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Trump floats pardons to ‘protect’ Elon Musk and staffers from Democrat investigations
(www.independent.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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politics
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I think we need an amendment to rescind the pardon. Reduce it to a stay of execution only. Why is it even a thing? Did they really think giving this power to a sitting president would ONLY be used to right injustices? It's a friggin unlimited commit crimes and get out of jail free card.
Biden used it to protect his family members and Dr. Fauci. Might've been a real risk of some retaliation in the air.
I never said some that there weren't a few good uses. It's just not worth the cost in my opinion. Biden saved two and Trump pardoned thousands from 01/06.
Yeah, pardons don't make sense unless you believe that executives can never do wrong.
Which is a very strange belief to have as people in the process of rebelling against a king because he made decisions they didn't like.
Pardons also make sense to correct miscarriages of justice. The justice system often leads to anomalous outcomes, and there needs to be a way to correct them.
So the pardon power should be restricted but not abandoned altogether: for example, no self-pardons, no pardons for crimes that have not been charged yet, no general pardons, no pardons for anyone who holds an Executive branch political appointment until (say) five years after a conviction.
In theory.
But who defines injustice?
Currently, the executive can just label any and all prosecution of anyone they like a "miscarriage of justice," as Donald Trump routinely does.
In my opinion, you shouldn't get a reprieve just because you're on good terms with the executive; you should have to ride out the justice system like anyone else. If it produces injustice - and it surely does - reform that.
Yeah, while stuff like this is very bad, Chelsea Manning was pardoned for the crime of leaking government secrets pertaining to the torture of prisoners in Iraq. She also had a whole 8th amendment case going on, but it would have taken many years to have a shot of freeing her on that.
Pardons however do need to be seriously curtailed, and should require that the individual have been convicted and not be affiliated with the president or their administration in any way. If President Josh Shapiro wants to pardon Elon he can go right ahead. Elon is a trump ally who was acting as part of his administration and hasn't been convicted yet. Hell, Ford was Nixon's VP and an elected member of the same party, if Carter wanted to pardon him after conviction that's fine, but hell no to Ford
there should 100% be a check on pardons, like everything else. However, it wouldn't do much good in this situation seeing how congress and SC have already abdicated their duties.
Kings had the power of pardon and they were creating a replacement for a king.
The only reason the office of the President exists is because the American founders didn't have anyone among them with a reasonable chance of being supported as a king. Democracy was just a necessary compromise. If they could've gone full-on feudal, they would've.
As in the Glorious Revolution in England, some of the founders put out feelers looking for some underemployed German or Dutch prince who might want the job of King. But the debate ran out of the founders' control, thanks to radicals like Thomas Paine, who wrote pamphlets arguing that we didn't need to have a king at all.
Lol what nonsense shit is this. The federalist papers have a mess of talks about how they're worried that what they have created would be used like trump is using it now.
And even Washington was vehemently against it, and the reason the POTUS has a two term limit is because of Washington.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newburgh_letter
Where did you even come up with this...
The two-terrm limit was not law until the 22nd Amendment was ratified in (I think) 1951, as a Republican-led reaction to FDR's having been elected four times.
While this is correct, all previous presidents abided by the whole, two term thing as Washington did. It should have been a law from day one but nothing is perfect.