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 Constitution assumed that the Congress wouldn’t abdicate all of its power. A unitary executive wouldn’t be possible if Congress stood their ground and said “Nope”.
The Senate is supposed to impeach him but GOP Senators are playing team sports instead of common sense.
The Senate is supposed to impeach him
The House Impeaches.
The Senate convicts.
But you need a supermajority in the Senate, which even the Radical Republicans of the 1870s failed to muster, despite having the half the country under Marshall Law at the time.
The unilateral presidential pardon and veto are both huge mistakes.
That puts far too much power in the hands of one person. Especially in a country that wanted to eliminate a king-like position ruling over them.
That wasn’t a mistake. It was absolutely intentional.
It is vital to understand the early American state as a patronage system and the president as the ultimate patrician through which power flows. If you look at early Plantation society, and the subsequent networks of power that flow from landholders to merchant brokers and from yeomen to their wealthy oligarch neighbors, all of this fits neatly together.
The problem the American Founders saw was with the upstart plebians and landless workers. Pardons and vetos check the power of popular judges and legislators, as intended.
Yep, it all flows together because the thinkers behind the Constitution and the plantation model were post-Enlightenment classicists literally basing their perfect model of society on the Roman Republic.
That is propaganda, they wanted a king, just their kind of king. His name was Washington and he would have been a billionaire adjusted for inflation if he had not died in his sixties. The US was always corrupt from the very start.
Considering the US founders owned slaves, I reckon they were short sighted in many other aspects of what they “founded”.
The Orange Shitstain has proven there are a shit ton of loopholes in the US government.
“error” yah right
No, no, you see there’s a system of checks and balances.
Presidential Pardons are balanced by the 2nd amendment.
They made a lot of grave errors.
And a lot of them were errors of omission. Operating under the assumption that idiots and money wouldn’t undermine the checks and balances or usurp the highest office in the land. They didn’t erect enough barriers to prevent such things.
I was thinking about owning other human beings, as most of them did.
I don’t think US founders ever expected that such a moron would manage to be elected, and use that power for himself.
If you had just overtrown the british crown to be a “no king” republic in that big land you just colonized and emptied from its people, you would expect that no one would ever act like a king here, right? …right?
We need the midterms to allow for a possible reform of the constitution, if it is even still possible…
I don’t think US founders ever expected that such a moron would manage to be elected, and use that power for himself.
Within a single presidency, you had early Americans calling one another idiots, tyrants, and foreign plants. Washington himself wasn’t above suspicion.
Everyone from Patrick Henry to Aaron Burr reviled one another and accused each other of plots to reinstate some kind of monarchy.
We need the midterms to allow for a possible reform of the constitution
That won’t happen. The American system will continue to revert to the 19th century mean, until the bureaucratic mechanisms fail completely.
It’s crazy how they weren’t able to create a completely flawless founding document governing a new nation of 4 million that then grew into 340 million over centuries and became the richest and most powerful country on Earth on the first try.
That is not how any of that worked.
American Exceptionlism is summed up neatly as a continent of stolen land and a legacy of warmongering and genocide.
If americsns weren’t do damn horny for guns they would’ve maybe thought some time ago that some backwards slave owners maybe haven’t figured it all out all that time ago
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.
I agree with 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 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.
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 removed.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
They’re allowed “tax free” status as a result of separation of church and state. They’re not adhering to their part of the bargin, so tax them
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.
Thomas Jefferson proposed exactly that, but other founders did not heed his advice.
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 expected people to conduct themselves as adults and not vote in a piece of shit.
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?
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.
