Ford said this to assuage his conscience. I’m not sure that this is true in a legal sense,
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He was impeached. Just not convicted and removed from office.
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Sorry, I don’t buy it. The Constitution has holes you can drive a 747 through, and most of those holes are in areas the founders just couldn’t conceive would even come up. Behavior so abhorrent that they wouldn’t even speak of it much less spend ink on prohibiting it.
Those aren’t loopholes, even. They are outright bugs in the system.
Unfortunately, 45 has a knack for behaving in ways that are so deviant as to have not been specifically prohibited. That doesn’t make it right or legal.
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I think there can be lots of prosecutions of Trump without getting anywhere near political persecutions. I think you were talking about the precedent, but the precedent that presidents don’t get prosecuted for crimes committed in office is also a bad one.
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I don’t think anyone has ever challenged a preemptive pardon in court, including one granted to others, like Ford’s to Nixon? I would be interested to know what the legal community in general thinks of those.
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True. And he could not pardon himself (or anyone else - say, judges) from impeachment. But just because Trump was impeached for something, does not mean he couldn’t pardon himself for other crimes.
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I’d like to think you are right, but I don’t think there is a very good argument for these limitations based on the text or history of the use of pardons. (I am a lawyer, but I haven’t studied this in detail.). I don’t think you’re quite right that the founders couldn’t come up with problems - they discussed a lot of them, and included “no impeachment” right there in the pardon power. The right remedy for over-broad pardon power is an amendment, which because D’s and R’s both benefit won’t be happening.
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If the founders had really thought of most of the problems, then the SCOTUS would be the most boring place in the world.
Narrator: It’s not.
It seems like the history of SCOTUS is most defined by filling in these giant gaps of unforeseen problems written into (or left out of) the Constitution. And a big part of the best work of SCOTUS has been bringing some common sense into the interpretation of it. For instance, why the fuck would the founders, fresh off of throwing off the yoke of monarchy, place a ticking time bomb of tyranny right smack in the middle of Article II? Because a president that is not accountable to the law during their term, and then is capable of pre-emptive self-pardon, is just another name for “king.”
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I suppose it’s possible we find out in the next few years. With the current SCOTUS makeup (and frankly even a moderately non-conservative SCOTUS) I’d bet on plenary pardon power or them saying it’s a PQ and not touching it. I don’t think your common sense approach would have much weight tho.
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I say we keep the numbering intact, like they did for Doctor Who. We can just refer to Pence as “His Accidency.”
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Donny Boy still has almost a month and a half to fuck up the Americas and the rest of the world. Universal federal pardons would be a good start. Just hope he doesn’t proceed to nuking Tehran.
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Ford carried around a copy of Burdick v. US to show that was the case.
It’s pretty well accepted that the pardon is operative whether or not any charges or convictions have been obtained.
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I’d like to think that there would be push-back from the military if he tried this.
“Push-back from the military” is essentially a military coup, which may be a cure worse than the disease.
If it came to the military laughing off the orders of a deranged lame-duck president and slow-walking it past the inauguration and not nuking Tehran - I’m willing to take that trade-off.
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None. They can’t dance.
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I say we go after those turkeys he pardons each November. If we can successfully take down those guys then we can escalate to higher profile recipients.
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What’s more troubling is that it doesn’t seem that behavior would harm his chances of re-election.
If it is not forbidden, then it is allowed, eh? He can sell pardons. He can pardon himself. He can pardon crimes that may or may not have been committed at the time the pardon was issued. Okay, I am curious: how far can we take this? Can he pardon his family including yet unborn generations for anything they might do for all eternity? That’s not forbidden either.
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Indeed, and if Trump gets away with pardoning himself it would be an open invitation for the next GOP president to complete the fascist transformation of the U.S.
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