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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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.
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.
edit: On second thought, seeing as half of them didn’t know if they wanted an elected representative or a king to rule their new nation, maybe the outcome was all too predictable even back then. Apparently some people, even wise and intelligent people, tend to gravitate towards the mindset that the powerful deserve to rule and the meek deserve to be ruled over as a sort of natural order.
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.
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
I agree it’s you generally. Do they have a specific mechanism for controlling the pardon? Or would they just have to fall back on unpacking and removing the president? Because if that’s the only solution, sure it exists, but yeah the pardon power itself could probably use some work.
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 be 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.