Not an option, tempting as that sometimes may seem.
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Reduced crowd size is my guess. They say his crowd was thinning before he finished, and he knows his audience.
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I’m really glad it’s Friday.
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I don’t know, it might make an interesting test case to see how far the presidential pardon goes. Arpaio violated an injunction against continued unconstitutional detentions. IF a president can give pardons for that, it means that constitutional rights are essentially unenforceable, if government actors can violate them with no repercussions.
Just a thought, I have no idea if the ACLU or anybody else has this teed up…
Edited to add: I see there is an article up at NYT about this very subject.
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The President… shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
Okay, two things. It looks like the pardon implicitly acknowledges the offense was real. You can’t pardon an innocent man.
Also, look at that part about impeachment…
Not exactly. It means constitutional rights are unenforceable for those whose privilege level is high enough. With a conservative President, that means you have to not just violate the law; you have to violate it flagrantly in ways that harm minorities and the poor. You have to gain celebrity for being a truly awful person, and then be convicted in Federal court.
You must admit that’s a high bar.
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Also - it only covers federal offenses. Not state.
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It was contempt of a federal court order wasn’t it?
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Yep. But some future offenses - especially those money laundering ones in NY - may not be.
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Well, fuckity fuck fuck.
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Technically the POTUS can. Although presidential pardons cannot cover any future crimes, they can cover charges past, present and future for any federal crimes committed prior to the pardon.
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That’s very interesting - and very chilling.
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Of course. Trump knows there’s a segment of the population who live by the mantra “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”, and therefore think that exonerated blacks should be executed anyway, just in case.
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I have been thinking about this possibility for the previous few days and I may be in the minority here, but I think this is one of the best things he’s done to help out anti-trump and anti-TGOP forces.
First, Arpaio is a shit-bag’s shit-bag. But he’s also a has-been, no longer in office… Pardoning him will have no practical impact on the lives of everyday people. Its purely symbolic, and what a fantastic symbol it is. I can’t think of a cheaper way to motivate latinos to go to the polls in 2018. And this is pretty much the end of any TGOP outreach to latinos - Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, etc y’all are just whitey-mcwhite-whites now with funny names.
One interesting take I’ve seen on this is that its a signal to Flynn, Manafort, et al - don’t make any deals with Mueller, and you’ll get pardons too. But the president can’t pardon anyone if he’s not in office, so its still a gamble for them to go to prison.
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Unlikely, they’re too busy defending the rights of Nazis to kill people these days 
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A little hope.
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People like Adam, and Chelsea, and Killer Mike, and Heather, and millions of others who are fighting for what’s right…
This is why there is hope for America. And why it’s worth saving.
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Constitutionally (by which I mean “based on the text of the constitution”), there are no prescribed limits beyond pardoning impeachments and only being applicable to federal charges. Once again, we’re in territory that has previously been circumscribed by the notions of propriety and shame, neither of which apply to the shitweasel currently sitting in the oval office.
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patribotics
Eh, I’ll wait until somebody other than a blog I’ve never heard of reports it. There is just too much fabulism out there in the anti-trump world telling us exactly what we want to hear.
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I dunno. Bannon is gone, and Gorka left today.
I think Trump is impulsively doing things that appeal to his “base” at the same time as Kelly is seeking to rein him in and the Russia Probe is finding dirt a plenty.
I suspect Trump doesn’t have the ability to think strategically.
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