of the executive branch, but then, traditionally presidents haven't just blatantly broken the law while in office, either.
So, today, a president who breaks the law while in office just tells "his" DoJ not to prosecute him.
While I desperately want Sotomayor to be right here, she's not. In 2025, presidents are monarchs.