> More commonly, they order things that result in significant loss of life, which could be prosecuted as negligent or reckless homicide.
> Should former presidents be subject to prosecution for those decisions?
Yes! That war crimes have become normal behavior for US Presidents doesn't mean that we now need more legal frameworks for protecting from prosecution of them.
It seems to me that, if we are to actually become a nation of laws and not of men, we need to acknowledge and account for the crimes in office of virtually every president. And if that's too difficult to do, politically speaking, then we simply aren't what we say we are.
> Remember that criminal laws are often extremely broad, and you can use conspiracy and other legal theories to make someone liable who didn’t perform the actual killing.
This is also a huge problem. It seems that many of us walk around unknowingly subject to capricious prosecution for felonies (according to one author, three felonies a day[0]). How can we have equal protection under the law when any of us can be prosecuted at any time, and the matter of which of us are is one of political discretion?
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> What I feel like the dissent misses completely, which is quite ironic given Justice Sotomayor’s history in private practice, is that not having any sort of immunity means trusting every prosecutor in the country
While the dissent is unsatisfying in some ways (including following the trend of exhaustive and distracting analysis of the particular facts of the case instead of sharp focus on the ostensibly simpler constitutional issues), you are mistaken, as the phenomenon you are describing is contemplated at length - 9 pages (13-21) are committed to this analysis [1].
0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6611240-three-felonies-a...
1: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
