Anthony Levandowski Pardoned
trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov
trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov
Note that the President does not have the corresponding power to convict anyone.
An interesting set of pardons was when Andrew Johnson pardoned all the rebels in the Confederacy, including Jefferson Davis.
As far as I know, the only Confederate officers convicted and hanged were the ones running the POW camps. The crime was the brutal way they ran them, not rebellion.
On the judicial, so it would be great if it was also subject to Congressional approval. It would still fulfill its purpose.
Sometimes pardons are politically unpopular even when they are right or justly merciful. Pardoning someone who embarrassed the government, for instance -- I can easily imagine a majority of Congress choosing to deny Chelsea Manning's commutation.
It's a bit of a parallel to the "better a hundred guilty go free, than one innocent suffer" philosophy that is supposed to rule the court system -- I'd rather the pardon be flawed in being too generous than too stingy with its mercy.
Or worse, had someone murder his political opponent and then pardoned him? This sort of thing was unthinkable a few years ago, but no longer.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed69.asp
> ...If a governor of New York, therefore, should be at the head of any such conspiracy, until the design had been ripened into actual hostility he could insure his accomplices and adherents an entire impunity...
An example: https://www.dcourier.com/news/2019/nov/10/veterans-day-dan-f...
District Attorneys, the FBI and other agency's responsible for prosecuting crimes report to the President as part of the executive. Each has broad discretionary power on which crimes they prosecute, what sentence they seek, and what deals get cut. The president having some authority to wave crimes goes along with this ( and also short-circuits the president manipulating law enforcement for their own purposes ).
If the president one day decided that he didn't want the executive branch to enforce the law and pardoned everyone... well they'd be impeached quickly, and the supreme court would almost certainly rule that the president doesn't have the power to pardon everyone. Assuredly an injunction would be issued to block the pardon coming into force.
I agree that there should be no check on the power to pardon. There can't be because Congress does have the power to convict in some rare cases. The check is on the legislative as well as on the judicial branch.
Though I agree calling it a "check & balance" is pretentious.
It's at best an instrument for mercy. Of course it can be abused, but if you have a bad president, that's not on the top 10 list of problems.
I dont understand your comment. Are you thinking that acts of justice, by definition, cannot also be the product of a person becoming an arbiter of law? That you perceive a decision as just doesn't change whether a person might or might not be acting as an arbiter of law.
I mean, I suppose its one of a near-infinite number of possible alternatives, but I don’t see how its an even relevant one. The discussion wasn’t about someone pardoning only black people, it was about pardoning all people convicted under a particular set of laws.
That power can then be used justly or unjustly. The constitutional balance for this is impeachment, but it's not clear that would work in practice or theory.
Typos happen (and this is an international community including people unfamiliar with some idioms). Obviously the alternative presented isn't THE alternative.
No, the Constitutional pardon power (in one direction, for criminal law only) does that already. The question is about how that position of arbiter will be used, not whether the President has it.
Checks and balances essentially don't work in the US. The best bit is simply a decent judiciary, but that was mostly copied from the British. And even that is more poorly executed than elsewhere, due to the political nature of judicial appointees, and esp. due to the tradition of direct elections of some judges. I'd say it's arguably worse than the British model it was copied from, not because the Brits were psychic geniuses, but because of the not entirely unrelated fact that the UK model is much more open to reform; it's aged better because it's less crufty. When lead by a dangerously populist government that might be risk, of course, but so far even populists have turned out not to do too much consitutional harm - might differ in the future.
It's more like: the US constitution was grand it its aims, but pretty v1.0 in its execution. It's full of unintentional (or at least unfortunate) indirect effects that didn't work out too well; such as that congress is likely to deadlock; that the constitution isn't sufficiently amendable; that its form of democracy is subject to unproportional divergence as state population sizes diverge, that by contrast adding new states is way too easy, that elections at all are in no way shape or form necessarily fair (and I don't there there has ever been a particularly free&fair election in the states) due to gerrymandering, state size disparities, imbalanced voting registration requirements, and lack of constitutional protections for elections in general; the presence of systematic biased introduced by winner-takes-all approaches; the lack of a checks on the presidency (clearly not intentional, but impeachment is a purely hypothetical check). I'm sure actual scholars could name a bunch more. Then theres the more general flaws in legal republics, such as that there no systematic mechanism for reform; laws just accumlate leaving extremely outdated wordings on the books forever, and with ever increasingly large rulebooks.
Seriously, name 1 check/balance that's actually particularly good! (I mean, I guess there by sheer scope might be one... but I can't think of one anyhow).
The person in charge with executing the law is different from the people in charge of crafting the laws to be executed.
Deadlock is not the worst thing, and the solution to it is not necessarily to remove as many locks as possible.
The actual problem in the US right now is that checks and balances are strong enough to allow one party to block things, but not strong enough to deter waiting until your party stochastically has enough power to get things done. This is exacerbated by having one party's ideologically committed to having the government do less.
In previous decades, stuff like earmarks greased the wheels enough to get things done (but an effective PR campaign against them got them banned). You could also fix deadlocks by strengthening the checks to force compromise among factions, like by coupling automatically expiring legislation with requirements for big super-majorities.
Since Congress makes its own rules, and 51/49 is enough to change a rule ('the nuclear option'), supermajority would have to be a constitutional amendment... And then 45% would be enough to halt government. I guarantee you this would then happen regularly.
Other systems have mechanisms to force elections if deadlocks are persistent. Of course, you also need mandatory voting, PTO for voting, full franchise, etc and that isn't going to happen in America while this Supreme Court lasts.
That was the problem with the Senate's supermajoriy requirements: basically the only thing holding them in place was convention, so they fall in the face of someone willing and able to make unsentimental tactical power plays.
IMHO, someone like McConnell would have behaved very differently if he knew his opponents could block him just as easily as he has blocked them. His apparent effectiveness is almost entirely a result of his greater willingness to hypocritically use then discard convention when it gets in his way. He'd never have gotten his tax cuts or judges if he wasn't able to bend the rules.
> Other systems have mechanisms to force elections if deadlocks are persistent.
I think something like that could be a genuine improvement.
The real protection here is that a simple majority can't throw out the minorities voice entirely. But that doesn't require the separation of the executive to achieve, it merely requires either a supermajority, and/or a differently composed senate (which doesn't need to be unrepresentative either, the differing election schedule would suffice, and it doesn't even need a veto - an election-cycle delay would be enough).
Incidentally, from memory, all sliding-into-dictatorship democracies I can think of did so behind a strong "executive". Empirically at least that would suggest that simply not having such a strong executive sounds like a sound protection against despotism. Intuitively, that would suggest that it's pretty hard to rally a country behind a dictatorship that originates in congress; a powerful figurehead matters. Finally, I'm not really sure to what extent a constitution really can or should protect against popular despotism - at best it can delay the process; but part of the point of democracy is self-rule; and taking away that rule to avoid despotism also takes it away for other reform - and it's not really going to work anyhow, because if enough people want to dump the laws, they will, even if the letter of the law begs to differ.
Article II Section 1 of the Constitution?
All it will take is a stronger, more popular leader who feels 'bypassing the rules' is ok for 'the greater good' (aka themselves), and we're in deep trouble.
If Trump hadn't spent all 4 years of his tenure actively disparaging, impugning, maligning, and throwing under the bus every military leader or hero he ran across, we could be in a very, very different country today. I'm still amazed how close he came to winning Arizona considering what he said and did to McCain.
A check and balance has been on great display in recent weeks. A President has stated, "the election was a fraud, I should get another term". Congress has stated, "the election was correct. Moreover, we may choose to prevent you from holding office ever again." The judiciary agrees.
That Congress is likely to deadlock is arguably a feature, not a bug. (That voters don't demand better from their congresspeople is, perhaps, a correctable bug.).
There is only one exception to the amendability of the Constitution -- states cannot be deprived of equal suffrage in the Senate. See Article V.
The disproportionate representation is by design. Without it, the country literally would not have formed. I am pleased to see states hacking around it without an amendment, thus, should the prior function be required, the states themselves can revert.
Is adding states too easy? There are three million US citizens in Puerto Rico without representation in Congress.
I am hopeful that we will find ways forward on gerrymandering. The only true beneficiaries of the existing system are the political parties.
Impeachment is not just hypothetical. Though it was not fully realized against Nixon, it would have been had he not resigned.
Regarding the endless accretion of laws: we get the government for which we vote. Speaking up, as you have done here, is the first step toward making it better.
As to congresses deadlock being a feature: it may well have been intentional; but it's pretty plausibly a long term fatal blow. Countries need to be able to evolve, and when small minorities can prevent that (and we're not their yet, but it's moving that way), you're creating really perverse incentives for horse trading, leading to really low quality law making, and thus low respect for congress. It's not out of the question that this might lead to the nation's dissolution in our lifetimes - what happens when elections are legally stolen?
On impeachment: we'll see what happens with trump who happens to be a perfect case to check whether this feature of the constitution is more than hot air; but given how stacked the deck is against conviction, I'm not holding my breath - and if it's not going to happen now, it never will - not only was he utterly shameless in undermining the election (knowing full well that democracy is worth fighting for, i.e. raising tensions dangerously) and addition literally using combative language and calling for as close to a stormin of the capitol as possible while trying to retain plausible deniability, we're also just post election that shifted the balance of the senate against him. This is pretty much the best case scenario for an impeachment, and it's far from a sure thing.
Additionally, the current election was upheld largely because of states still sticking to extra-legal solid traditions. Those however, are not constitutionally protected; i.e. what worked was american culture & tradition (sometimes backed by state law), not really the american constitution. I mean, for scale: it's easier to throw out an election than a president, which is absolutely Not Ok.
Some of your other objections relate to tradition, e.g. such as puerto rico not being a state. This has nothing to do with the constitution; this is purely a political tradition. And indeed; many traditions are fine - while I think there's no question on the specific instance of puerto rico deserving statehood, the point is that the constitutional bar is very low despite the fact that it allows senate packing. A malicious populist could easily abuse that, if convenient, were it not for the real protection: tradition&culture, not the constitution.
The US has a solid set of traditions and an extremely civic culture; and that's why it works - not because of the constitution.
IMO this is something that I wish more citizens understood. They put way too much faith in the Constitution and don't realize that it's the tradition, the mythology of America that really holds this country together. If we lose that, we lose everything, and the Constitution won't save us.
"Statehood is too easy" is probably the wrong critique. The problem is that there is not clear enough guidelines for enforcing some criteria for what constitutes a new state. Thus we have a false positive like Wyoming, which shouldn't be a state with its minuscule population, and we a false negative in Puerto Rico, which is anachronistically governed like a colony .
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I don't think the original senate had states that had 80X the representation by population, as we have today between CA and WY.
I would argue the "false-positive" state that in this case is California.
Imagine if the entire Eastern seaboard was divided into three States. That would be equally imbalanced.
Practical hacks like that might mitigate the imbalance, but really - the senate needs proportional representation too. It's OK that small states are slightly over-represented, but the current state of affairs is pretty crazy. Also, the amount of people per senator is unbelievably high, making them less approachable than they once were.
If the senate were proportional, we could simply abolish the electoral college with little loss; just let congress elect the president and be done with it.
Each state is supposed to be an equal member of the union, which is why they each get equal voice in the senate. Up until the early 1900s senators were appointed by state governments rather than being popularly elected.
It's sort of fallen out of fashion to identify strongly as a member of your state rather than just as a citizen of the United States, but I think this year has demonstrated that state governments still have a lot of influence and autonomy.
I for one have been very pleased with my state's handling of the situation and have been glad to live here rather than somewhere else.
No, the Seventeenth Amendment should be repealed and state legislatures should be required to appoint senators. The United States form a federal government, not a unitary state; that means the several states should be represented.
> If the senate were proportional, we could simply abolish the electoral college with little loss; just let congress elect the president and be done with it.
Alternatively, state legislatures could appoint electors. Or maybe they could appoint two electors, and the people of the state could vote for the rest.
But personally, I don't think appointed senators would practically help much.
The point of federalism isn't to achieve some ivory tower ideal of centuries past, but to have real value today. Some of the value we can still retain is flexibility: essentially letting states go their own way for many laws and regulations. That benefit of federalism is quite real, and imposes no requirements that the senate needs to have appointed senators vs. elected, nor that the number of senators be fixed (vs. scale with population size). I'm pretty sure we can mitigate the deadlock, lack of accountability, and undemocratic representation issues with today's congress+executive while also eating our federalist cake.
To be clear: I don't think of this is worth pursuing as political reform; it's entirely unachievable due to the US's virtually unamendable constitution (basically only populist amendments are ever achievable, never this stuff; states need to large agree, after all - and pure political power play makes that utterly impossible).
The whole point of having two separate bodies is that it requires two groups that are chosen in a different manner to both agree that a piece of legislation is acceptable.
If anything, I would push the principle downwards further, and argue that state senators should represent counties. Indeed, this was the case until the execrably unconstitutional Reynolds v. Sims decision in 1964, which forced states to apportion state senate seats by population.
We would probably be a much happier union if our politics were mostly about those things most of us can agree on, rather that all about the things that we disagree on. Our politics is all scissor statements, now.
Also: just because the senate should be proportionally scaled doesn't mean that proportionality needs to follow the same rules as the house's: e.g. one of them might use winner-takes-all per district approach, another a ranked choice, or one might use districts, and another be a proportional representation of the whole state.
Finally, while a slight variation in the representation is likely "nice to have" I don't actually think it's all that critical. The idea makes sense: you want a check on power, but in practice it fails at that goal today, because power is not wielded by senate vs. house, but instead by republicans vs. democrats (sure, in the exceptional curent case of a precisely divided senate where every vote counts there's a slight possibility that intra-party disagreements mean that some senators sometimes switch sides, but even now it's going to be rare). But it's really important to realize that the senate does not exercise any kind of legislative check on the house in the normal case that congress is either clearly divided or clearly in the same hands. When house and senate are in the same hands, it's the political party that makes the decisions and members generally stay in line; and conversely when it's divided it's the political parties that do the horse-trading. There's no protection or moderation offered by the current system; if anything it makes for even more extreme legislation - because now it's either deadlock or go!-go!-go! - and when congress is in gung-ho mode, they don't have the luxury of careful consideration, and so likely produce less moderate legislation.
The current split is a failure; not a feature.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiv#section3
As to what you consider a "false positive" state, that's a political question, and apportionment is not the only political consideration. Congress is just about the best option we have for settling such complex, interstate questions.
Moreover, the US has always had lopsided state populations. The 65:1 apportionment population ratio between California and Wyoming (https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/2010/data...) is definitely big, but it's still within an order of magnitude of where we started in 1789.
The first (pre-Census) apportionment, hard-coded in Article 1, Section 2, had a 10:1 Virginia:Rhode Island ratio in the House:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section2
After the first Census, the largest difference ratio of apportionment population (i.e. population after implementing the 3/5 compromise, excluding "Indians not taxed", etc.) was about 11:1, between Virginia and Rhode Island:
https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/ApportionmentInformation-...
If you were to undo that 3/5ths slavery effect, the Virginia:Delaware ratio becomes closer to 12.5:1.
FWIW I agree Puerto Rico ought to be admitted, just as the Virgin Islands, Guam, and Mariana Islanders ought to be as well. France's DOM-TOM system seems like a better model to follow than America's, and it could still happen within our lifetimes; France made major reforms here within the last few decades:
Wyoming met the requirements when it was admitted, but its population hasn't grown as much as other states (e.g. no gold rush, etc). If you think this is somehow an incorrect result, what you're really arguing for is the abolishment of established states or periodically "redistricting" them in a way that would do more harm than good (given that states are more than just subdivisions for representative purposes).
> and we a false negative in Puerto Rico, which is anachronistically governed like a colony.
They've had many referendums on that question, and I think they voted against statehood until recently.
In any case - your points against redistricting are good. But even a "temporary" solution might have centuries of value, so I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to make a pragmatic push for limited redistricting, specifically only splitting large states - fusing states is much harder (because which laws apply?), and given population growth, it's pretty reasonable to have more states. Judging by the size of the house - which is probably too small, not too large - the senate has a lot of room to grow. We could certainly afford splitting all of the large states without causing huge issues - if people actually want that.
But a more long term solution without redistricting is to give up on the notion that states are equal. Just give more senators to larger states, and fewer to small states, and the current system mostly works; certainly better than now, and without the need for as radical an imposition as state-level redistricting.
Virginia: 447,016
Georgia: 23,375
About 19x.
No, it voted for becoming a state, under the terms set for the 2-question referendum.
Question 1: Should Puerto Rico continue its current territorial status?
Yes: 46%
No: 54% (Wins)
Question 2: Which non-territorial option do you prefer?
61.2% for statehood (Wins)
33.3% for free association
5.5% for independence
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Puerto_Rican_status_ref...
> and in 2017 a vote on the issue was scotched because of anti-statehood boycotters.
No, the vote was held, statehood won overwhelmingly, but the boycott by opponents was cited (by opponents!) as a reason to disregard the results.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Puerto_Rican_status_ref...
Criticism Edit Critics said that voters who favor a developed version of the current status of Puerto Rico (a commonwealth which is part of the United States with internal self-government) had no alternatives on the ballot. As a result, leaders of the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) instructed such voters to leave the second portion of the ballot blank, or to invalidate the ballot.[27]
Because there were almost 500,000 blank ballots, creating confusion as to the voters' true desire, it provided Congress an opportunity to ignore the vote, which it did.[28]
History professor Luis Agrait explained the result in this manner to CNN: "If you assume those blank votes are anti-statehood votes, the true result for the statehood option would be less than 50%."[29] Considered as a percentage of the total number of votes cast in the first ballot, 44% voted in favor of statehood on the second ballot.
—-
“Scotched” was the wrong word, implying not held, I apologize. Interpreting the vote got destroyed, was what I meant.
It’s clear that the folks who run PR see their jobs in danger if the island becomes a state. Hurricanes have now made it clear what second-class status means to the average person.
It surely worked, but with the majority of the Republicans in Congress objecting. And one can't help but wonder what would have happened if the election had been closer (you'd just need to ramp up the voter suppression a bit more). We had a taste of it in Bush v. Gore, where the judiciary decided to stop a recount with a very poor justification. Now imagine it in the much more polarized environment of today. Or with someone actually competent, who managed to solidify power over 4 years rather than doing opposition to his own government half the time.
That risk has been realized. Aren't the parliamentary governments of Hungary and Poland falling into "democratic" authoritarianism?
I'm pretty sure the US system was mainly designed to prevent that kind of thing, and put up democratically-derived barriers against it. The Trump presidency would have been way worse without them. Trump has been very effective at keeping his party in line behind him (even to the anti-democratic extremes). The things you complain about are mainly tradeoffs of that design.
The US works; and has excellent governance; that's not really in question (IMHO). The question is whether that's due to the constitution, or despite it.
If the US were as uninterested in democracy and as accepting of an autocratic leadership as hungary (and as small as hungary) - do you think the constitution of the US would have made anything better?
In many countries he could have just insisted (or tell a crony he insists) and that would have been that.
I agree. The checks and balances worked as they were supposed to.
Note that if there was evidence of widespread election fraud, the checks and balances on display here would (hopefully) provide a check on that.
The US Constitution would have really been 2.0 as the Articles of Confederation preceded it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation
The bicameral requirement for a concurrent majority is entirely by design and has plenty of supporters. It's pretty egregious to cite this first on the list of supposedly crucial flaws.
>that its form of democracy is subject to unproportional divergence as state population sizes diverge, that by contrast adding new states is way too easy
The one fixes the other, but adding new states turns out not to be that easy. From a political standpoint, larger states have an outsize cultural and regulatory influence (which is known to the state of California to cause cancer, but which cannot be mentioned in textbooks used in Texas schools) so compensating smaller states makes sense; voters in large states who feel their votes are diluted should, in principle, be able to correct this with a split. Is it a perfect balance? Not at all, but it's something.
But in practice, adding new states has become too hard and this may be a source of recent political problems! Puerto Rico should have been a state in the '90s. Movements to split large states may not be such a bad idea.
>that elections at all are in no way shape or form necessarily fair
A cultural and political flaw, not a Constitutional flaw. Maybe an omission, but you can't write all of the laws and practices necessary for a fair election into the Constitution; it would take up most of the document!
>that the constitution isn't sufficiently amendable
A risk-averse and historically motivated bias; we had one bad Amendment (the 18th) and the fallout really put a damper on amendment movements.
>the lack of a checks on the presidency (clearly not intentional, but impeachment is a purely hypothetical check)
Trump's impeachment trial was heavily impacted by the Democrats' primary season and not-so-subtle party establishment hopes that Warren would somehow pull out a win, so everything had to be rushed in order to avoid distracting her (and she lost badly anyway).
The issue isn't the bifurcation of congress by itself, it's that in addition the electoral system for both sides differs so greatly, and simultaneously that the US uses a winner take-all approach to assigning seats which converges to partisanship. Fix any one of those issues and the deadlock issue is reduced. It's the current bicameral nature that the problem, not the abstract notion. However, I also think that bicameralism is oversold - sure, made a lot of sense to try that, but the protections it supposedly provides are extremely slim in a partisan electorate. Part of the time there's deadlock, part of the time it's close (best case, but very rare and growing ever more rare as more congressmen toe the party line), and part of the time there's a trifecta, and there is in essence no bicameral congress, nor even really a separation of powers. The whole thing makes sense only if political parties either don't exist, or are constantly in some kind of coalition. But as in the US? There are only downsides, and virtually no upsides to a bicameral congress. Also, we know more now; other democracies don't have such strongly independant arms and if anything appear more stable.
> The one fixes the other, but adding new states turns out not to be that easy. From a political standpoint, larger states have an outsize cultural and regulatory influence (which is known to the state of California to cause cancer, but which cannot be mentioned in textbooks used in Texas schools) so compensating smaller states makes sense; voters in large states who feel their votes are diluted should, in principle, be able to correct this with a split. Is it a perfect balance? Not at all, but it's something.
Personally: I don't believe this problem is anything near as bad as the current problem (and it's likely overstated anyhow; even large states aren't that large). But yeah, splitting large states would be a good idea, even with proportional representation. But even if there it's worth boosting small states' influence, the current system is excessive. Fundamentally, I'm a little skeptical than non-proportionality is ever a great way to redress that sort of imbalance, but we could easily have a compromise system, e.g. N+1 senators (a kind of smoothing that boosts smaller states). Another thing we could do is limit large states' influence, e.g. by banning stuff like winner-takes-all solutions to the electoral college.
>> that elections at all are in no way shape or form necessarily fair
> A cultural and political flaw, not a Constitutional flaw. Maybe an omission, but you can't write all of the laws and practices necessary for a fair election into the Constitution; it would take up most of the document!
On the one hand: fair enough. On the other: that something so fundamental to a form of government isn't specified is a problem. This isn't black and white; the constitution doesn't and shouldn't include "all of the laws and practices". But the almost complete lack of ground rules - while very federal in spirit - also means that it's a race to the bottom, and what makes sense locally (gerrymandering, winner takes all, etc) isn't good for the whole. The ground rules here are lacking, and that makes sense historically - but then again, that's exacty my point: the constitution is a product of its time, and not a good fit today.
>> that the constitution isn't sufficiently amendable
> A risk-averse and historically motivated bias; we had one bad Amendment (the 18th) and the fallout really put a damper on amendment movements.
It's not just cultural, it's part of the rules too - it's way too easy for a tiny number of voters to essentially veto a change. Also, again, look around the rest of the world (here britain really stands out) - those protections don't seem to help in practice. Britain has no protections whatsoever on constitutional change, yet it hasn't collapsed after centuries. Again, I think that intuitively the idea of setting a high bar for amendments makes sense, but empyrically it does not appear to be borne out. Other protections might be to instead of raising a high bar, create a huge drag - make the process take a long time, and thus require multiple congresses to approve. Have veto-like capabilities, but ones that delay yet further, not prevent reform wholesale.
>> the lack of a checks on the presidency (clearly not intentional, but impeachment is a purely hypothetical check)
> Trump's impeachment trial was heavily impacted by the Democrats' primary season and not-so-subtle party establishment hopes that Warren would somehow pull out a win, so everything had to be rushed in order to avoid distracting her (and she lost badly anyway).
I think you're really focusing on the details here. Set aside whatever political agreements or disagreements you have; the fact is that today's impeachment is a political process that requires going against the grain of partisanship. It's way to attractive to reject impeachment for partisan reasons; because after all - a flawed president one agrees with is still better than giving the other side a win, and it gets worse given the senate's extremely unproportional nature. This causes real problems too; it's not just a question of who wins or who loses - what you see in other countries that have an easier time ejecting leaders is that they try to mitigate damage a lot early, and are a lot more careful to avoid the kind of transgressions that have plagued quite a few US presidents in living memory. And when they do engage in dubious behavior they often seek approval by others at least in their own congressional majorities beforehand, because they know they risk getting hung out to dry otherwise - and that itself is a valuable check on excesses. Alternatively, impeachment itself should have much more teeth.
Maybe trump is too recent a memory, but consider Clinton's impeachment. Sure, I think most people agree questioning a president about his sex life under oath was not reasonable - but lying under oath, really? The only reason that was OK was because the whole thing had the whiff of partisan witch-hunt, and that's a problem, because it'll always be spun to that. I'd rather have a system where everybody knows that if you pull a stunt like that you're liable to get removed. I don't mind if some other leader from the same party takes their place - in fact, that's a good idea, because it makes the process less about partisan rejection of the other side's election win, and more about personal responsibility - but leaders should not be even close to above the law; and right now they are - how bad does behavior need to get before they're actually punished?
How do you pick judges if you don't appoint them or elect them?
In Texas, Justices of the Peace have no particular requirements, and are (IIRC) the equivalent of small-claims courts in the rural counties, but have had some special powers, like acting as coroner in counties without access to one. I had a government teacher with a long list of amusing anecdotes---like the JP that determined that a body with like, 27 bullet wounds had committed suicide. Judge Roy Bean was a JP; at one point someone brought in a dead cowboy who had fallen down a cliff. The body was carrying $25 and a pistol. Bean found the cowboy to be carrying a concealed weapon, confiscated the pistol, and fined the body $25.
One method that I've heard of is to have a committee (/"commission"/"council") select judges. The committee composition can draw from multiple branches of government (e.g. some members are existing judges and others are appointed/elected by the executive and/or legislative branches) and from civil society (e.g. appointed/elected by bar associations; in some implementations a majority of the committee is from civil society). The terms of members of the committee can be staggered.
The idea is to make it difficult for any one controversial person or party or movement to consistently dominate the committee, because in order to do so they would need to consistently dominate multiple branches of government and civil society (because the different members of the committee are selected by these different institutions) over a long period of time (because of the staggered terms).
The overarching one is the government being a triumvirate. If one branch overreaches, the other two can keep it in check. Triumvirates have historically been stable governments. Even in the Soviet Union - the Party, the Army, the Police.
Of course. If the laws are rotten it's the court's job to tell the legislature don't do that.
For what it's worth I don't care much about Lewandowski's pardon and I suspect a large part of the outrage here is because his compensation was public and he is a tech worker. There are other more salient recent examples suggesting the pardon system is being abused.
Original incorrect statement: Levandowski not lewandowski. Different people different offenses.
But aren't prosecutions done by the DoJ, as part of the executive branch, i.e. the decision to prosecute someone at all, or whether to offer a plea deal is already under the president's control?
He may ultimately be in charge of the prosecutions, but for him to take that much control is considered unseemly. The closest the President will generally come to deciding whether to prosecute someone is to make a policy that certain crimes will get extra attention or no attention. Alternatively, he can fire the US Attorney.
Edit: fixed use of election instead of appointment
It's much better to be on an nth + 1 republic, let me tell you.
The other gaping flaw is the systemic, undemocratic bias that determines the makeup of our Upper House.
This a feature, not a bug, and in fact the United States would not exist without it. The senate prevents small states from being dominated by large states, and is the only reason that smaller states like Rhode Island agreed to join the union in the first place.
If we were to alter this configuration of the Senate, the same question would undoubtedly arise--why should small states like North Dakota, Vermont, and Oklahoma remain in the Union, only to be dictated to by the citizens of Florida, New York and California?
Perhaps. The problem I see is that state boundaries are pretty arbitrary. The real political division is between urban and rural, and whether or not a particular state is 'red' or 'blue' depends on how those boundaries have been created. There are a huge number of rural voters in California that share more with Wyoming rural voters than Wyoming urban voters, so why should they be disenfranchised simply by living within the state of California?
I don't know why this is a valid argument, when you can turn it on it's head. Why should states like Florida, Texas, New York and California, who (1) have the most amount of people and (2) generate nearly all economic activity, be dictated by the citizens of North Dakota? Why is it that this argument never considers the inverse?
It's clear, by looking at Federal budget inflows and outflows, that states like North Dakota need California more than California needs them. If States were countries, and if The United States were more like the European Union, Texas would naturally have outsized power, much like Germany. It would be Texas citizens bailing out North Dakota.
If you think NYC could be supported purely by NY state alone (or frankly even just 'Blue' states), you'd be in for a rude shock.
That much of the value add/economic activity happens in the more densely populated states isn't that surprising - but cutting off the midwest from the rest of the United States would cause catastrophic famine in very short order, to name one example.
[1] https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=17844
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/714376/crude-oil-product...
CA's central valley produces fruits, vegetables, and nuts, much of which gets exported, and a bit of, but not a huge amount of staple foods - and if you add up all California's agricultural output, it is still only ~13.5% of the US total. [https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/#:~:text=California's%20a....]
The areas in California that produce that food are solid red, through and through. Texas is red, ESPECIALLY the areas that produce that oil - but let's set aside the intra-state conflicts on this. None of the states mentioned are 'ideologically' self sufficient in their needs (CA for Oil, despite being a major food and oil producer, Texas for food - among literally millions of major and minor needs), and NY State or NYC are most decisively not in either category.
[https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...]
If you look at your own chart, you'll also see that ~90% of all of the remaining entries following California (who make up the bulk of production) would be called midwest, near midwest (definitely not blue), or 'flyover territory'.
If you go to the link you had and filter by staples (as compared to expensive-per-calorie foods like almonds or strawberries), you'll see this reflected even more strongly [https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=17844#P7521943176f...]
California has a LOT of people in it. 11% of the nation. While they might not personally feel the brunt of a major famine right away - running out of fuel for the harvesters, or the steel products to repair their equipment, or the equipment itself (predominantly produced in 'red' areas or imported), would mean it wouldn't be that long either.
If we look at the wider context, losing 50%+ of the agricultural products aka inland 'flyover' areas and the midwest would definitely cause catastrophic famine. And that is at least how much is there from your own links.
I think you are missing mine; I'm not making a blue/red distinction, I'm making a point about senate representation.
First, you are trying to prove that California, Texas, or New York could not be self sufficient. This is a meaningless point as today states like Wyoming are not self sufficient. I'm sure a state like Texas would figure out self-sufficiency much faster than Wyoming. Why do large states have to give up power to small states given that both would probably be screwed without the other, but small states would be likely screwed even more? The idea that large states must cede representative power in order to access resources is absurd - after all they are already paying them via federal budgets; surely there is no reason to double pay? The "they provide resources" argument is bullshit.
Secondly, coming back to senate representation & electoral power - there are vastly more people in rural California and conservative districts like Bakersfield than there are in Wyoming. Those voters have effectively 0 senate representation. Again, I don't care if they vote red or blue, but Wyoming gets outsized power. Why?
I don't naively believe that once California has more representative power that the whole country would turn into San Francisco. I believe states like Wyoming and other sparsely populated, deep red states, allows the Republican party to effectively ignore their voters in blue states as well. That's the reason the current system is upheld - it allows the GOP to effectively never have to answer to it's voters. It cuts both ways, the current system is bad for Americans; red & blue. There are more registered republicans in California than most other states have people and the state itself was solidly red until 1992; yet those voters don't have much of a voice.
The party affiliations do not matter - the notion that a Wyoming democrat has 4x the voice than a California republican just isn't right.
Anything else is 'changing the terms', and that is very likely to result in a lot of chaos - since it would be unconstitutional, unless you got 3/4's of the states to go along with it.
Pretty unlikely, since most of the states benefit from this arrangement?
Statehood is eternal. Secession is quite literally treason and the Civil war was in that sense constitutionally mandatory.
>Statehood is eternal.
Is that you, Louis XIV? Spinning yarns about the divine right to rule?
>Secession is quite literally treason...
Says the nation born of treason.
>..and the Civil War was in that sense constitutionally mandatory.
Any institution which is willing and able to kill a million men solely for the purpose of its own preservation is a menace. But as long as it was constitutionally necessary, I guess we're good?
SCOTUS judges are not elected; they are appointed by POTUS, after confirmation by the Senate.
At the state level, only about half the states use elections for their Supreme Court judges. However, the highly-polarized and roughly-evenly-split Midwestern states (MN, WI, MI, OH, PA) are among these, so it definitely will come across as more visible.
This doesn't seem to be such a problem in other countries. I don't really understand if that's because the judges are purposely appointed to be as partisan as possible, or whether the 'rules' are so badly written that they can be interpreted any way you like.
It's a philosophical difference in legal systems derived from the Napoleonic code (and more indirectly the Roman legal system, so it's common in continental Europe) vs. the English legal system (the US, Canada, India, Australia, etc)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#Common_law_legal_sy...
And to your second point, the popular vote went Democratic in the last 7 of 9 elections (and electoral in 5 of 9) but 3 of 9 Supreme Court Justices are Democrat appointed. The court does not reflect our deeply ingrained values.
The supreme court literally decides whether X real-world activity is made illegal by Y law. Interpreting the rules is making rules.
The Republic is actually quite prescient in its analysis of forms of government and how they decay from one form to another. The USA today very much resembles an oligarchy (class-based rule by the rich) being pushed rapidly into social media-driven democratic mob rule.
Were we already farther down that path, Trump might have been enough to push us down the hill even farther, from democracy to true tyranny.
Agree with the first part, disagree with the second part.
It's going to remain an oligarchy, but the circus of 'mob rule' will be utilized to make sure the oligarchs remain in power.
This is quite similar to taking the views of Paul Ryan and Rand Paul and calling them representative of the US government. Those views are not extreme in the context of the time and are shared by a sizeable fraction but it's not a random or representative sample.
“Represent the view of” is misleading. The Federalist Papers were not an academic exercise of recording opinions for posterity, they were long form campaign ads for a targeted audience to sell the ratification of the constitution.
Also, the Federalist Papers were written before the formation of the parties, and when that formation did occur, Madison was one of the founding leaders, along with Jefferson, of the Democratic-Republican Party, he wasn’t a Federalist.
- Have a public vote, direct legitimation (or via some extra electoral college or something) this means that judges have to be "popular" and run campaigns and question is, if that's really smart ...
- Have the "juristical class" elect within, so judges from lower courts would lick somebody, or current judges elect additional ones. That would put judges into their own "class" and remove all democratic legitimation
- or do what is done and have a democratically elected body do it. In the case of the U.S. it's done by a combination of president (nominating) and Senate (confirming) where the Senate represents the different states.
It is one of the tough problems.
For the pardon the idea comes from absolutist times where a King would pardon as he likes. The modern interpretation comes from correcting "blind" justice. Justice has to rule according to law. But sometimes one either might decide that a law was bad and than a pardon might be a way to correct that (ideally if law is rewritten as well) and sometimes there are hard cases, like the 90 year old who should get a chance to die outside of prison, for sake of family etc.
Generally the system assumes the actors act mostly in good faith and were removed (impeachment etc.) otherwise.
I think Germany got that better: here we have a 12 year term (thus a single government can't easily swap them out - a learning from the time of 1933) and a max age of 68 (for whatever reason that was picked)
You might lose some expertise, but on the other hand, you don't have the tragic spectacle of Justices dieing in office whilst waiting for a 'safe' time to retire.
Taking again Germany as my example, since I know it best: There are 16 judges with a period of 12 years. Adding the age limit and other reasons that averages to about 2 elections per year. Thus a bit more than 4 years till a new group can take over the majority. (Now they are elected alternating by the different chambers of parliament, where one of the chambers, Bundesrat, is also slower moving in replacement ... making it hard for a short term movement to take over control and if, impact is relatively short - unless they stay in power long enough to replace all.
Let them serve for a limited period of time, say 16 years max. Can't be removed before then. It's not that complicated and would prevent justices who literally sit on the bench until the day they die.
If that were the case, and justices' terms started in January of even years (to avoid the election cycle), we would currently have 2 Trump appointees, 4 Obama appointees, and 3 Bush appointees, roughly matching what the balance of the court would be next month if Ginsburg had died 3 months later.
One method that I've heard of is to have a committee (/"commission"/"council") select judges. The committee composition can draw from multiple branches of government (e.g. some members are existing judges and others are appointed/elected by the executive and/or legislative branches) and from civil society (e.g. appointed/elected by bar associations; in some implementations a majority of the committee is from civil society). The terms of members of the committee can be staggered.
The idea is to make it difficult for any one controversial person or party or movement to consistently dominate the committee, because in order to do so they would need to consistently dominate multiple branches of government and civil society (because the different members of the committee are selected by these different institutions) over a long period of time (because of the staggered terms).
As far as 1 WY vote being worth 4 Texas votes, that’s also irrelevant because the president is elected as president of the republic, not the president of individual people.
Saying that the president is not a president of the people when people literally vote directly for that person (unlike most of the wester republics) is frankly pretty weak. How can you argue he is not the most influencial political figure in a US citizen life?
Some states have tied their electoral votes to the national popular vote in the name of increases democracy. It will be interesting to see the first state that has its electoral votes changed due to this. I imagine those residents won't be so thrilled to have their votes go against their will and in favor of how other people in the country voted.
For all practical purposes though, people vote directly for the president (last election is the proof that even a full front effort won't sway the election outcome from the people's votes). The only practical difference is that one single vote has a different weight depending on what state you live in.
Rural areas are incredibly over-represented imo. This should be addressed more than the tiny details that don't really change the outcome.
Just imagine how different the left and right parties would be if the will of the people would be equally represented.
So the most populous cities should have the unopposed power to decide all of the federal policies that could impact the lives of rural people? This sounds like the recipe for a Hunger Games classist uprising.
This is the same as saying your vote counts less than someone with more friends than you.
Might as well just throw out the whole state sovereignty idea which is an option.
Our whole system was based on individual rights and that philosophy extends to states as equal members of the union.
Just try to look from the other side of the fence. I can rephrase your question as:
"So the few individuals living in rural areas should have the unopposed power to decide all of the federal policies that could impact the lives of the vast majority of the people in the USA?"
So yes. I am sorry but with a democracy, you sometime lose and have to accept that the decision is different from your preference.
In the US this only applies to federal, how much federal laws should impact states is not really in discussion here (and honestly I have no opinion on the matter. I am originally from Europe and have limited understanding of a lot of states laws and structures).
Also, you are confirming my point that rural areas are over-represented. You seem to intend that it is rightly so, but I do find this criteria unjust, just like your example of voting power coupled with amount of friends is.
To me, the only criteria that I find just is "every person has one vote with the exact same power". It's simple and naïve, but only one I have seen that I consider fair.
How you cluster people is irrelevant for a policy to be fair or not. It's petty to chose what gives you an advantage. You should stick to a set of values and agree on policies that better express those values.
Understanding and protecting minorities is one of the core values that need to shapes policies.
You can't solve the minority problem by giving them more votes, because you can't give it to all minorities. Everyone is part of somekind of minority.
Today rural people are a minory who has a privilege compared to others.
Is this a thing? I had no idea. Do you know what states do that ?
This turns out to be really helpful when someone starts claiming something like widespread voter fraud for instance, because there is no one institution to attack, or even identical set of rules that can be exploited. Each state runs it's elections as it sees fit, and then votes the way it deems necessary - and is strongly interested in making sure it's voice is heard.
In that case, why aren't state legislatures or state governors voting for president and members of congress?
And prior to the 17th, Senator were chosen by the state governments as well.
Presumably because people of those states don't want it that way. Which means they consider the federal government "their" government, not the "government of the state".
Uh, not fully…
In France, Germany, Greece, and Italy it's also a prerogative of the president, for example.
Executive orders are Royal decrees. The president signing laws is Royal Assent. Presidential pardons are Royal pardons. The power to adjourn Congress is proroguation. It goes on and on. Of course there are differences, but a lot of these things are still direct copies that never got reformed.
Any time you create a second system, you can see similarities to the first system. That doesn't make it a "modified copy"; it makes it a "rewrite that has some similarities".
As I said there are differences but the overall system is basically the same shape. Specifically the Presidential Veto wasn't conjured up out of thin air as a cunning plan to implement a system of checks and balances, it was just carried along with the general cut-and-paste.
The details do differ and have diverged over the centuries, for sure, but the basic executive role of the President in the US system today is that of George III in the 1770s. I also think there's a case to be made that the political relationships between your branches of government would be much more familiar to a 18th Century British politician than their contemporary counterparts.
> it's a modified copy of the British constitutional system. [...] Executive orders are Royal decrees
Those things are not mutually exclusive. In other words, sure, you can look at the latest batch of pardons and think they are overzealous - but it doesn't mean the action does not have place in the US checks & balances system.
There's no good reason to give all that power of unconditional pardons to one person.
In other words, Black people would beg to differ.
Net result: we rein in that power (hopefully). Dont get rid of it - keep it but instill rules and regulations like enforcing Justice Department oversight and review
When forming the government the founders didn't just blindly copy British government. There was a lot of debate over what to keep and what to omit (For example, we don't have a king. Presidents were seen as servants not as rulers).
Pardon power is mostly a direct copy of British pardon power. However, there was a reason for that beyond not getting around to reform.
It should also be noted that presidential pardon power, while very powerful, isn't unlimited. The president can only pardon federal crimes, they cannot pardon state crimes. That's an important break from British law where royalty had(?) unlimited power to pardon any crime. Particularly when pardon power was first envisioned, the founders looked towards a very small federal government. In that case, the number of federal crimes were far fewer than what we have today. That means, the presidents pardon power was pretty much only for crimes such as treason.
In other words, absolutely the founders were influenced by British government. They weren't, however, just blindly copying things. Everything went through debate.
The British approach is more appropriately labeled not as a separation of powers, but a fusion of powers [0] - probably the strongest example of such a government currently around today.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_of_powers#United_Kingdo...
The Westminster system subordinates the executive branch to the legislative, but keeps the judicial branch independent.
(In the past, the judicial branch in the UK was not completely separated from the legislative and executive, due to the judicial roles of the House of Lords and the Lord Chancellor, but that all changed in 2005. And other Westminster system countries such as Canada or Australia didn't have that issue.)
I am not aware of any corrupt pardons under Obama similar to that of Marc Rich under Clinton, much less more egregiously corrupt pardons like that of Ford by Nixon or Manafort by Trump.
The British system was very familiar, and while it had potential flaws visible to them at the time they were known familiar flaws. I find it doubtful that someone coming up with an entirely novel and unfamiliar system would have got anywhere at all, no matter how rational and well argued it was. People like familiar and that can affect their judgement. Just worth considering.
Isn't this true of your own original post?
I don't really understand what argument you're trying to make.
I'm not disputing the fact that they took ideas directly from the British government. I disputing the fact that it was done without consideration, reform, or reason. There's ample evidence that they heavily debated each part of the British government that they adopted.
The fact is, the founders remedy for a corrupt president was impeachment. They made that perfectly clear. Corruption included things like misusing the pardon power (High crimes/Bribery).
What they didn't anticipate was the fact that we'd end up with a 2 party system equally spitting the country where neither side would remove their president from office. The put a LOT of faith in "honor" and the fact that the general electorate would punish dishonorable leaders. They did not expect things like wedge issues.
State governors have that power.
The role of "governor" isn't defined by any federal laws or rules. It's theoretically possible for a state to decide that it doesn't need a governor.
[1] https://ccresourcecenter.org/state-restoration-profiles/50-s...
The guarantee clause (Article IV section 4) says "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government..." What constitutes a "Republican Form of Government"? Is having a governor essential to it?
I think the answer is nobody can really say because the Supreme Court has never had to consider that exact question, and nobody knows how they'd rule if they did. They have previously ruled that the guarantee clause is "non-justiciable" (in Luther v. Borden, 1849), which implies they'd let a state adopt whatever form of government it likes, but they could change their mind about that if they wanted to.
What if a state wanted to adopt the Westminister system, like a Canadian province or Australian state? What would SCOTUS have to say about that?
https://lawshelf.com/shortvideoscontentview/the-power-of-the...
> The United States Constitution does not have a provision that explicitly permits the use of executive orders. Article II, Section 1, Clause 1 of the Constitution simply states: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." Sections 2 and 3 describe the various powers and duties of the president, including "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed"
They're constitutional--in the sense that the President has the legal authority to issue orders to the rest of the executive branch--but they are certainly not an explicit provision of the Constitution explicitly modeled after the royal decrees of the British monarchy.
I personally think we should have kept the part where Parliament ceremonially slams the door in front of the Usher of the Black Rod every time. Cracks me up every time.
The idea of a First Amendment such as we have in America would be entirely foreign in Britain, for instance, since no sitting parliament could ever restrict a majority of a future parliament from passing any law they saw fit. Even Royal Assent at the time was largely ceremonial and usually carried out by Royal Commissioners rather than the monarch. In fact, the last time assent was withheld was 1708 under Queen Anne.
Distinctly English rather than distinctly British. As Lord Cooper said in MacCormick v. Lord Advocate, "the principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish Constitutional Law".
> no sitting parliament could ever restrict a majority of a future parliament from passing any law they saw fit
If the British Parliament tried to amend the Acts of Union 1707 to remove the protections granted to Scotland – for example, if it sought to abolish Scots law and replace it with English law – it is quite possible that the Scottish courts would rule such an Act of Parliament unconstitutional under Scots law, and also quite possible that the Supreme Court of the UK would uphold their ruling.
Is it though?
I went to school in America, I know what they teach and elevate as sacrosanct.
The developed world laughs at our "checks and balances".
This last term, the judiciary was the only "check and balance" left and it did its job, but it didn't have to.
The executive branch also controls the justice department, which did the prosecutions.
Upon first read I just saw the last name and thought it was related to his former campaign chair Corey Lewandowski[2]!
As in , I thought the extradition request was to be sent to USA for a trial.
Trump pardoned Steve Bannon for example and he has not yet been convicted (he has been charged). Assange has been charged with various things by the Feds, which is what Trump would pardon. The floated theory went that Trump could plausibly pardon himself as well, for any likely future charges.
It's not questionable if you can pardon things that haven't been charged yet. You can. The pardon power is absolute, greater than laws that define specific crimes, and doesn't require accepting guilt or whatever.
For a specific example, Jimmy Carter pardoned everyone who dodged the draft for Vietnam[1]. This showed that pardons could both apply to actions which hadn't been charged and categories of people.
I think one of the only limits on the pardon power is that it can only apply to past behavior.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/pardon/vietnam-war-era-pardon-instru...
It doesn't actually show that because the legal effect of thar pardon has never been challenged. If no one tries to charge someone subject to a pardon, or that pardon recipient never offers the pardon against the charges, nothing is resolved about the validity and effect of the pardon.
That's because impeachment is a political process, not a judicial proceeding. Clemency does not affect impeachment.
The pardon power applies to offenses against the US “except in cases of impeachment” (Art. II § 2 ¶ 1). This uncontroversially means a pardon cannot affect the process of impeachment in the House and trial on charges of impeachment in the Senate. It is disputed whether it also somehow prevents pardons for criminal charges relating to the same act for which the recipient was impeached. The issue has never come up in a nontheoretical sense, so an authoritative resolution hasn’t been handed down.
Ford pardoning Nixon is the usual example.
> [I]... do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974.
https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/speeches/740061.as...
While he had once entertained the idea, Trump decided against it because he did not want to anger Senate Republicans who will soon determine whether he's convicted during his Senate trial.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/trump-self-pardon-wa...
I don't know if there's a specific word for it in any language, but it's completely in character for trump to always pick the worst of two choices.
What a laugh. Significant price? How so?
Snowden and Assange have no value in the market economy. Lewandowski, on the other side, has some interesting skills
Assange won't, because Donnie doesn't think he'll be useful again.
I know the intend behind this 'pardoning' idea, but both in theory and practice this seems very bad.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers#Compariso...
Instead it’s just more and more corruption.
The moment when POTUS is unable to profit off of his presidency is the moment where these things wouldn't happen.
POTUS becoming a multimillionaire after presidency is just a sad display of moral corruption.
Edit: Not talking about Trump, just in general about POTUS. It's my impression that in the last 50 years all of them benefited from the public, exerting their influence after losing the binds of the POTUS position to enrich themselves. Shows quite a lack of moral character in all of them.
It still seems like an accident of history that Americans sent Jimmy Carter to the highest office in the land. For as much as they claim to want a regular Joe/Joe-ette as President (the mirage of the unpretentious 'I can have a beer with him' candidate) they seem to vote for people that are the polar opposite.
Before they passed a presidential pension bill Truman was basically broke, living of his army pension
In 2000 Donald Trump told Fortune magazine, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”
You are underestimating something. I remember how Bush was literally Hitler and Cheney was an impossibly evil name.
But now Bush is a lovable cook, Biden admin was taking with Dick Cheney about foreign affairs and Liz Cheney was just celebrated by the left/media for dumping on Trump.
Trump brand won’t be what it was, but it’s something different now. I think the political left did themselves a great disservice by not giving in to election fraud investigations, when people were asking for signature matching, observer access, proving compliance with Article2, scanned ballot uploads, whatever else was reasonable and we should expect our election system to provide without question. Even the most rabid TrumpHater5000 should have supported that because it would have proved he was wrong. Now in some people’s eyes we will never truly know. For practically half the country Biden has an asterix by his name. That doesn’t seem like a great start and it didn’t actually tarnish Trump Brand except to the people who hated him already including the establishment GOP. His approval among supporters is not lower since Jan 6th, as difficult as it may be to understand.
Oh boy, are you going to be in for a nasty surprise. Trump is going to get more powerful after this mess, but it will likely tear the GOP apart. And don't kid yourself that the Democrats love the idea of having him as an enemy if he ever runs again. Most of what you're watching is political theatre.
If he stays out of prison then the message is 'USA's political establishment endorses white power, and oligarchy' and given many nations rely on USA having at least a little morality as the greatest military superpower on Earth ...
USA seemingly can't be trusted to keep even a semblance of Rule of Law, any country lead by those who don't themselves pretend towards megalomania has to find this problematic. Your (USA's) democracy is very broken.
No offense, but this seems like a narrative straight out of the left-wing playbook. Fomenting racial divisions around the World? Seems a bit of a stretch.
As far as the motivation being "purely money", I'd say his presidency cost him a bunch of scrilla, though I bet he earns it back in the long run. Is that any different than, say, Bill Clinton, who has made millions of dollars doing speeches around the world after his presidency? I'm not sure.
>USA seemingly can't be trusted to keep even a semblance of Rule of Law
Turn off the TV. The US is still great. Again, what you are watching is mostly theatre.
>If he stays out of prison then the message is 'USA's political establishment endorses white power, and oligarchy'
Wait, you say the US can't be trusted to keep the law, but then say that Trump needs to go to prison? For what crime?
He's clearly a capable actor. He pretends, rather convincingly, to be this amazing, confident, shrewd businessman. And I think a lot of people idolize him because he embodies what they think of when they think of a smart, successful business person. But I think real smart, successful business people spend two minutes with him, and paint him as a rube.
I agree, but, uh, everyone with half-a-brain knew that this about Donald Trump long before he was elected president. He's been playing this character for 40 years.
If, on the other hand, a president makes his presidency about doing favours for the rich and powerful then he won't have to write books and speeches afterwards.
ex-POTUS is still an influential individual and is just profiting after the binds of the position are lifted.
I think it would be a pretty nice decree to disallow the president to become extremely wealthy X years after presidency. Let the influence slowly fade and let's see if POTUS as an individual, after being elected to do public good, can produce some value outside of benefiting from being elected.
"Always has been."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-lobbying-execu...
This had been one of his only practical actions towards keeping his campaign promise of "draining the swamp."
Levadowski pardon, the spy, the swamp, etc.
Remember, Trump won 47% of the popular vote which likely includes a large number of HNers. We should not alienate those people.
Im also downvoted btw, so this goes both ways.
The only result this achieves is telling these people with "reprehensible ideas" that they need to take their discussion elsewhere and avoid any communication with people who don't share their opinion.
This is the opposite of productive.
But how do we get there?
In my view, until Hacker News has a mechanism to capture different kinds of feedback; e.g.:
1. comment is well-written (even if I disagree)
2. comment is civil (even if not well-written and/or I disagree)
we're going to have "lump all, some, or none of these factors together" voting.
Both sides see themselves as the victim and the others as the attacker.
>Why is it always on us to be nice to people who hate us and want us dead?
Do you see how this is perpetuating the problem?
I have not been brainwashed by the TV to think these types of people are evil. I know them intimately. I know that they are multifaceted human beings, capable of love, but also capable of hate and great harm. I have family members that do believe other races are below them, aunts and uncles old enough to have fought against civil rights and desegregation. Much like Trump, who was 22 when MLK was assassinated. Grandparents who mutter about the war of northern aggression. They are still alive today, there are millions of people like them, and they vote. They push real policies that present a real threat to many Americans.
I have moved away from the South, and have new friends and family, who have directly been affected by the Muslim Ban, changes to immigration policy, and the rhetoric of Trump and his supporters these past four years. This is real harm.
"Both sides" are not the same, and there are real victims of such bigotry. To deny this reality perpetuates these problems.
The media has spent the last 4 years portraying Trump and his voters as evil racists. What is not mentioned is that his support among minorities increased from 2016 to 2020. He had more black and hispanic percentage of voters than any republican in in living memory. Ironically Trump lost the election because middle class white voters abandoned him.
Don't get me wrong Trump was a terrible president and there are countless criticisms that can be leveled at his administration. But the key question no one is asking is why did people vote for him in the first place and why did so many vote for him again? To me answering that with "because they're all racist/fascist" is nothing more than a cop-out from established political powers to distract from their own failure of public confidence.
My experience was not some one off event, or story that applies to just my family, it reflects a culture of racism common in this country, particularly the South. We are talking about well documented multi-generational harm perpetuated by communities, businesses, and government.
"There are shitty people of all walks of life," is not sufficient to explain away the harms of institutionalized racism in the United States.
So, you do not need to call people "brainwashed" for recognizing the attitudes espoused by many Trump supporters. They have earned their reputation for good reason, though "some, I assume, are good people."
As for "the key question no one is asking is why did people vote for him in the first place and why did so many vote for him again?" In fact, many people have asked that question, have studied it extensively, and have found that racism and anti-immigrant attitudes were the strongest indicators of support for Trump (e.g. [1]). Yes, you're right that "because they're all racist" is a cop-out, there are other factors at play, but to say that "racial attitudes" is not a significant factor is to ignore the evidence.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/09/18/2016-election-race-class...
"People from the south are racist bigots"
"Minorities are lazy criminals"
"White people who disagree with my politics are white supremacists"
These are all different flavors of the same poison.
Just how you can use your antidote to justify your statements of prejudice against groups of people you don't like, equivalent people from the right will citing FBI crime statistics until they're blue in the face to justify their prejudice.
In that respect there is parity between the right and left.
Likewise, understanding of the historical conditions and causal factors responsible for racial disparities in wealth, education, incarceration rates, and other outcomes is not equivalent to the regurgitation of FBI statistics. Anyone can cite statistics, what matters is understanding why these disparities exist. In that respect, both the "left" and "right" rely on such statistics, the difference is in their interpretations, or lack thereof. Someone who is familiar with the history of racial discrimination in the U.S. will offer causal explanations of these disparities, which are consistent with these statistics and often distribute responsibility among various institutions and policies. On the other hand, someone who reflexively cites FBI statistics without interpretation, is at best justifying their prejudice by means of willful ignorance. At worst, by omitting the underlying context and offering no explicit explanation, they imply that these disparities are actually explained race, so that the minority can be blamed, conveniently absolving themselves of any responsibility. Thus they perpetuate and spread this prejudice, relying on their others' existing biases, ignorance, and proclivity to accept simple explanations or easy scapegoats.
These behaviors are clearly not equivalent. One is born out of ignorance and desire for self absolution, which are timeless, and that is why the same arguments have been used for decades. The other relies on deeper understanding of historical conditions and acceptance of culpability, which takes significant time and collective effort to build and communicate, which is why it has taken decades for concepts like "institutionalized racism" to enter the broader public discourse. Furthermore, the former is by definition prejudice, bias based on an immutable attribute of others, their race, while the latter is instead critical of others' prejudicial behavior, behavior that can change.
So, this as not an issue of prejudice on "both sides", and framing it as such presents a shallow understanding of the situation. This is also demonstrated by the quotes you've constructed to characterize the "left" on this issue, e.g. "white people who disagree with my politics are white supremacists". No reputable person actually says this, though the quotes from the "right" that you've used are almost direct quotes from sources like the President Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc. So, what would someone on the "left" actually say? Let's check out some quotes from Ibram X. Kendi; "Racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next", and, "whenever the antiracist sees individuals behaving positively or negatively, the antiracist sees exactly that: individuals behaving positively or negatively, not representatives of whole races". The quote you've constructed is not just an uncharitable interpretation, it's actually in direct contradiction to what people on the "left" are saying.
So, again, these are not equivalent. I also want to point out that you have not engaged with any of the specific points (or references) that I have made in my previous comments, but instead are changing topics, presenting straw man arguments, and doubling down on "both sides" false equivalence fallacies. It is extremely unlikely that everyone else is "brainwashed" while you are somehow an objective observer of "both sides", nothing is that simple. Approaching discussions in this way will only serve to protect your own ego and worldview, and prevent personal growth. I highly recommend that you reflect and seek out opinions different from your own, while thinking critically about the foundations for your beliefs and the environment from which you derived them.
There was literally no good reason to vote for Trump regardless of views (to be fair op didn't say he voted for Trump)
I personally look at the pardon list and I'm at a loss for words. What a weird mix of scammers and celebrities.
Drain the Swamp simply meant get rid of anyone against Trump, including goverment ethics watchdogs
Snowden was just the first honorable American to come across the information and he did his best to expose it safely, by giving it to journalists to release, after consulting with the government.
We can't expect whistle blowers to do a perfect job. There will always be some mistakes. As long as they act in good faith and reasonably, they should be protected.
I agree 100%.
Everyone says this but it's pure conjecture. We don't know what would have happened and now we never will.
Edward had a childish reaction to release documents that had nothing to do with Xkeyscore (of which the media claim as the reason for his release), particularly those of Tailored Access Operations [TAO]. This was the action of a petulant individual lashing out at the system however he felt he could. Don't let it be ignored that he was specifically working in a capacity supporting operations in China.. then fled there before moving on to Russia. No one talks about or acknowledges that Edward was in a support role and not an "Operator" at the agency either. He was pissed because he applied twice and was denied, in part due to his horrible support on operation plans.
He wanted to act out and damage the NSA and their mission.
The hero worship of Snowden is deplorable. I only wish the american public had a real understanding and grasp of what goes on to keep their "bubble" safe and sound. Edwards actions have had an outsized impact and unfortunately it won't be mad public in a nonclassified space for many years to come, because of further operational impacts.
He was 100% a traitor.
That’s just a lie. He was in a plane on his way to Ecuador when the US cancelled his passport, resulting in him being blocked in the Russian airport for a while. At some point the situation created such a mess for the airport that Russia accepted to let him enter the country.
All of this has been documented at length, and anyone on this forum is likely old enough to remember the events from when they happened live.
At no point he wanted to be in Russia. The US forced the situation by canceling his passport mid-flight and putting pressure on any country that would offer their help (my home country did and was publicly pressured for this).
In any case, you can forget about the guy, the information he gave demonstrate that the NSA under Obama was committing plenty of illegal surveillance of the US population (and of course other countries, but US citizens don’t seem to care about non-US rights), created a system of hidden courts, and lied about all of it. That should be enough to consider him a whistleblower.
I didn't say he wanted to be there, but he clearly wanted to be in Hong Kong, then move on... and ended up in Russia? Again, what part of this is false?
Did you know him? I did, he's a fucking tool. The information leaked was piecemeal. Take the bible, leak random pages and one will say live a joyous life, love each other.. where a different page might tell you to sacrifice your only child. Unless you've been privy to all of the information at the right scale, you've been sold a piece, a piece that paints a narrative.
The FISA courts weren't new. You have have to have a secure means to disclose data without risking release in a non classified environment. Obviously this concept is over your head.
Even if he was genuine in trying to blow a whistle on one program, that doesn't mean he has a right to do a smash and grab and release un-related materials. He took a spray and pray approach to retaliation and it just so happened he was able to form a "good guy" narrative around one piece of it.
This reads like you have an indiscrete level of personal animus. Aside from being lazily pejorative, it isn’t very descriptive. Still I’m so glad to know if I just had “all the information at the right scale” this wouldn’t go “over the head” of regular folk like me. Truly you are a federal bodhisattva.
This line of argument seems more in line with Scientologist’s protection of “Zenu” stories thru cooyright than “the Bible,” which has substantially available to read since Gutenberg. If only the security apparatus was more like Jesus than Mr. Hubbard.
No I wouldn't. A, I don't have first hand knowledge of the situation, and B, it's a drastically different scenario. I'm not anti-whistleblower. I'm anti retaliation because you were told no.
> I don’t think he would’ve been ignored.
He told the intelligence committees the same time he told _the entire country_ and he was still ignored.
Likewise could it not be said that it is better that many legitimate programs go exposed to expose the blatantly lawless mass surveillance of USA Persons?
I am fairly confident that even if Trump had specifically wanted to pardon Assange or Snowden he could not have.
Edit: lol, this will have been the most successful lie by the media and GOP... getting people to believe the GOP and Trump were friends. They never wanted him. McConnnell picked Sessions and Barr both who did little for Trump. McConnnell picked the 3 Supreme Court justices, and the federal judges who when given the chance refused trumps election fraud cases, McConnnell dropped the mask the second it was clear Trump no longer had power. Ffs, they stuck him with Reince Preibus at first.
This is the thing I’ll never understand about GOP-Haters... not understanding Trump was fighting them too. Literally everyone had to pretend that wasn’t the case including Trump if he wanted to get anything done at all.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/mitch-mcconnell-riot...
Do you think the House pushed through breakneck-speed impeachment vote, breaking almost all of the rules about witnesses, testimony, procedure all for fun? No, that was calculated to keep Trump in line I think.
Removing all platforms from him, looming impeachment or other threats, publicly denouncing him after four years of pretending to be MAGA...
Now, I don’t have a CNN article to make my case. So maybe you are right.
McConnell has no influence. That's why Stone, Kushner, and Bannon are on the list among others.
Trump decided not to pardon Snowden and Assange. Full stop.
Hang on, if you’re certain about it being entirely trumps decision not to pardon Snowden or Assange... can we at least have a citation that McConnell cared at all about Stone Kushner or Bannon?
You declaring that those names put together are in any way equal to the weight of Snowden -or- Assange?
I never suggested Trump did want to. I suggested he could not.
Trump should have pardoned Assange, it's the only thing that would actually have taken a (small) chunk out of the "deep state" for real. Instead, as many of us saw coming, Trump's rhetoric about "draining the swamp" and "fighting the deep state" was always empty bluster.
Now Assange will die in prison (there's not a snowball's chance in hell that Biden pardons him, to state the obvious).
Sessions did everything he could for Trump just did the right thing once to avoid legal jeopardy for himself by recusing himself. In exchange he got nothing but abuse, I mean Sessions is a nasty little goblin so I don't feel to sorry for him but that's what loyalty to Trump gets you
Barr did cross ethical lines anday have broken laws in making the justice department Trump's personal defense lawyers instead of the semi independent agency it's supposed to be.
https://abovethelaw.com/2020/12/the-temptation-and-corruptio...
Barr was the ultimate lacky Attorney General. But because he declined to support overturning the results of the election illegally, he's not Trump's loyal toady?
Assange and Snowden remain unpopular with Senate Republicans, and my understanding is that he was told pardoning them would hurt his chances of avoiding a Senate conviction in his second impeachment.
He was also recently steered away from pardoning himself, his family, and some Republicans that may have helped the capitol rioters (and he apparently got the message), but who knows if he'll change his mind in the next couple hours.
Is pardoning oneself legally possible?
EDIT: Seems possible but never tested.
> The Constitution provides little guidance on the issue of a potential presidential selfpardon. Only one sentence is dedicated to pardons: “The President . . . shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” Looking to historical precedent and case law likewise provides no dispositive answer. No president has ever issued a self-pardon, and very few Supreme Court cases have addressed any aspect of the president’s pardon power.
-- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3587921
Part of the what?
I was looking for clarification about what "the information warfare campaign" was. I'm guessing it's some kind of post-hoc rationalization for a lot of Trump's bizarre statements and other distractions, but I'm not sure.
As for the information warfare part. The media on opposite sides tend to sensationalize their titles to manipulate the discourse for their benefit.
In X’s comment, we can summarize information warfare as lies. So X thought that “Trump is going to pardon himself” titles are part of the informational warfare and Trump won’t actually do that. But now that X saw this HN thread, X said “was he even going to do that? Do we actually have a proof that he intends to do that? Or was it just a lie to shape public opinion further” Like the time Pelosi asks US generals if they keep Trump in check so that he can’t launch nuclear weapons. [0] Implying to the public that Trump is so crazy he can start a nuclear war. These type of things, shape public opinion over time. It is the same with Fox News shaping conservatives’ opinions about Biden. Or the NYT shopping global issues from a pool for Americans to get concerned with. It is standard propaganda and has been happening for decades.
That’s why I think X’s skepticism is healthy and warranted.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-politics-nancy-pelos...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180604233027/https://twitter.c...
Nobody from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU is on that list.
We are wasting our time and energy caring about either of those organizations. Let them stick to filing Amicus Briefs in courts, but they clearly have no pull or influence or backchannel despite our tech scene thinking they do.
I'd be curious if there was a list of all unsuccessful applicants too. I think that would be very interesting to see and bring some transparency. We'd be able to see just how many businesses, shady and legit, how many political orgs and cultural institutions, millionaires lobby and for whom.
Like I said, EFF and ACLU are a waste of our energy because they failed to do that. The White House has published a list of the kinds of people and organizations that get results. Its an instruction manual.
The ACLU and EFF should also find a way to give Trump money / favors under the table to get pardons too in the name of the ends justify the means?
The world thinks our ideas are just memes with quizzical effect on the real world, and they're right.
For example, Peter Theil risked ostracizing himself from the broader tech community to gain massive leverage and influence, and it worked and continues to work.
We should be supporting more flexible and crafty organizations to turn our memes into reality.
Direct quote by the way
I get the impression people don’t know what an Amicus Brief is, about half of the replies are pretty off topic
https://www.axios.com/aclu-leaked-memo-free-speech-civil-rig...
I think the actual leaked memo is a phenomenal read and very well balanced. : https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/20180621AC...
Excellent quotes from that memo:
> “although the democratic standardsin which the ACLU believes and for which it fights run directly counter to thephilosophy of the Klan and other ultra-right groups, the vitality of the democratic institutions the ACLU defends lies in their equal application to all.”
>We also recognize that not defending fundamental liberties can come at considerable cost. If the ACLU avoids the defense of controversial speakers, and defends only those with whom it agrees,both the freedom of speech and the ACLU itself may suffer.The organization may lose credibility with allies, supporters, and other communities, requiring the expenditure of resources to mitigate those harms. Thus, there are often costs both from defending a given speaker and not defending that speaker.Because we are committed to the principle that free speech protects everyone, the speaker’s viewpoint should not be the decisive factor in our decision to defend speech rights.
Considerations in prioritizing cases:
> Whether the speaker seeks to engage in or promote violence
> Whether the speakers seek to carryweapons
> The impact of the proposed speechand the impact of its suppression
> The extent to which we are able tomake clear that even as we defend aspeaker’s right to say what they want, we reserve our right to condemn the views themselves
These aren't some crappy organizations that do 'deals' to get their objectives. There's really (afaik) two ways to keep government in check. Voting and paying lawyers to sue the government when they do 'bad' things (read: against the law/constitution).
Disclaimer: I am a member of both EFF and ACLU.
The enemy of Assange's enemy was never his friend. Nothing about Trump's conduct has ever suggested he wants more whistleblowers walking free, especially ones who may not feel a "professional courtesy" to refrain from leaking some things.
The next thing Wikileaks reports on could have been shady back-dealing on Trump real estate projects, for all we know. Trump never saw pardoning Assange as a gain for himself.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/giuliani-associate-reportedl...
Because he has a grudge against the US intelligence community, so would enjoy using his power to piss them off:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-flynn-pardon-matters:
> The “own the intelligence community” pardons—pardons designed to offend and punish the intelligence agencies for their professionalism over the past several years and the inconveniences that professionalism has caused to Trump. A number of right-wing and civil liberties figures have suggested pardons for Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, though Axios suggests that Snowden will not get a pardon today. Such actions may have a certain appeal for a president—who, like both Assange and Snowden—has a tolerant attitude toward Russian intelligence activity that benefits him and who does not care overmuch about revealing American intelligence activity to adversary actors. There has also been talk of late about clemency for Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the “Silk Road” dark web market—who is serving a life sentence in connection with a murder-for-hire scheme. This would arguably be more of a “own law enforcement” clemency, but the concept is the same.
If there was a Trump pardon, I guarantee every major news outlet would bring up their Russian connections and Twitter would lose its mind. What people "seriously believes" changes rapidly.
I think lots of people think Assange has been (“is” is a murkier question) a Russian asset, but not so much a spy (someone who serves as an agent for collecting information) as an active influence agent.
For Snowden, I think that’s probably less common.
Simply put, Trump was threatened that if he pardons Assange, senate republicans (the establishment) would vote to convict.
I wish he had the courage to call their bluff, because them convicting Trump would fragment the GOP to an extent that is irreversible, IMO. Most people who aren't Trump supporters don't appreciate the extent to which Trump's base is not overlapping with the establishment GOP base.
"there was knowing and complicit behavior between the Trump campaign and Russians that stopped short of direct coordination, which may constitute conspiracy."[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report#Redacted_report...
That's one of the reasons he colluded with a hostile foreign entity(Russia). Cause he doesn't give a shit. Sadly I don't have much hope for senate Republicans to do the right thing regardless of what Trump did, even after his role in the attempted coup
Trump doesn't have courage, he has bluster and self interest, he didn't see what was in it for him to pardon Assange
It's also been reported that Mitch McConnell threatened to support the impeachment if he pardons Assange. Though this claim has not been substantiated.
- Trump can't afford making more enemies in the intelligence community, or simply does not want to.
- Assange and Snowden are libertarians' heroes, but libertarians didn't even vote for Trump this time, right? The percent of libertarians voting for an independent candidate was larger than the gap between Trump and Biden, even though Trump was probably the most libertarian president in the past 30 years. For instance, Trump refused to expand federal government's power during Covid, and he deregulated a lot to defer policies to states. Not that I like or dislike Trump's policy, mind you -- just my assessment. So, Trump may simply ignored the requests to pardon Assange and Snowden.
Don't mistake incompetence for libertarianism.
But correct me if I’m wrong this has no impact on civil suits? So he’s still on the hook for any damages.
One quote stood out to me at the very end of the article:
“The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.”
I've always been obsessed by history but always struggled with this same sentiment: that I was escaping reality and my responsibility to try interesting things by plunging into the past.
[0]https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...
edit: to clarify my thoughts given the sudden replies: I don't mean to say I argue for a wholesale casting off of the past. Clearly, I understand the trivial observation that such a view of history has naive aspects, but that's not at all what I am interested in. For me and most other people here that enjoy history and such things, ignoring history would be impossible anyway because the draw is too great. I'm merely putting out a reminder that all our inner or outer debates about the finer points of politics or history or other such topics are often a way to escape seeing what we can do in the present.
Looking at people like Levandowski, you might see yet another arrogant techie that has a blinkered view of the world, (and that is more or less true) but at the same time they are out there doing bold things and living life on the edge for better or for worse. They essentially act like the historical figures we read about, although I am not implying that he is some important figure as of yet (though who knows in the future) just that he shows the same zest for life.
I'm essentially speaking for those whose main problem is the opposite of Levandowski: too much intellectual masturbation, too much thought as entertainment, and too little meaningful application of whatever lessons you may or may not have learned. You may harp on about how history matters, but how many of you have actually been presented with choices that mattered beyond the parameters of your own life?
Here’s an example:
What do you think the global acceptance of capitalism is?
This is far more important than this vague idea of reputation. Just because a person has a good reputation doesn't mean they are respected or loved. It could just be that they do not figure at all in people's minds. You can live up to people's expectations and die having never really lived.
Honestly it's somewhat reflective of the infamous slave morality vs. master morality debate
Nor is every goal of our existence is about “building stuff”, it can also be about just living a just and considered life.
These types of boorish egotistical statements from tech talking heads masquerading as cerebral contrarian thought are much of what’s contributed to our current mess.
It strikes me that this an argument for the uselessness of reading history. People are basically the same as they always have been and just as you can’t simply explain to a teenager that they’ll feel differently about the world when they’re thirty, every generation has to figure life out for itself.
And you came to this conclusion without reading any history? This is too absolutist a statement. Sure, some things need to be relearned through experience, but there are also plenty of cases where you don't want to waste time reinventing the wheel.
This is like arguing about whether dieting "works." On the one hand, obviously, yes, it works. There's no credible debate about the efficacy of calorie restriction for losing weight. It simply works. On the other hand, most human beings can't actually follow a diet, so, no, it doesn't actually work, for any reasonable definition of "works."
Reading history is probably a lot like that.
And we know this... how? Studying history!
> and there's no library big enough to change that
Who's trying to change human nature? This is a strawman you are thrashing. Studying history is about understanding human nature, not changing it. Just like studying physics is about understanding projectile motion, not about changing the gravitational constant.
The idea behind studying history is that we use the insights gained from it to try to solve new challenges in reasonable ways, instead of ways we'd know were likely to fail if we'd just cracked open a book.
Santayana was pithier.
To me this is a mind-numbing display of ignorance. Once you understand that you're not the first human being to ever have existed and that the people that came before you (even way before) are not dumber than you, you will immediately realize that there's a lot to learn from what has happened before.
This should be very obvious when it comes to political/social endeavors (e.g. how to push for substantial social change without having things degenerate into some form of totalitarianism), but it's equally as important for scientific and technological ones. For a simple and increasingly popular example just look at Sabine Hossenfelder's line of criticism of contemporary theoretical physics. A lot of it draws on the sociological and historical study of the scientific process.
This is how this person sees technological progress, and I'm inclined to believe he's right... within the context of technology.
Beyond that, I do think history does matter for understanding how humans interact with each other and with our planet.
Since when is reality like a game of chess? Setting aside human history for a moment, just think about natural history (Levandowski mentioned dinosaurs and Neanderthals). Evolutionary biology is to a significant extent a historical discipline - it looks at the record and tries to come up with ways in which animals have changed over time under all sorts of pressures. Can that endeavor be done a-historically? How about even something like cosmology - the origins of the universe etc.?
The universe is not a Markov process. Thinking of it as such is incredibly limiting as an intellectual paradigm.
To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind.
There will be a historical post-facto rationalization of what went down for anything happening in the recent past, but the meat we draw from historical analogies is often poorly applicable since the divergence between the map and the territory is so large. The difference between reality and a game of chess is indeed paramount here, but for different reasons. The past is so complex that the lessons we draw from it are likely to just be distorted narratives that are already just a reflection of the present.
>To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind.
In Levandowski's own example, he learned what existed in his time and then built useful things from there without worrying too much about the details of past beyond the directly visible iceberg spire in the present. This is broadly applicable to many fields and there are many people who did the same. It's tautologically true that disciplines that need to draw on the past to move on will do so, such as biology, but that doesn't say all that much about engineering for instance.
Another argument against ignoring the past is it's important to identify what things remain invariant in society as technology evolves. Allowing for a fuller contextualization, understanding and perhaps somewhat anticipation of the on-going changes and their effects.
Technology itself is based on leveraging libraries, tacit knowledge, internet threads and mathematical concepts decades to hundreds of years old. That's a kind of history. It's not uncommon for advancements to occur after revisiting old lines of research that were ahead of their time.
That is an immensely myopic view. Analyzing the game up to now and understanding the opponent's style of play and tactical preferences are very useful in planning your next move, especially when you have multiple, equally weighted choices.
Levandowski may wind up convicted of something else if he doesn't learn from history... his history. So maybe he really ought to look at it a bit.
On the other hand, when you've messed up, and you understand that you've messed up, and you've learned what you can from it, then throwing away the past and moving on is perhaps a psychologically healthy thing.
Chess is an abstract turn-based zero-sum discrete 1-on-1 board game with perfect information sharing. In other words, it's completely different from real life in every possible aspect, and thus any drawn parallel is likely to be worthless. Real life is not Chess.
The idea that we all just “appear” on Earth from some formless void, then subsequently make totally independent decisions, devoid of any previous influence, is both highly naive and far too common.
1. People are rarely in a position to effect changes or draw from historical lessons in the first place
2. Whatever lessons you can draw are often very contingent on the time and place and even taking into account patterns, we still end up in a situation where the lessons can't really be applied beyond general principles that are already well known without much study involved.
3. Often the understanding we think we have of historical events is hopelessly distorted anyway, and colored by the sources and narratives we have read or composed in our minds.
In the end, the people who do change history tend to barrel away at problems without taking the past all that much into account beyond some general references. Even if we take into account survivorship bias this is still an important phenomenon to consider. Hence the conclusions that there is much to learn from history is either trivial or actually under its own layer of naivete.
After asking what he would change, he told me he had no time to look at the past and could only look ahead.
I learned if you have enough money and lawyers, the past doesn't matter because you can enforce trust through litigation. But if you have to take people on their word, then their history becomes important. I didn't rebuild the team.
I'm sure there is some deeper lesson here between "smarmy business folks" and more principle driven individuals.
However, people put way too much emphasis on history - their personal history - and it affects them in all kinds of unhealthy ways. In my opinion it's so much better to leave the past in the past and focus on making a better future. Learn the lessons that can be learned and then move on (easier said than done.) I'm not an expert, but that's my take on it from my life experience and also watching others struggle with their historical baggage.
The story of Levandowski appears to be a story about consequences being something other people experience.
His parents were a Diplomat and a Businessman and he graduated with 2 engineering degrees from Berkeley. So we should be lauding him for winning a game of poker when he was dealt a Full House? Lol
Lots of people start life with a lot more than he was given and walk away with a lot less.
Rich friends, a presidential pardon and no doubt a rich and easy life going forwards.
This is just another blatant example of where being rich and having connections puts you above the law. Sadly this isn't an isolated case.
Take Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort. Both plead guilty and both were somehow granted home detention due to the pandemic
What Levandowski did was egregious. You walk out the door of a company. You take nothing. That's it. You don't own nor are you entitled to any of that work product. It's pretty simple.
I'm not surprised to see Peter Thiel on that list. His politics are pretty appealing. I don't know most of the other names on that list who supported the pardon but that's not a list I'd want to be associated with, personally.
"Instead, Alsup sentenced Lewandowski to 18 months, but delayed his prison time until the pandemic was under control. Levandowski also agreed to pay $756,499.22 in restitution to Waymo and a fine of $95,000."
So he didn't even spend a single minute in prison. Wow
IP laws exist for a good reason, but it's hard to say that he has done serious damage to society.
https://www.huffpost.com/highline/article/white-collar-crime...
> Law and order, for this president, simply means that he and his ideological allies are above the law, while others, such as [George] Floyd, are merely subject to it.
Lewandowski's pardon request was endorsed by Peter Thiel, a huge Trump backer, so he gets to be above the law. Simple.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/chauvin-di...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-24/thiel-bac...
Dumb question, if Levandowski used the (allegedly) purloined IP at a new employer, could he be charged with a new crime or would he be clear to proceed under double jeopardy?
If your points about Obama pardons are valid, then they should stand on their own merits, and it shouldn't bother you if it's 'downvoted into oblivion'.
And I'm not being facetious. It's worth comparing Obama's (or any previous president's) process for granting pardons with Trump's.
You mean like Bill Clinton who pardoned his brother's drug charges?
James Robert Adelman: pardoned after being convicted of embezzling from his company, sentenced to 12 years imprisonment, which he served.
Teresa Clark: convicted of "Knowingly disposing of a firearm to a person convicted of a crime punishable by a term of imprisonment exceeding one year (three counts); falsification of firearms purchase forms (two counts)", sentenced to 3 years probation and 1 year of house arrest which she served.
I'm not sure what your point is in these examples. I couldn't find more details on the reasons for their pardons, but letting people clear their record well after they have served their time is a common use of pardons. None of that is true in the Anthony Levandowski case, or for that matter the slew of other pardons and commutations Trump gave to his close associates and cronies.
Most of yesterday's pardoned folks also either fully served or served a majority of their sentence.
That is one of the oldest myths about pardons. While you do not have to accept a pardon, your acceptance is not an admission of guilt. All the soldiers in the Confederacy did not have to admit their guilt. All the Vietnam draft dodgers did not have to admit their guilt. And Caspar Weinberger did not admit his guilt when Bush 41 pardoned him, because neither thought he had committed a crime.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths...
I'll point out that, now that Donald Trump is out of power, many in the GOP in general have been rather quick to turn their backs on him and outright criticize him. While he was in power, sure, Republicans politicians were politically savvy enough to side with him, knowing that the alternative was suicide. But there is now room to disagree with Trump and we're seeing many (like Mitch McConnell, and you don't get more Republican than him!) use that opportunity to distance themselves.
> While he was in power, sure, Republicans politicians were politically savvy enough to side with him, knowing that the alternative was suicide.
It's not that easy: some people were making a cold political calculation but we're far enough down the Tea Party rabbit hole that there are members who earnestly believe what used to be fringe beliefs. I mean, think about how many right now are willing to unequivocally say that Biden legitimately won the election, which is almost the weakest sop to objective reality possible. That's not going to reverse itself quickly, especially without a hard fight from everyone else still in the party. I know some people who are trying to pull the party back from the edge and I wish them success but the odds aren't looking great.
*Corvain Cooper – President Trump commuted the sentence of Mr. Corvain Cooper. Mr. Cooper is a 41 year-old father of two girls who has served more than 7 years of a life sentence for his non-violent participation in a conspiracy to distribute marijuana.*
Life sentence for "conspiracy to distribute marijuana" - Unbelievable. There are dozens of similar examples on this list.
I'll also add that his crime was trafficking 37 tons. He wasn't the seller or buyer.
Could you explain? I'm not following and when I search his story news articles said he opened a clothing store. What was his actual business and was it connected to cannabis?
Corvain's wife started 40tons with the help of a lot of industry folks in 2020. The effort was to bring cannabis revenue/profit back to support Corvain's two teenage daughters while he's incarcerated. That's the cannabis brand I'm referring to.
Good for him that he was pardoned, but I find it sad that it's those 37tons that make the pardon unsurprising. I don't think he would ever be pardoned for trafficking 37 pounds.
edit: removed some inflammatory text that was unfair to all involved.
The President is the head of the executive branch. The Department of Justice, on top of which the President ultimately sits, was responsible for prosecuting ~each and ~every one of the people the President pardons, on their first or last day. Someone inside the DoJ thought each and every one of them was guilty of a crime and deserved to be prosecuted for it. Weeks and months -- years, the work of dozens -- went into each and every one of those prosecutions. The convictions, when obtained, were hung like trophies on the walls of the individual careers. Proof they had done their job, proof their work had meaning.
And then the President, with the stroke of a pen, throws it all away.
We all have projects get canceled. We all have invested time and effort and then, through no fault of our own, had our efforts come to naught.
It's bad for morale. Even when the reasons for the laws were outdated or absurd, even when the prosecutions unjust, even when perfidy played a role, even when the people who worked the case no longer fully believe in it ... it still hurts to have your work thrown away by your superior. It still damages the working relationship you have with your chain of command. Why should you work hard in the future, doing the tasks assigned to you, if your boss is just going to ignore it all?
The President pardoning dozens, hundreds, thousands of individuals permanently damages their working relationship with the career employees of the Department of Justice, even (especially?) if the pardons are moral, deserved, merciful, just without a hint of corruption. Maybe that shouldn't defer justice, but it's a reason.
so snowden isn't an upstanding citizen either? law abiding citizen != upstanding citizen
Your sole argument here is that they were convicted by a court for violating the law.
Are you saying everyone convicted by the criminal justice system is a bad human being? Because the pardon is by definition an admission of guilt, it doesn't exonerate them from what they did.
I'm absolutely not saying I agree with this manner of assessing people; but it's interesting to imagine how it fits into development of the species and how that 'works' with society.
That doesn't mean that parents can't be bad people, or that parenthood is the only criteria of goodness. But knowing that somebody chose to become a parent strongly updates my priors about their character.
But the simple argument, that he never overcomes, is how many people if given access to a time machine would use it to prevent their own birth? How many would use it to prevent the creation of life on Earth? Even after reading Benatar's carefully crafted tome, I doubt that very many readers would be convinced to change their answers to these questions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Possibility_of_p...
Sorry, it was 100k, 50 up front:
"A onetime top adviser to the Trump campaign was paid $50,000 to help seek a pardon for John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer convicted of illegally disclosing classified information, and agreed to a $50,000 bonus if the president granted it, according to a copy of an agreement."
And this is not to trump, but rather to his groupies to talk to him on your behalf. At least on paper.
Still, probably a good value if you actually get it.
I think the OP has the numbers wrong but regardless, it isn't something that should ever be bought.
Fully implementing the spirt of the civil service reforms and and have 99% of current presidential appointments done on merit instead.
I guess it pays to have rich friends.
I have no idea if there is such a thing as a "revenge pardon", but I guess it's a thing now.
(Incidentally, I wanted to use an exact Trump quote in that first paragraph, and I found it here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/19/upshot/trump-...)
His pardon could be interpreted as a strike against “piracy is theft” mindset and the idea of “intellectual property” in general that HN often rallies against.
I’m quite disappointed by Trump’s pardons but this one is actually a good one.
Do you have any evidence that he didn't commit the crimes he is convicted of? Because his lawyers would've loved to talk to you last year.
It's not as if I said he was not guilty, but rather saying that he would have a lot of information on self driving cars. Which is what he was charged with in the first place.
I think corrupt is the right word.
If highly positioned people in the industry asks to have his competence back on the market, maybe it's the best if the president just listens
He was sentenced to 18 months and served 6. Wouldn't he be out on good behaviour after 9 months anyways?
Are you sure you are not just knee-jerking here?
(So Levandowski and Jared are going to launch a venture fund soon, right?)
[0]: https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2018/lr24092.htm
[1]: https://www.pressherald.com/2016/11/30/sec-charges-ex-maine-...
[2]: https://www.pressherald.com/2018/04/02/liberty-in-sec-crossh...
I think a more interesting question is whether there's a specificity requirement. AFAIU, that hasn't been answered, either.
This is literally all it says...
> he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
What gives you the impression pardons are limited to those that are "delivered" and/or "accepted". How would that even be legally demonstrated to a court.
The Supreme Court apparently ruled that way in a case a long time ago and that precedence has never been challenged (or come up again for that matter)
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9IRZ9FzWEA
But realistically if they tried to revoke a pardon today it would certainly go to the Supreme Court again and they would almost certainly rule the other way.
Looking up Grants revocation of Johnson's pardons - it's hard to find details, but it does seem like a Federal judge took issue that they were not delivered prior to the new president revoking them.
Given that there's no such limitation in the Constitution, I wonder if it would hold up to SCOTUS. ...and maybe that's why they announce them publicly these days.
There's also a difference between state and federal charges - even if they've been pardoned, they can still be charged for related crimes.
As you said, though it's not clear, it need to be a different (though potentially related) crime.
https://www.wklaw.com/double-jeopardy-federal/
Of course, there's still the limitation that the State would need to find it's own law that the accused violated - they have no jurisdiction over Federal law (and vice-versa).
Still... it doesn't sit quite right with me. If someone is acquitted by a jury in, let's say, Rhode Island for murder. It doesn't seem right that the Federal government could step in and hold an entirely new trial thereafter. Seems to fly in the face of what Double-Jeopardy is supposed to prevent.
...and that can happen regardless of criminal conviction.
The other no name money laundering criminals are all related to either his gambling businesses or his place of living in Florida.
He's basically pardoning people he's been doing crimes with for a long time and then if course some big names.
I'm happy to see some rappers pardoned though tbh. Their music has influenced my life, they've done great deal of good outside of music and none of them were in the can for things like harming women or animals etc.
It's not like they are all Trump's friends. But obviously conspiracy theories will prevail, sadly.
And where he admits that he leaked info in order to counter the effect of Hillary's emails on the 2016 election. So, literal foreign interference in an election.
You may have also missed the declass that showed Fiona Hill perjured herself when she stated she had no idea who Christopher Steele was- yet actually met with him while he was compiling his dossier.
Most Trump's pardons bypassed DOJ.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/trumps-circumvention-justice-dep...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/most-clemency-...
"I gotta bring the hood back after Katrina / Weezy F Baby now the F is for FEMA"
"The CAN-DO Foundation thanks President Trump for providing a second chance to numerous deserving individuals through the use of his Executive Clemency powers. Many defendants that receive draconian sentences are individuals who exercised their Sixth Amendment right to a trial and suffered the trial penalty phase by receiving harsh mandatory sentences many times greater than if they had taken a plea. These sentences were often based primarily on the testimony of other co-conspirators who received sentence reductions once they testified and were in many cases far more culpable. Executive clemency represented the last hope for many of these individuals to have a second chance at life since (with limited exceptions) there is no federal parole."
https://www.candoclemency.com/can-do-thanks-president-trump-...
p.s. - if you wonder why the Clintons are especially hated in some circles, and if you wonder why people are so quick to believe those Q conspiracy theories, the kernels of truth exist and originate in simple corruption like this
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Glenn_Braswell#Unsubstan...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_McDougal#Whitewater_affa...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Reynolds
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Clinton,_Jr.#Conviction_...
This pardon was... really pretty conventional. It's of a non-violent crime and a comparatively compartmentalized one that doesn't impact the nation as a whole. Incentivising industrial espionage isn't "not bad", but it's not that bad.
This is routine Washington stuff, really. The genuinely corrupt pardons, of his family and associates (and potentially himself) for crimes committed during the administration don't seem to have materialized[1]. The list from yesterday is very long, but really pretty unsurprising.
[1] But there is still an hour and a half left. A pardon can be scrawled on a napkin in 30 seconds and then shown to the media to deliver it. There's no formality requirement in the constitution. If he does it before noon then it counts.
I would say that it is uncommon for presidents to abuse the pardon power like this, it's just not completely unheard of. It's also worth noting that Trump multiplied the total number of corrupt presidential pardons in US history by something like 10 in his time in office. The scale is hard to fully grasp.
He granted clemency to 143 more last night which places him closer in line to Bush and G.W. Bush, but there's no way your data here would include that (and that still places him at a very low number), so I'm wondering where you're getting this data, and how you qualify "corrupt."
If we look at a handful of Bill Clinton's corrupt pardons on his last day in office alone as mentioned in the gp comment above:
(1) Susan McDougal who went to jail for contempt of court for him, (2) Braswell who paid Hillary $200k for the pardon, (3) his brother Roger Clinton Jr, (4) Democrat Mel Reynolds who was granted clemency after being found guilty of sexual abuse of a minor.
Thus, Trump must have had at least 40? Where is the source?
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/24/so-far-trum... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/FT_20...
That's my kind of criminal, if so.
He did a few things right, but let’s not pretend the last year hasn’t been mostly political theatre rather than leadership and one man could have led with a different tone.
This one is hilarious. The "political project" was raising money for a border wall via crowdfunding and putting it into his own pocket. He scammed the most hardcore Trump supporters, and got pardoned by Trump for it.
> Bannon and another defendant, Brian Kolfage, allegedly promised donors that the campaign, which raised more than $25 million, was "a volunteer organization" and that "100% of the funds raised ... will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose," according to the indictment.
> Instead, according to prosecutors, Bannon, through a nonprofit under his control, allegedly used more than $1 million from We Build the Wall to "secretly" pay Kolfage and cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bannon's personal expenses.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/steve-bannon-pardone...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1306611...
As a thief, he should be in prison. He hasn't paid any price. He's still a millionaire, will probably start another company and raise billions in next 3 years.
Is that price a large sum of money to a particular SuperPAC in the near future?
Great way to make large sums of money if you have skills to raise money.
The man believes manslaughter is the cost of doing business for innovation. He should be in prison for much more than he got.
Should the airplane have never been invented and the Wrights jailed for trying?
> There's a difference between accepting the costs of progress
I'm not seeing the essential difference here.
P.S. I know nothing about Levandowski, his beliefs, or his statements. Just commenting on what the parent wrote.
I worked on the stab trim gearbox design for the Boeing 757. That gearbox is "flight critical", meaning total failure of it means a crash. I'm very proud that the stab trim system has never caused an accident in the service history of the 757. (Of course, the design was an iteration on the highly successful 747 equivalent, not anything revolutionary.)
What was said, at the most, was that maybe the Wright brothers should have had to face consequences for endangering that passenger. That maybe they acted recklessly.
I don't think that carrying that particular passenger was the one crucial step towards inventing airplanes.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/inside-uber-lawsuits...
We've seen "an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president." ~Mitt Romney
And we've seen pardons put up for sale.[0]
Is the US a nation of laws and due process or a Banana Republic where anyone can be acquitted of anything?
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/us/politics/trump-pardons...
Not an American, but I just learned a few days ago that a good deal of presidential pardons are used to give citizenship rights back to people who have already served their sentence - sometimes decades ago.
After the pardon they can actually vote and hold public office.
Maybe you should, you know, stop taking away people's rights after they're served their court-appointed sentence?
[0]https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_17,_Voting_Ri...
Source?
Is this not just a coincidence of scheduling though? Or do courts normally schedule executions for presidential transition periods?
It's definitely not scheduling.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-trump-and-barrs-la...
In short, there has been a push to resume executions for nearly ten years, and it has accelerated during Trump's presidency (he campaigned on a strong pro-execution platform). In summer 2019 a shortlist was made of prisoners already on Death Row, whose appeals had failed. They then moved as quickly as they could to schedule the executions, quash further appeals and pass litigation to make them happen.
Look at the dates, from the beginning. To me, it doesn't look like a coincidence.
This story is especially sad. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/05/lisa-montgomer...
This sholdn't happen to a dog say dogs.
> We've seen "an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president." ~Mitt Romney
It's good to have friends.
> And we've seen pardons put up for sale.[0]
Free market at work.
> Is the US a nation of laws and due process or a Banana Republic where anyone can be acquitted of anything?
Taken into account that it uses it's military and secret service to promote a certain fruit company i will say the later is correct.
> [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/us/politics/trump-pardons...
We've had presidential pardons for centuries, and they are both a carry-over from the time of kings, and they could arguably serve as a short-circuit against injustice at the hand of the legislature.
Not everything illegal is wrong. Not everyone in prison is serving a just sentence, no matter what the legal system declares it to be.
Left in the hands of the legislature, no one would ever experience mercy.
It should also be a good example of the fact that the president of the US has an extremely and unusually large amount of power, which should probably be reduced by quite a lot.
That's kind of the problem, though. Most countries didn't carry them over in the same way.
> Left in the hands of the legislature, no one would ever experience mercy.
In countries with highly regulated pardon powers, some people are sometimes pardoned (though many countries lean more on the power of the courts to overturn convictions).
What if someone _did_ commit the crime, and it's proven, but the sentence is wrong (way too extreme) or the crime is now seen as archaic?
Think old homosexuality laws or blasphemy laws.
No offence, but most of these pardons make perfect sense. Unfortunately, Snowden, Ulbricht, and Assange were left out.
At the Presidential level, the power is absolute because the founders believed in the executive branch being centralized in a single individual, the President. Outside of Senate confirmation, there isn't much that limits the powers of the President and it's like that on purpose. The people get to have their say every four years.
> The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-2/section-2...
President Trump commuted the sentence of Jaime A. Davidson. This commutation is supported by Mr. Davidson’s family and friends, Alice Johnson, and numerous others. In 1993, Mr. Davidson was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in relation to the murder of an undercover officer. Notably, witnesses who testified against Mr. Davidson later recanted their testimony in sworn affidavits and further attested that Mr. Davidson had no involvement. Although Mr. Davidson has been incarcerated for nearly 29 years, the admitted shooter has already been released from prison.
It doesn't make things worse. The only reason people think it makes things worse is because it at times serves to emancipate people they think are undeserving of it. This is a small price to pay for what broadly serves as a useful tool for justice.
The UK used it a lot more at the time that the US became independent, which may be where the US got it from.
I don't think _any_ developed democratic country has a pardon power as unrestrained as the US one (even in countries with executive presidencies it's usually constrained in some way).
- Require nomination or agreement by the AG. - Prohibit pardoning of political crimes or other self-interest. - Require approval by at least on other minister, or the whole cabinet, or some portion of the legislative body. - Require a published request for pardon, justification of the pardon, and the judiciary's comment about this justification. - Prohibited during lame duck or caretaker periods. - Allow commutations only. - Allow pardons only when someone is actually serving their sentence. - Eliminate mandatory sentences, allows judges to exercise mercy in sentencing.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/giuliani-associate-reportedl...
Keep moving those goal post tho. You've already went from it's mean to say that the previous administration was corrupt to every administration is corrupt.
The “/s” aside, if granting a pardon, perhaps it’s fair not to go into depth under these names on the badness in their past, as part of the pardon concept is getting beyond that to move forward. Talking up their “good” supports that too.
> The pardon for Paul Manafort (on Dec. 23, 2020), is illustrative. By its own terms, the pardon covers only the crimes “for his conviction” on specific charges and not any other crimes (charged or uncharged). [...] Manafort pleaded to a superseding information containing two conspiracy charges, while the entire underlying indictment — containing numerous crimes from money laundering, to witness tampering, to violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act — now remains open to prosecution as there was no conviction for those charges.
Not sure if this applies to Levandowski - I haven't seen the text of his pardon.
Update: Levandowski's pardon [2] covers "those offenses against the United States individually enumerated and set before me for my consideration." Manafort's pardon [3] lists specific convictions with docket numbers. IANAL so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] https://www.justsecurity.org/74241/the-gaps-in-trumps-pardon...
Meanwhile, the US is illegally pursuing Assange, and is penalizing Snowden for following the very same values that the US ostensibly holds.
The alt-media is calling Trumpers as the new "Liberty movt.", yet they call for American hegemony on Asia and elsewhere, and their policy directions are equally counter-indicative. Liberty my ass.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-15/thiel-urg... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pumped
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_pardoned_or_gra...
Without passing any judgement on the validity of the pardons the sheer number of them surprised me.
Trump - 94 as of Dec 23, 2020 (going up obvs)
Obama - 1,927
Bush - 200
Clinton - 459
Bush Sr - 77
...
The most interesting one to me was President Ford pardoning President Nixon. TIL.
Done in the name and hope of "national healing". There were even talks about Biden pardoning Trump in order to prevent the precedent of a new administration pursuing an outgoing administration by legal overreach... was utter madness IMO even before the attempted putsch by his supporters, but now it's untenable.
Personally, as a half German and half Croat I can only say one thing when I look at the histories of my home countries: for any form of healing to succeed, criminal actions by any government must be dealt with transparently and impartially by the appropriate institutions in a speedy manner, otherwise the only thing that will breed is resentment.
The Nazi regime crimes were dealt with by the Nuremberg trials and the supporters were assessed under de-nazification, the result was that every German could see that high crimes did not go unpunished and that our neighbor countries could trust us again.
Contrast this to the post-Independence Wars Balkans, where half the war criminals of all sides were not prosecuted at all as they died and not much research happened into what they did, and of the other half the majority was protected by their respective ethnic's governments for sometimes decades. The result? Ugly nationalism and hatred are as alive as ever in the region.
His original sentence (6 months ago) was 18 months. I don't know if the extra 12 months here changes anything.
I find a small joy/comfort in knowing the non violent drug dealers/users got a pardon from a president... well you can fill in the rest. (US drug laws need to change!)
Otherwise, I'm sick to my stomach.
That's the part that caught my eye, not Trump's pardon.
So that's how rich people are treated by the court system...
Not, all. Some are shot on the spot, despite being non-violent, unarmed, or even a kid playing.
Others get life for "three strikes" (non violent).
Also, three strikes laws apply to carrier criminals that commit repeated felonies, which in most states require at least one of those felonies to be violent and severely so.
https://freebeacon.com/issues/study-no-racial-difference-pol...
Just to clarify what I mean... YouTube has banned Trump's channel.
I don't think anyone is saying Levandowski is innocent (I saw somewhere else in the comments that a pardon is by definition an admission of guilt), but if he's as brilliant of an engineer as some people make him out to be, it would be best for the country if he was back at work instead of in prison.
> 404 Page Not Found
Any backups/cache on this article?
UPD: HN topic link seems update now.
I wish it was an ongoing thing a president did every night before bed - get presented with a curated list of deserving prisoners and a rubberstamp. Far better than a splurge at the end of term.
> Anthony Levandowski – President Trump granted a full pardon to Anthony Levandowski. This pardon is strongly supported by James Ramsey, Peter Thiel, Miles Ehrlich, Amy Craig, Michael Ovitz, Palmer Luckey, Ryan Petersen, Ken Goldberg, Mike Jensen, Nate Schimmel, Trae Stephens, Blake Masters, and James Proud, among others. Mr. Levandowski is an American entrepreneur who led Google’s efforts to create self-driving technology. Mr. Levandowski pled guilty to a single criminal count arising from civil litigation. Notably, his sentencing judge called him a “brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs.” Mr. Levandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good.
http://web.archive.org/web/20210120111121/https://www.whiteh...
Does anyone think Lewandowski’s conduct is acceptable or defensible? He defrauded everyone involved in Le Affaire Uber.
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Wed, 20 Jan 2021 03:48:59 GMTThat having been said, the law is the law and I'm no fan of using the pardon to free some corporate spies while others with fewer political connections are bound by it.
"Karma means action, work, or deed. The term also refers to the spiritual principle of cause and effect, often descriptively called the principle of karma, wherein intent and actions of an individual influence the future of that individual: good intent and good deeds contribute to good karma and happier rebirths, while bad intent and bad deeds contribute to bad karma and bad rebirths."
You can choose to always do good actions or do bad actions against others for the sake of greed/power/etc. Everyone has a choice of how to live and it's pretty clear what's the right way to live especially karma will be bat down your door soon, next year or years from now.
I guess you are here defending Google's actions and this engineer's actions that both actions are good?
His facing a Senate trial for impeachment doesn't remove the pardon power. That also expires at noon on Jan 20.
As much as I hate Trump, I support that.
The worst one was this:
Paul Erickson – President Trump has issued a full pardon to Paul Erikson. This pardon is supported by Kellyanne Conway. Mr. Erickson’s conviction was based off the Russian collusion hoax. After finding no grounds to charge him with any crimes with respect to connections with Russia, he was charged with a minor financial crime. Although the Department of Justice sought a lesser sentence, Mr. Erickson was sentenced to 7 years’ imprisonment—nearly double the Department of Justice’s recommended maximum sentence. This pardon helps right the wrongs of what has been revealed to be perhaps the greatest witch hunt in American History.
Yeah, BS. Trump deserved to lose his Presidency then and there.
I also didn't like the special treatment that Stephen Bannon received. There is another person who deserves to rot in hell.
But my guess is that more than 2/3 of these commutations I support. And it has nothing to do with who commuted them.
"Some look shady, but it's mostly good".
And he didn't particularly abuse the power. The record for one day of pardons/commutations is 330, set by Barack Obama on his last day of office. I believe that the record before that was set by Bill Clinton.
For a previous example, Bush Sr commuted the sentence of everyone involved in the Iran-Contra affair which prevented that investigation from potentially reaching him. (Given excerpts of his diary released after he was in office, it seems likely that the investigation would have been able to nail Bush in time.)
Given this, I find this pardon to be ok. Say what you want about Lewandowski, maybe he was the biggest scumbag, maybe he's worthless as a scientist and does not know the derivative of x squared, maybe (most likely) he stole millions of lines of cutting edge code from Google. But he did not physically harm anyone. He did not even cause monetary harm like Bernie Madoff. It's very doubtful he even caused any psychological harm to anyone. Does he deserve to be sentenced as a criminal?
Well, we all know IP is taken seriously in the US. We know cases as Sergey Aleynkov [1] and Aaron Swartz [2], cases that we consider despicable, where corporations or prosecutors pursued with an absolutely terrifying vengeance the minor transgressions of some unlucky but quite harmless members of our society.
I for one think Lewandowski (and other people like him) does not deserve the ordeal suffered by Aleynkov or Swarz. If I were in the jury, I would give serious consideration to jury nullification.
Don't get me wrong. In terms of civil penalties, I say let him be shirtless. Let him drive a Yugo, if the allegations against him turn out to be true. Google gave him a $100 million bonus, and he took some code and ran to the competition. Confiscate everything he's got. He doesn't deserve it.
But don't put him in prison.
Trump did many, many bad things. But pardoning Lewandowski was a good thing.
I never imagined Trump and Levandowski being connected in any fashion. Does anyone have any insight into why Trump would pardon him?
*: state offenses are handled by governors or a state pardon board, not the President
Here's the photo of Palmer Luckey with Bannon. He claims in this tweet that he was flashing the sign "ironically" as a hoax in this reply: https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/922575384817950726
Trump: Hey Tony, you know...they are kicking me out and I'm going broke; I need a favor from you.
Anthony: what can I do for you mr. President?
Trump: I will pardon you in one condition.
Antony: what that would be?
Trump: I will need some "financial assistance" from you.
Antony: ...say no more!EDIT: Well whitehouse.gov itself was switched to Biden's page, so I assume the page may have been lost in the migration.
I mean it’s a good way to make money and influence. Also shows that US is corrupt to the top seat.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210120111121/https://www.white...
The page linked is now hosted here: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/st...
Or are you suggesting the second we know the winner the previous president should be booted out?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Canadian_federal_election
Over the past couple years I'm strongly starting to believe that this is a better system of government than the US republican[1] model.
[1] by republican, I mean of a republic, not the GOP
I think GP is asking why it's 2 months instead of something like 2 weeks.
> Or are you suggesting the second we know the winner the previous president should be booted out?
It's not a terrible idea to prevent them from signing new legislation or doing anything else of massive importance. If it was worth doing, it should've been done before the election so that voters had all the information before casting their votes.
In presidential and quasi-presidential systems, it typically takes a week or so. The US really is an anomaly here.
Plus, once confirmed (on the 6th), it does take some time to change cabinets etc.
B. There is a process in the US that involves state electors having their votes counted and certified and the new government installed
C. No country in the world instantly swaps governments at election result time.
Fact is the civil service is not being swapped, just the political leaders of the departments. Perfectly fine to just swap ministers in a matter of days.
This is not a 'Europe is different from USA' thing. Each country/system is peculiar in its own way.
Unlikely. After election, coalition negotiation starts and that took weeks or months. Only after a new coalition is negotiated then a new government may be voted in by MPs.
For example last EU elections was 2019-05, while new commission was voted in 2019-11.
I'm sure you've heard this before, but Obama built the cages.
I'm sure you've heard this before, but Obama implemented policies to limit the necessity for their use, while the Trump Administration deliberately maximized their use.
If you commit a crime while having entered the country, you are charged in criminal court, meaning you are put in jail awaiting trial. Your kids can't be put in jail with you, thus they are taken care of separately.
If you don't commit a crime, you are charged in civil court and not put in jail awaiting trial, so your kids aren't taken from you.
Under Trump:
Charge everyone in criminal court [0], take away everyone's kids, despite evidence that it doesn't deter [1], because we are evil vindictive (inferred from facts) [expletive] (assumed).
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/27/far-more-im...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/borde...
What, no pardon for Joe Exotic?
How are we going to survive the lockdown without more of his antics on Netflix?
Personally, I think that the ability for gigantic corporations' ability to not only sue their former employees or influence justice to get them thrown in jail by the government is a much bigger problem.
And generally I feel like prison sentences for white-collar and non-violent crime is in almost all cases excessive.
People like him are a menace to society and shouldn’t be allowed to operate companies or deploy capital.
Society blesses individuals with the privilege to form a company and in exchange those company officers are expected to make a net positive contribution to society. Jobs, investment, progress.
If you fail to do that — through stealing, fraud, corruption — the least you should expect is to never be allowed to run a company ever again.
There are certain positions of trust that hopefully they will not be able to hold.
A counterpoint: Abraham Lincoln had some strong opinions about the events like on Jan. 6, and his opinions were not guided by an idea of "unity." Healing may involve some unpleasant medicine.
But AFAIK, Trump hasn't done anything to address these while in power, and given his usual rhetoric about "law and order" targeted at a very conservative audience, the cynic in me can't help but wonder if a lot of these pardons are to detract from or excuse the pardons for cronies.
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/17/676771335/how-trump-went-from...
"Trump's endorsement of the Senate's First Step Act stands in stark contrast to some of the rhetoric he has employed while in office"
"Trump, too, at times has argued that drug dealers are not punished enough"
"He has even talked about wanting to utilize the death penalty against drug traffickers" (yikes!!!)
And then there is the executive order that Trump made targetting BLM protesters, where damaging a federal building can lead to up to 10 years in prison, and he spraffed at length about coming down hard on them. Funnily enough, he wasn't saying anything like this about the Capitol Hill rioters...
I think one of Trump's biggest flaws (if we put aside megalomania), is that he wants to be loved by everyone - I always got the impression he'd say anything to anyone if he thought it would get them on side, regardless of whether he actually believed it.