This is the real crux of the issue. Blanket pardons shouldn’t be a thing. If you want to pardon someone, it should be specific. Which crimes? Where? When? Who was victimized? Who else was involved? What was the outcome of the crime?

The SCOTUS has already ruled in Burdick v. US that accepting a pardon requires admitting guilt of the crime you’re being pardoned of. The wording of the ruling was that a pardon carries “an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it.” The SCOTUS has consistently held that a pardon does not overturn a guilty conviction. Instead, it removes the punishment for the crime. You’re still unequivocally guilty after a pardon.

It shouldn’t be some sort of “I pardon you for waves arms in air vaguely” power, because that turns the whole “needing to admit guilt” part into a sly wink wink elbow nudge situation. It puts the person’s crimes in a quantum Schrödinger state. The person accepting a vague pardon is inarguably guilty of something, because they admitted guilt when they accepted the pardon. But the court doesn’t know what they’ve admitted to until a prosecutor tries to indict them, and they go “oh no you can’t prosecute me, I was pardoned.”

No, it doesn't.

It does, however, void your 5th Amendment rights to refuse to testify against yourself.

I strongly disagree. There has to be a check on judicial overreach and miscarriages of justice. Pardons make sense for that.

The problem with Trump isn't the use of pardons per se, it's that he's issuing them corruptly.

The next candidate who floats a blanket pardon for anyone convicted of murdering any billionaire gets my vote.

That blowjob demonstrated that he could be easily compromised. Ridiculously easy, really. Granted this administration has proven that corruption and kompramat is actually a rite of passage rather than being truly scandal-worthy, so yeah. We screwed

The charge would be for contempt.

You can't call it a "precedent" if it was not contested in a legal environment.

That said, the constitution allows too much bullshit. It needs to be culled.

You think Elon's going to stop committing crimes? That's adorable.

Pardons don't stop state indictments and the fact that Trump is pardoning Elon to help cover up his own crimes is all that is required for the next president to nullify those same pardons.

It's never that simple. Even the limit is a good idea on paper, but pardons also apply to people who have been convicted of "offenses" that should never have been offenses to begin with (IMO marijuana possession is a huge one.) If the prez happens to have heard or met any of them personally, they wouldn't be eligible? Hardly seems fair. And yet, someone out there would argue this, you just know it.

can only pardon people who they don’t personally know, and who didn’t commit crimes that directly benefit them

Easy to abuse the other way too. Just have a group lobby to pardon someone so there's no direct relationship between pardoner and pardonee. Would probably meet "legal criteria", or there'll be a subtler move that does meet legal criteria, because legal criteria change.

Unless there is a mechanism to PREVENT pardons from being issued without prior review, but even then: the review process can be abused (see: Supreme Court full of bought judges).

I also don't understand why anyone can uphold the logic of "guilty, but there won't be punishment". Any system that's based on that kind of logic needs to be abolished. If there's a confirmed offense, there need to be consequences, period. If the offense shouldn't have been an offense in the first place, there needs to be actual restitution made and some other mechanism than just saying "sorry, my bad"--it shouldn't have more weight when it comes from the president, come on. Presidents are just people, human beings holding an office. (The fact that they're venerated in some places is a fucking problem, not a feature.)

In some cases there can't be restitution without causing damage to innocents; "heads need to roll" when that happens (there should be damage to those who continued enabling whatever went wrong.) And so on, but all of those steps can be abused.

Yet we go the other way these days (oh, nobody's really "guilty" of anything) and it's no wonder the president can be a convicted felon. I'm fucking tired.

'Chop chop!!'

Some of the founders did imagine it, argued against it, but it was passed anyway.

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.

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.

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 American founders didn’t have anyone among them with a reasonable chance of being supported as a king.

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.

I still have that picture saved on my phone

Could you explain more about that? I'm not very familiar with USA law, but doesn't it also cover double jeopardy?

I assure you that they will neither be sad nor miss out. Everyone will know immediately.

He won't pardon anyone unless it directly benefits him, either financially or by maintaining one of the many cover-ups that protect him. But he wants them to keep committing crimes. So he's setting up a rug-pull.