this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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I'm often asking this: how can presidential pardons be defended as acceptable at all, even outside Trump?
This was bound to happen at some point. Presidential pardons were just waiting to be abused.
They're not a thing in many other counties. And thank Christ for that.
Being able to personally just overturn the courts is bar shit insane.
I bet you, there will be political assassinations coming that Trump will simply pardon.
The thing is, if he has no involvement, was this even illegal before the supreme court gave Trump their get-out-of-jail-free card?
Not a laywer, but I could imagine it wouldn't have been.
Trump aside, y'all need to get rid of executive pardons.
Oh, and electronic voting.
Sincerely, from the provinces. Please.
So, ostensibly, pardons are meant to be a way to override the Justice system where it has failed to provide justice. If the law is unjust or it's application was unjust, a pardon can correct that. And ideally it is used sparingly and by a President that that can be trusted to be an arbiter of wisdom and morality. So there's just about no limitations on the power. And the other branches are meant to give consequences for unethical applications of it, like quid pro quo pardons/bribery. But obviously that is not how it works in practice.
If the only consequences is that they can be removed from office, that's not really a consequence in my opinion
Supposedly, if impeached and removed, they can be liable for criminal charges. Idk if that still is the case after the Supreme Court ruling or not.
💀
The theoretical argument is that any justice system no matter how well thought out and well intentioned, will eventually result in edge cases where justice fails to be done. Especially when implemented on a large scale. There are already appeals, and those can fail too. Plenty of examples of people actually being railroaded.
You can just accept that , or you turn to democracy to try alleviate the most egregious cases. Thats what the pardon is for - no process, no more appeals. Just the president, the people's highest representative, and a pen.
It sometimes works (as in, is probably a net benefit) when the person wielding this power fears the people and will pay (at least) a political price for misusing it. Pardoning someone he knows is a complete of the power. Enriching himself by essentially selling pardons throws the whole thing into the world of comedy. Any talk of the theoretical merits of it is laughable.
You can argue that this was inevitable. Maybe you're right. But that was the intent, and it's failure is another symptom of the American democracy degenerating towards failure. Trump won't pay a price for this. Even on conservative forums where they hangwring about "not getting why he's doing this" (as they stare straight at the naked corruption), none of them will change their votes. Nobody is interested in holding him accountable.
This democratic failure has widespread consequences. The open corruption of the pardons process is actually one of the smaller symptoms of it.
I mean even if you're not explicitly selling pardons you don't have to worry about the political consequences of a pardon if it's your last term in office and can't run anymore due to being term limited. So the system is broke from the very start and just allows presidents to override enforcement of laws they don't like at the federal level.