Law and order
David Smith at the Guardian on Trump’s latest dive into squalor:
Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heards worked as security guards for Blackwater, owned by Erik Prince, a prominent supporter of Trump and brother of his education secretary, Betsy DeVos. All were serving long prison terms for a 2007 massacre of 14 unarmed civilians in Baghdad.
After their trial in 2014, Ronald Machen Jr, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, said: “These Blackwater contractors unleashed powerful sniper fire, machine guns, and grenade launchers on innocent men, women, and children. Today they were held accountable for that outrageous attack and its devastating consequences for so many Iraqi families.”
The pardoning of the four led political opponents and legal commentators, even those who thought they had grown immune to Trump outrage, to reach for words like “disgusting” and “grotesque”. With just 29 days left in office his burn-it-all-down brazenness knows no bounds.
He also pardoned Chris Collins, imprisoned for making false statements to the FBI and conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and Duncan Hunter, who admitted misusing campaign finance funds. Collins and Hunter were the first two congressmen to endorse Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
Meanwhile there are I don’t know how many thousands of people – mostly black of course – serving life sentences for selling drugs.
So much for “drain the swamp” and “law and order”. Research by Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at Harvard University, found that 88% of the 45 pardons or commutations that Trump had granted before Tuesday helped someone personally associated with him or benefited him politically.
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The pardon power is something of a quirk, more redolent of a medieval monarchy than a constitutional republic. Perhaps that is why Trump finds it so attractive as he enters full King George III meltdown with America slipping from his grasp.
But Trump doesn’t have porphyria.
My husband and I have been talking about that. It seems rather open to misuse and corruption when you have a single individual who can pardon offenders. That needs to go, but…I don’t see it likely it will.
(Copied from the other thread, because it seems relevant here.) George Mason argued against ratification in part because the president “ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic. If he has the power of granting pardons before indictment, or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection? The case of treason ought, at least, to be excepted. This is a weighty objection with me.”
James Madison responded hey, no problem, if that happens, Congress can impeach and convict him.
Mason wins the Cassandra award in this case.
The pardon thing sounds quite archaic. Does any other democratically elected leader have that power?
Another example of the quasi-monarchical status of the President.
Obama has been reading his memoirs on the BBC. It’s a real pleasure to hear that fine voice again. He tells how as he campaigned as a senator and got a larger and larger team, he went from being “Barack” to “Sir” and people got up as he came into the room.
Before he drains the swamp, he has to get all the chunky bits out, lest they clog the drain.
Even if you got rid of the pardon power, there are still a host of ways that a sitting president can effectively immunize his supporters and lackeys from federal criminal consequences. He can simply order his Attorney General to order the U.S. Attorneys not to bring any such charges or to dismiss ones that have been brought. This is essentially what Trump first attempted with Flynn — of course, being Trump he arguably botched it by waiting until Flynn had already pled guilty, so Judge Sullivan was at least entertaining the possibility that the dismissal might not be legally effective. In fact, the “unitary executive” theorists would say that Trump can just order it directly without going through the AG. And of course, even if the AG balks, the president can fire the AG and find a new (acting) AG who will do it — as Nixon did in the Saturday Night Massacre.
A pardon at least has the virtue of being a clear public act that has to be explicitly documented, while more subtle means of thwarting prosecutions can be done without a paper trail. And abolishing pardons would also be throwing out some babies with the bathwater, as there really are situations where pardons and commutations are good things.
Nor do I think you can solve it by strictly forbidding the president to ever give orders to prosecutors or fire them. You can’t have unelected prosecutors running around answerable to nobody — what if some Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney refuses to resign in January and starts filing charges against Biden and Hillary and Dominion based on every dumb Kraken/QAnon/etc. conspiracy theory?
I’m not one of those people who thinks the U.S. Constitution is a work of eternal genius that cannot be improved upon — quite the opposite. It’s kind of amazing it’s held up this long as well as it has, and there’s a reason that countries forming new constitutions don’t look to it as a model very much any more. But on this issue, I think that someone should have the power to pardon, and I think that if Congress has abandoned its duty to reign in a president’s abuses of power, and the voters have abandoned their duty to punish GOP Senators who abandoned that duty, then there’s a more fundamental problem at work.
tl;dr version: Kent Brockman of The Simpsons was right. “Democracy simply doesn’t work.”
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