From betraying Ukraine and dispatching masked agents who killed Americans to deporting US citizens and pulling out of accords controlling climate change and Iranian nuclear weapons, the list of Donald Trump’s abuses is long and growing still longer, seemingly by the day.
Looking back decades from now, historians will see that at the top of this shameful list is Trump’s utter abuse of his pardon power. It started on the first day of his second term, when he pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists who, on 6 January 2021, had stormed the US Capitol.
More recently, as documented in astonishing accounts by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and 60 Minutes, Trump has overseen a robust pardons market in which friends or relatives of criminals offer to pay millions for presidential clemency.
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“error” yah right
Back then, politicians were assumed to be honorable Gentlemen. This ended a long time ago, but Trump goes the extra mile to prove he is anything but.
Well yes, but also the concept of honour back then was dictated largely by rich slave owners. So…
I’d trust the honor of a slaveowner over the proud cruelty we have now. It’s not like the fascists are less racist.
That may be, but it’s dangerous to guess at a distance. And time is a distance all its own
I really have no idea why they did they, I agree we should get rid of presidential pardoning power. We should have gotten rid of it after Nixon.
Should have gotten rid of it after the civil war
Along with tariffs and other dictator power, but even worse is the fools elected him twice with all the knowledge available to all and they still fail the test again! That’s bad choices and willful ignorance and will keep regressing each time and where they make the bad choices.
But how do we deal with the other side after all of this? They’ve clearly been manipulated by Fox News and social media algorithms. They think they’re up-to-date with current events. The media manipulation in the US is staggering. I don’t see how we move forward without tearing everything down. It’s rotten from the inside out.
The only option is to tear it all down. Personally I say start with deregulation of the radio frequencies to hopefully drown out talk radio (and iHeartRadio) under a ride of not quite pirate stations. This would at least stop folks from listening to low tier talk radio while driving since I doubt any of them besides Coast to Coast will be able to maintain.
From there its a bit harder cause just deregulating something and waiting for it to die isn’t quite an option. But you could do a trust bust followed by simply disbanding cable TV to get rid of Fox.
Internet is both harder and easier in that you really only need to regulate how the algorithms work and maybe cave in Facebook and their subsidiaries. At least in theory, maybe throw in some indepth investigations on where right wing influencers are getting their money since it came out the ruskies were bankrolling a bunch awhile back. But overall attacking their funding structure is probably the best method, maybe see about shit canning TPUSA and similar orgs due to obviously skirting regulatory laws.
I hope they will tighten up and amend any loopholes that got them into this mess in the first place.
agreed, President also should have nothing to do with DOJ / appointing the AG. Big mistake.
Perhaps the pardon should be a 2/3 vote of congress instead, just to preserve the check on the judiciary
They made error in giving him so much power in general. It should never be concentrated in the hands of one guy
The main issue is buying the supreme Court. The president shouldn’t be choosing justices…
A normal SCOTUS, and Trump is already in jail
yeah, no shit.
I think part of the problem with pardon power is that it can be freely done.
I think a president should nominate someone for pardoning, then congress critters have to give a 51% vote in favor of pardoning for it to ultimately take effect. 30 days have to pass during the nomination period for them to review the pardon, the pardon to be public knowledge, and congress critters having their name attached to their vote. Particular crimes should be noted for the pardoning, and a pardon doesn’t void new infractions of the same kind of crime.
A second 30 day direct voting period then takes place to confirm the pardon. The general public sends in a vote, based on all voters who send in a ballot. By default in this stage, the pardon passes unless 51% of the ballots reject the pardon.
To sum up:
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1a: A president nominates a person for pardon for specific crimes at the time of the pardon.
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1b: The nominated for pardoning must be considered a flight risk, and prevented from free international travel during the review stages.
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2: After 30 days of review, 51% of congress must decide whether to approve of the pardon, attaching their name to the vote.
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3a: Following approval by the congressional voting period, direct voters from the public can send in ballots to cancel the pardon. 51% of voters who submit a ballot must agree to cancel the pardon. This window lasts 30 days.
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3b: Direct voters can choose to automatically prevent the leader from nominating pardons. 51% of the voters have to agree to remove the pardoning power. This state lasts for the current term of the leader. If this leader is elected again, a ballot is sent out to ask whether their pardoning privilege is restored for their new term.
IMO, the important part of a pardon is for national security purposes - but right now, it is too easy to pardon bad actors in the name of factional forgiveness or bribes.
your “to sum up” section is longer than the rest of your comment
Chelsea Manning wouldn’t have gotten a pardon if you all had implemented that. A lot of terrible people would still have gotten pardons. Your congress is an applause machine right now
This sounds like the Kamala Harris pardon plan. Does it include means testing and tax rebates?
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The issue is not the pardon power. The issue is the other branches of government failing to act to restrain the President.
The whole balance of powers works best when all parties act with integrity. If one of the beaches act in bad faith, the other branches must intervene to constrain the party and mitigate the damage.
What has happened is that both Congress and the Judiciary are acquiescing to claims of executive power and we can all see the results.
Balance of powers has never really worked. Congress will seldom impeach a president from their own party. Two party system has completely effed the US.
The founders never would have imagined something like Unitary Executive Theory would ever take off, as they assumed that each branch would be too selfish to willingly diminish their own power by handing it over to another branch.
I agree. The pardon is a powerful tool with very real and valid uses, but it only works if the rest of the government is working
The founders couldn’t imagine a president making literally everyone in their party’s congress a scared little bitch.
Or they couldn’t imagine a populace that would elect Trump.
The founders actually didn’t trust the populace with electing the President. That’s the original reason why the Electoral College exists. Back then, State Legislatures would choose electors, and they would all meet to choose the President.
So I would argue the opposite, they did imagine a populace that would elect someone like Trump, and deliberately designed a system that would ignore them.
Are you fucking kidding me?
In many ways they were far, far worse than Trump. And proud of it.
How many Mulatto bastards did Jefferson sire, again?
His pardons are as legitimate as his election fraud claims. The rest of the government should treating it with similar disdain
There are not really any legal limits on Trump’s pardon power, so what Trump is doing there is technically within the law. In that sense it is quite different from Trump’s fraudulent election fraud claims.
14A3 disqualifies him. He wasn’t legally appointed.
The problem is enforcing it and getting it legally recognized that nothing he did in the second term had legal force, and nothing had immunity.
Which is objectively true. But also kinda besides the point.
If the presidency gets nullified due to always having been disqualified, the pardon power nullifies. So it’s to the point.
This is it exactly. Our friendly local Lemmy user is sharper than a Guardian columnist.
Which does not surprise me.
To expect all parties to act with integrity is naive, expect all parties to act maliciously and with incompetence and design the system to cope that way.
To be able to override judges and juries, that’s a true horror that compromises the legal system, or if you must, at least have it that pardons are only able to be recommended by the President and 75% of Congress must also agree.
They made a lot of grave errors. Y’all should scrap the constitution and write a new one
I don’t want these fuckers anywhere near the Constitution. I guarantee they will establish a religion and probably eliminate presidential term limits.
Thomas Jefferson proposed exactly that, but other founders did not heed his advice.
One of my greatest personal fears is that a Constitutional Convention will be used to shove Christianity down our throats. That said, failure to regulate churches has resulted in a group of conservative churches that preach pretty much the opposite of what Jesus said. The document was a series of compromises, far from perfect. The compromise over keeping the government out of religion was to keep the peace and avoid sectarian warfare. We’re seeing some hints of that as a result of the Talarico vs Paxton race in Texas.
I mean itnisnt a holy document like Americans think it is. Itnis old and at least needs to be updatedeted.
It needs clarified in some places, yes. But I do not want to give Republicans a blank check to rewrite the Constitution. I guarantee they will establish a religion and criminalize abortion at the very, very least.
The constitution worked pretty well for some time, but that time is over.
We’ve been overdue for a constitutional convention for a rewrite suitable today (not 1776) for decades, but now that “dollars are free speech” and “corporations are people”, that won’t be a legal option.
- Corporations don’t want a constitutional convention.
- Our politicians require “donations” to get reelected.
- To get those “donations” they do what their “donors” want.
- Their “donors” want them to cut taxes and wages.
- The voters by and large therefore have low wages, and can’t “donate” enough to influence.
- So the “donors” control all policy, and will until it collapses in on itself
- Pardons are the least of our worries
- Good luck getting them to throw out their “get out of jail free” card
I’d love to be wrong, please let me be wrong
Yeah, the “new Constitution” would be a feeding frenzy and we may as well get called “Free Corporations of America” or something, which is what we really revolted from England: the oligarchs in mainland England had sway over the King and it ignored the colonies until we were overtaxed and hardly represented.
You had rich white dudes who didn’t want to pay taxes. Oh…
The solution is to make America decline in power enough that its politicians aren’t worth buying.
Narrator: He wasn’t wrong.
They expected people to conduct themselves as adults and not vote in a piece of shit.
Watching US coverage of their politics, it’s really amazing seeing people being interviewed in their 40’s that act like teenagers still.
America has a real maturity problem it seems to me.
They should’ve listened to Alexander Hamilton who also factored in “human nature.” So, they should’ve imagined Idiocracy and how to navigate it amicably?
This is already a pretty old poster by van Kooten en de Bie. It says: If only the Indians had had a tougher immigration policy then America wouldn’t have been such a big mess right now.Britain invaded and enslaved Indians, not USA.
But the poster doesn’t mention who was doing the immigrating anyway? What is your counterpoint against exactly?
It was an attempt at a silly joke that didn’t land. No real counter to anything.
Really where not all the famous battles and the Indian wars done by america? Custard and all those people.
/wooooosh
(insert racist dot and feather joke here) so how about that Gay of Hormuz? Is it still pretending to be Strait?
Americans: is there anything stopping the next president from abolishing the pardon and retroactively nullifying any existing pardons?
The President does not (yet) have the power to amend the Constitution.
The pardon power is directly in the Constitution. It would take an amendment to modify it. Amendments are hard to do, they need 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of States on board.
And if you want Conservatives to get on board, you get a Liberal to start abusing it. But most Liberals have too much integrity to do that…
… So, maybe Gavin really is the man for the moment!
You can void a pardon that wasn’t legally issued.
14A3 disqualified Trump from reelection. Now you just need to get that enforced and even his pardons in the second term can be eradicated
Biden pardoned his son and a bunch of other people and the Republicans didn’t start going after the pardon power. So I don’t think they care even if a democrat misuses it.
Was it a misuse? I could totally see Trump and co going after the Bidens, for whatever.
They tried and Trump got real mad about it because he wanted to drag them through the courts and with the pardon the courts wouldn’t comply
Well, when the cons are questioning things like donnie having a third term, I think some Democrats should step into the WH and test it out. Arrest donnie and pals, and make them fight it out in the courts. Maybe deport them to CECOT in the interim and let them fight to have them brought back here.
I mean, that’s a broad question. Personally? Practically? Politically? Constitutionally?
Legally-speaking, this is not something the President can unilaterally do. Theoretically they could amend the Constitution to accomplish the former and allow for the latter, but the chances they could actually do so are next to nil.
Could a President do it anyway? Well, maybe… It seems very unlikely that this would survive public scrutiny, and even the corruption-captured Courts would have a very difficult time trying to justify any of it under existing frameworks.
The “retroactively” part would probably be a particularly difficult hurdle. The US Constitution has protections against Ex Post Facto criminalization, and revocation of pardons would almost certainly violate that principle. Ditching that protection would be wildly unpopular, since it would allow for things like passing a law that would, for example, having ever received an abortion in the past. Or, having ever so much as touched a firearm.
Nobody is going to give up their super powers
