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Via Noah Feldman from a longer piece on Bloomberg View
Here’s some unsolicited advice for President Donald Trump: Don’t listen to any lawyers who might tell you that you can pardon yourself, or even that it’s a close legal question. You can’t — and no court is going to rule otherwise.
There’s a decent historical argument about why, but it’s beside the point. The bottom line is that if the president could pardon himself, we would no longer have a republic — nor a government of laws rather than men. We would be a dictatorship, not a democracy.
You know that. Americans know it. The Supreme Court knows it. Now let’s move on.
The very idea of self-pardon is the kind of silly technicality that non-lawyers think lawyers engage in all the time. I’m not going to offer a full-throated defense of the legal profession, but we’re not really that dumb or bad — at least not usually.
The idea of the pardon power itself is old, going back at least to medieval England — and the king. It is based, roughly speaking, on the idea that the king is in charge of administering the common law, and therefore has the authority to go around that law and issue a pardon or reprieve when it’s desirable to do so.
[…]
Given that worry about the anti-legal nature of the pardon power was already more than 450 years old when the Founding Fathers drafted the U.S. Constitution during the hot summer of 1787, it’s a bit surprising that the pardon power even made it in.
In Philadelphia, the more rights-oriented republicans, like George Mason of Virginia, questioned the whole idea of the pardon power. The more pro-executive participants, like Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson, managed to get it in, albeit without much debate. The idea was that pardons served mercy and could be expedient.
No one so much as hinted that the president could pardon himself.
[…]
But frankly, the history isn’t the point. The basic problem with self-pardon is that it would make a mockery of the very idea that the U.S. operates under the rule of law. A president who could self-pardon could violate literally any federal law with impunity, knowing that the only risk was removal from office by impeachment.
We have a name for an elected leader who is outside the law: dictator.
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The Donald besides being as paranoid as a cat in room full of coke heads in rocking chairs – apparently also has a growing god complex to add to the menagerie of psychoses he maintains within his self.
Self-pardoning is the mainstay of someone ruling by “divine right.” He is the hand of god and consequently, as an extension of god he can do no wrong If he does – well, god says its ok in advance.
Donald Trump is insufferably too intellectually incompetent be President. So, just how long will it take our elected Congressional cowards to do something about it? Do we have to get rid them first? If this situation wasn’t so absurd, it would almost be funny.
all of that is true, but i don’t necessarily see anything wrong with “a room full of coke heads in rocking chairs.” that sounds like a good time.
H — wrong kind of cat
– Murphy
I think it’s possible or even likely that Trump walks without any charges regardless of pardon power. I think that, while he’s dirty as hell in other respects, the Russians would know better than to try to break American law. I think I can hear some of you laughing from here as I type this so I’ll leave with just one more note.
In the case of the 2016 election and Trump’s relation to Russia, my bottom line isn’t the number of convictions or anything else that might happen. My desire is that the truth comes out, and if Trump fires Mueller I worry that part of the truth may be lost forever. In this case, the truth is what the country needs more than D2S’s resignation.
My two cents.
~SM