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Elon Musk in Real Trouble After Humiliating Defeat: "Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time." (futurism.com)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 181 points 3 days ago (20 children)

Congress should investigate Doge and charge some individuals for crimes committed. Sure drumpf will pardon them but that'll just expose more of their corruption.

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  • [–] 66 points 3 days ago (11 children)

    I kind of think they should investigate that, among many, many other things, then decide if they want to charge them immediately, or decide if they can or should wait until trump is out to avoid a pardon. But they should get together a body of evidence as soon as possible.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 days ago

    Oh, no, take it to court now and let him pardon the fall guys. Then call them up to testify against the big players. The pardon acknowledges their guilt, meaning they can no longer plead the fifth.

    By the time that gets through the courts and we move on to trials for the ringleaders, it should be too late for Trump to parden any of the real responsible people.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (9 children)

    Trump will just preemptively pardon them anyway the same way Biden did

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  • [–] 12 points 3 days ago (6 children)

    Insane, didn’t know that was a thing. Almost like the whole pardon thing was designed for blatant corruption.

    Long shot, but maybe congress could get some legislation through limiting pardon power. Would need quite a few republicans to play ball though

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  • [–] 27 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (5 children)

    The issue with that is, presidential pardons exist for a reason, as a solution to a problem, in part one of injustice and abuse of power of the legislative branch. Among a few other things, It’s purpose is a safety valve against unjust and cruel laws passed by a theoretically tyrannical or apathetic legislature.

    It’s easy to look at this from the lens of “The President is corrupt and Congress is good” and so we decide to let Congress take the pardon power away, but then what happens when you have the inverse situation where Congress is corrupt but the president is good? Now the president has no power to protect genuinely innocent people from injustice.

    This is what the American system of checks and balances is about. Every check is both a solution to corruption and a potential lever of corruption. The point is to split the power up so that while some corruption can happen, it’s the least likely to be able to become absolute. We cannot implicitly trust in the President, Congress, or the courts. And whenever there is a hard choice to make between “Punish innocent people” or “Allow the guilty to walk free”, the framers of the constitution erred on the side of the latter.

    But ultimately, we do have other mechanisms to deal with this. Specifically impeachment (Which pardons cannot be granted for), and the ability for us to vote out the president, or a legislature that is enabling them. Also the president cannot pardon anyone for state crimes.

    It’s a very messy, imperfect solution. But it has largely worked for 250 years.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    But the president still controls the executive, and as we've seen, the Attorney General has considerable infulence in choosing who to prosecute and what laws to enforce.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago* (3 children)

    The Attorney General cannot pardon or commute the sentence of somebody whose judgement is past.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (2 children)

    Yes, but were talking about a runaway congress overreaching to unjustly persecuted people by passing laws, such that a president's power to pardon is required to prevent injustice.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    A pardon is also an abject admission of guilt. Can't be forgiven for something that you didn't do, right??

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago

    Trump's pardons are an interesting thing. The more he pardons people now, the less leverage he has in the future, and he needs to hold onto that power for as long as he can. Cuz basically, he's about to get fucked. The Epstein Files will be coming back into focus, and everyone who already was pardoned now has to testify under oath about everything when Congress calls them in for questioning. And if Trump doesn't have allies (i.e., people who owe him shit), then he'll be toasty in short order.

    Also, it's hard to pardon someone effectively if you can't figure out what crimes they committed. Who was actually employed by DOGE? What authority did they actually have? The DoJ lawyers refuse to explain that, because it would expose them to liability. So, because the legal landscape is ambiguous (from the DoJ's perspective and intent), the pardons themselves are likely to miss large swaths of criminal activity.

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