Jacoby on the Pardon Power

Jeff Jacoby argues that the time has come to revisit and revoke the President's power to issue pardons. His column starts with the egregious abuses of that power by the last two Presidents before shifting to Jacoby's recollection of his own past support for that power against the historic backdrop of its uses -- and back again to Trump's abuse of that power.

Jacoby concludes:

The Framers vested the pardon power in a single executive, trusting that most presidents would exercise it with a sense of moral gravity. That assumption no longer holds. What was meant as a safeguard against injustice has become one of its chief instruments.

The result is a constitutional contradiction: Presidents obliged to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" deploy clemency as a tool to make a mockery of the laws.

Plainly, the pardon power no longer works. Miscarriages of justice today are much more likely to be rectified by the nation's extensive network of federal courts and appellate review. Americans don't need presidents to dispense mercy from the throne. They need a constitutional amendment to repeal a power that has become a dangerous relic. [bold added]

As sympathetic as I am to this idea, I strongly disagree.

Consider the January 6 pardons, which came almost as soon as Trump returned to office:

[Trump's] blanket pardon of the January 6th insurrectionists [included] unwitting trespassers (who could reasonably be pardoned) [and] real criminals (who should have served their terms).

...

Whatever one makes of those events, unleashing real criminals is no way to achieve justice.

In better days, a constitutional power of another branch of the government -- We have three coequal ones, believe it or not! -- would have come into play: Impeachment and possibly removal from office.

Trump should have been impeached, if not removed from office, for these pardons and, had he been impeached without removal, that would have deterred him from abusing the pardon power more -- or he would have faced impeachment and removal again.

I greatly respect Jeff Jacoby, whose columns (including this) are always thought-provoking. But the blatant abuse of the pardon power is no more a reason for banning it than the use of a gun by a homicidal maniac is a reason to ban guns. In both cases, the problem lies deeper than changing a law: It's that we aren't enforcing the laws we already have.

In this case, "we" means our Republican representatives in Congress -- who have been failing to restrain the President by this and other means at their disposal.

A far better and easier remedy would be to vote straight-ticket Democrat in the next ellection since at least that party -- as big a threat as it is to the Republic -- might have an appetite to stop the even larger threat that currently occupies the White House.

-- CAV