EDIT: You know what? Not worth the grief.
I’ll just say this: my career managing restaurants did more to make me empathize and understand what people who are different from me have to deal with than any life experience I could ever imagine. It sure as hell wouldn’t make me want to take up arms to defend a white supremacist president. Quite the opposite.
There’s (surprise) confusion over a clause in the Constitution:
In Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, it states that the president “shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.”
Emphasis mine:
A Washington Post analysis by two professors and experts on the U.S. presidential office said that only Congress, not the Supreme Court, can decide whether the president “can pardon himself or others directly connected to the high crimes for which he is impeached.”
“We and other legal scholars understand the clause to mean … the president cannot pardon himself or others in matters directly associated with his own impeachment,” wrote Corey Brettschneider, a professor of political science at Brown University and Jeffery K. Tulis, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin.
> “Under this view, Trump could issue no pardon for himself or the insurrectionists for criminal charges related to the events of last week.”
This is super-interesting.
The wording is vague, but per Popehat, pretty much accepted doctrine is that it doesn’t mean a President under impeachment loses his pardon power. Instead it means that a President can pardon whomever he wishes, as long as those other persons who would receive the pardon are not themselves under active cases of impeachment.
But if what the President has done causes him to be under impeachment, can he pardon himself for those offenses? I mean, taking the accepted doctrine on the wording here, it sure seems like DJT may be able to pardon himself for any possible criminal acts committed while President up but not anything he did with regards to the possible instigation of a riot on January 6, 2021.
That is…interesting.
(And of course the very issue of self-pardons by a President remains murky.)
I think the general consensus is that the president doesn’t have the power to pardon himself anyway.
It’s been interesting listening to Ken White kind of evolve his thinking on ATPL on this. A month or so ago, his opinion was essentially, that if the framers of the Constitution meant for a President to be unable to pardon himself, they’d have included that explicit language in the document. But they didn’t. And other places in the same section do contain very explicit details and checks on power and such.
But this week he sounded a lot less sure of that. Now he sees the idea of Trump self-pardoning himself to be the equivalent of waving a red cape in front of a Biden DOJ. I got the feeling that Ken’s thinking is that they might go after Trump if an evidence chain leads them there and it’s unequivocal…but if he tries to pardon himself, they’re ABSOLUTELY coming after him with everything they’ve got, and they’re going to force the courts to make some law on this. And that ruling may not go the way DJT hopes it will.
Just so I’m clear, I wasn’t really arguing a position - ultimately Trump is a wild card and what the heck do I know anyway? It just seemed like several folks seemed to consider it a fait accompli that he would pardon these folks and it didn’t seem like a slam dunk to me. Who knows though, he could still do it.
If Trump isn’t so enraged and crazy that he’s willing to listen to legal advice, right now he’s hearing from his (not Rudy Giuliani) lawyers that the #1 way he can assure himself of post-presidential indictments and potential prison terms is to pardon the Capitol rioters.
As dive to the power of three notes, Trump is such a crazy wildcard that he could still do it, for sure. But doing so would probably be a very bad idea for him personally.
Are we taking bets on which day Trump will pardon himself? Will it be the morning of the 20th?
I kind of expected today, so now my guess would be as you say, on his way out the door on the morning of the 20th.
Sadly it takes time for it to filter down to the voters.
Look at the Democratic Party. How long did they control the South after Civil Rights?
A long damned time. It took forever for voters to realize their Racist Party was now the Anti-Racist Party.
How long before the electorate figures out their party is the Sedition Party? At least 20 years probably.
Yeah, and this is why he won’t do it.
He will not expose himself to one iota of risk in service of anyone else.
Here’s a long video that some guys took while originally trying to make a comedy video by posing as OAN reporters.
Nobody Could Have Forseen It
It plays them side by side too. It’s pretty shakycam, but you can mostly just hear a lot of screaming
Wow, thank goodness these idiots are so very racist.