Look, I’m not sayin’ you’re wrong, but surely you realize them’s fightin’ words.
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I’m quickly learning the Lima Bean Lobby is a lot stronger than I anticipated. 
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Funny how some of the most passionate arguments on the BBS revolve (devolve?) around food… 
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can’t pardon for state crimes… and, beyond the financial stuff, some AG somewhere (and, i’d bet, more than one) is going to indict him on reckless endangerment - if not manslaughter - for his ongoing gross negligence in the pandemic response… as well they should.
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Trump punting the POTUS to Pence on Jan 19, 2021 and Pence issuing pardons is inarguably legal. But what does Pence get out of it? Pence may even harbor Presidential aspirations-- those all disappear if he does this. Pence is much more in the Jeff Sessions/Lindsey Graham model. They will lick his boots for him, but they won’t fall on their swords for him.
It’s doubtful he’ll ever be convicted of a federal crime, and any state crime will take 3 years at least to litigate (civilly that will take 5-10 years).
Meanwhile, you really think he’d tolerate just being a fixture on Fox? That’s impossible: can’t you hear him fume over Fox monetizing his likeness/programming, taking the lion’s share, leaving him “scraps”? It’s far more likely he’s going to have his own media conglomerate: think Glenn Beck but with even more financing. Or maybe he’ll simply buy OANN outright. Either way, he’s going to monetize a post-Presidency in a way that we’ve never seen before, and it’s probably going to involve us seeing him constantly.
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I’m imagining an SNL skit with armed Tea Party protesters at a newly reopened restaurant with half the tables roped off and jokes about how one of the gunmen has never heard the word “succotash” before
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No president will prosecute the outgoing president becuase it would set a perfect presedent to have their actions colored and then used to prosecute them by the next guy. If you think the US has swung toward toxic partisanship, setting this presedent would set the pendulum on fire. Even Trump was not dumb enough to do that, and I don’t think Biden is that senile.
Please make it Texass!
The precedent would be to punish ex-presidents who committed crimes while in office, and Biden can avoid that by not committing crimes. I’m from Illinois, which regularly punishes governors who abuse their authority while in office, but it is not something that people do lightly and certainly ot against all governors, just the prosecutable crooks.
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We didn’t ignore HRC’s whatevers. We did literally the exact opposite. That’s why a rapist is in the supreme court now.
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All of this is true but you don’t think the modern GOP wouldn’t try to prosecute Biden even if he didn’t commit a crime by simply making up some sort of scandal *cough* emails*cough* Benghazi*?
I want to see Trump humbled and in prison so, oh so badly but it is a Pandora’s box that future presidents have to think very carefully about opening. It wouldn’t be the first time the GOP and their allies took something that was aimed against them and turned it into a weapon. Executive orders, the concept or fake news, etc.
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Right now, with Trump’s people running things? Maybe, though I don’t think they’d need the excuse of precedent if they thought they really had something. After Biden’s term? I don’t think so, at least not with approximately the current makeup of the Senate. Why bother, if he hasn’t actually done anything? The GOP senators mostly don’t like Trump, once he’s out his usefulness will be at an end, there’d be no point in a vindictive post-presidential Biden prosecution.
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It’s all of Big Bean. Just be glad you didn’t cross the Fava Family
You don’t want to fight Big Bean. You know who they hire out for contracts, right?
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True, we tossed out a corrupt governor in Dade county a few years back for gifting a stadium to the “poor, out of money” Marlins.
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I’m pretty sure there hasn’t been a president in living memory who hasn’t done war crimes or anything similar. Even Jimmy got caught funding fascists in central america or something, did he?
A while ago I proposed that instead of bothering with all this nonsense we just have a constitutional amendment such that as soon as you’re no longer president you’re clapped in irons and taken to The Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity. Pretty sure that’s the best system we could do for the US.
War crimes by US presidents while in office are not in general prosecutable in the US. Sexual assault, tax evasion, fraud etc are.
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They beat you to it…
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Which is why I said we need a constitutional amendment to ship them off to the ICC as soon as they leave office
To sort of drag it back on topic: this is my hypothesis for why no president will ever allow federal prosecution of their predecessor. What happens if a future president decides that war crimes are something which America commits and it should be punished for it?
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Yes, but then you’ll have a situation where Nixon is in prison and Kissinger is roaming free. (Essentially the situation today, of course.) Most of the atrocities committed by the US (and western governments in general) are committee affairs.
What happens if a future president decides that war crimes are something which America commits and it should be punished for it?
I know you’re being a little facetious here, but in fact the scope of the extent to which government officials can be held responsible for such crimes is spelled out in the War Crimes Act of 1996 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which are both Congressional acts. A president does not have the authority to make these decisions. (The Supreme Court can also make interpretations as to how widely they apply; they did this in the Hamdan case.)
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