221–230 of 310 posts
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We should have litigated it then. Nixon should have died in prison. It would have been a good precedent to set
Life in prison for Watergate?
If we put 3x caught pot dealers in for life, a corrupt President can certainly rot alongside them.
The more powerful you are, the more significant the penalties for abuse of that power should be, because the damage you can do is correspondingly large.
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One seems to be New York v. Trump, which was a civil lawsuit instead of criminal. The main charge in the case was overstatement of real estate values to secure loans, yet the banks lending the money (mainly Deutsche Bank, if I remember correctly) were sophisticated lenders who were capable of assessing those estimates and the risk of lending. The banks not only did not lose money from the transactions but in fact hap…
> main charge in the case was overstatement of real estate values to secure loans > The banks not only did not lose money from the transactions but in fact happily made money, and they had no complaint about the deals The first part is either a crime, or it is not, regardless of the second? Suppose I falsely say I am worth millions, and then actually win the lottery. It being true later doesn't change whether it was…
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I've often wondered what would happen if a president explicitly offers to pardon anybody who murders members of Congress. Would they settle on reigning in the pardon power with an amendment? We're sort of already there. A lot of the Jan 6 rioters were openly trying to murder congressmen. The fact they weren't successful isn't super reassuring.
Nothing would happen, because SCOTUS decided to grant the president immunity for any crime committed in their official function, which would be the case here. It would literally be possible for the president to order congress killed, offer an automatic pardon to anyone carrying out this order, and establish a monarchy. This single ruling will haunt the United States for the rest of its existence.
And I think even this supreme Court would agree that murdering Congress doesn't count as an official act.
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Hmm, I see the issue.. The DOJ website lists all of Obama's as once, so I need to modify the parser.. https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-bar... Compare that to the other list. https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-recipients
That's probably intentional on the DOJ's part at this point.
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It will be interesting to watch what comes next, if there will be next. But people die of natural causes and otherwise anyway. Will it be the same a-lot-of-empty-talk-from-democrats like after first trump's term, or actually some concrete action? Clearly if next president would be democrat he can do some nice revenge and rebalance, maybe petty but maybe necessary. I would expect republicans do the usual crappy move o…
The Democrats literally tried like 6 different ways to get Trump in jail, and arrested and jailed many of his supporters and even some of his administration. I highly doubt that the majority of the voting public which elected Trump will sit idle for any sort of unjust retribution to the current administration.
Is this a threat, or…?
“Let our guy do whatever he wants or we’ll try to murder Congress and fuck up the economy and start some more wars”?
“Don’t you dare jail us for insurrection or we’ll insurrect even harder”?
What a stupid, silly post.
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>SCOTUS decided to grant the president immunity for any crime committed in their official function That ruling is very broad and vague! I don't think killing Congress is part of POTUS's official job description. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-isnt-immune-from...
Neither is fomenting a coup. And yet...
Presumably the suit could resume once Trump steps down, but it might be wise for his democratic successor to offer him a pardon for the sake of an orderly transition
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Life in prison for Watergate?
Yes. If we put 3x caught pot dealers in for life, a corrupt President can certainly rot alongside them. The more powerful you are, the more significant the penalties for abuse of that power should be, because the damage you can do is correspondingly large.
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Neither is fomenting a coup. And yet...
Trump was never found immune for that. We was just reelected before the prosecution could run it's course, and the DOJ never prosecutes a sitting president. Presumably the suit could resume once Trump steps down, but it might be wise for his democratic successor to offer him a pardon for the sake of an orderly transition
Oh absolutely not. Any democratic successor that did such a thing would face such an immense backlash from the democratic and centrist voting base that it would effectively throw their entire term away. No, most of the democrats see the pardoning of Nixon as a grave error and want to see justice for what has been done this term.
Presidents shouldn't have the right to outright pardon people. It should have to go through some sort of body beforehand and be voted on like everything else.
The pardon power is one of many explicitly anti-democratic measures in the U.S. constitution, which makes sense because the government that it defines is a federal republic and not a democracy.