Quote:
Originally Posted by detbuch
I don't think it was because the DOJ review of Mueller's 10 instances of possible Trump obstruction found, in their judgment, that they were not sufficient to support a conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt that the President violated the obstruction-of-justice statutes.
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Back in 1787, when the Constitutional Convention was drafting the part of the Constitution that would soon become the presidential pardon power, Mason unequivocally opposed the provision. The president, he said, “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?”
But that’s about it. Everything else about these pardons, including the incentive they give the president’s allies to withhold evidence of criminality, is, unfortunately, within the anticipated scope of the pardon power. Indeed, the Constitutional Convention, having heard and rejected Mason’s prediction, can reasonably be said to have accepted the possibility of pardon abuse as the collateral cost of having a pardon power in the first place.
And why exactly would the delegates have done that? Why did they disregard Mason’s prediction? In the end, his concerns were rejected by his fellow convention delegates because, in their judgment, there were adequate remedies for that type of presidential misbehavior. As James Madison put it: “There is one security in this case [of misused pardons] to which the gentlemen [i.e., Mason and his supporters] not have adverted: If the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him [with a pardon], the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.”
And there you have it. George Mason was prescient. James Madison—tragically, it turns out—was naive. The most insidious damage to American norms from Trump’s pardon extravaganza stems not from the extravaganza itself, though that is bad enough. Rather the damage to our democracy comes, most clearly, from the supine, almost sycophantic nature of Congress’s response to the Trump presidency since the start, both with regard to his abuse of the pardon power and his excesses more generally. Madison saw Congress as a powerful guard dog capable of preventing executive misconduct. Instead, in terms of pardon abuse, as with so many other instances of Trump’s overreach, it has proved little more than a lapdog.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...-start/617397/
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