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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

Trump's abuse of the presidential pardon is so hideous, I wouldn't be surprised if this power granted by the original US Constitution is amended after he leaves, in response to his unprecedented lack of respect for it. However, I also wouldn't be surprised if nobody in power ever possesses the strength of character or simple morality to do so.

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Giuliani selling them was the chef's kiss of ultimate, naked transactional prerogative exploitation of a traditional mechanism for exceptional humanitarian redress.

I don't think we should change it. I think we as a nation need to understand the person we put in that office has that power, and choose accordingly. It's there for a reason. Sometimes, it's perfectly acceptable for the President to say "fuck this shit" for the good of the Nation. With that power though, comes the responsibility to wield it with respect. This country put the man abusing it in power. No one had second bloody thoughts. No one listened. No one looked ahead. Changing the system won't fix that. Only changing ourselves will. Now you have an undeniable example of the destructive potential of a truly, unrepentantly, criminally inclined President. Consider yourselves lucky if we actually have a peaceful transition of power out of this Administration. Then don't fuck up again. The stakes of statecraft are high. It's about damn time we started acting like it.

> This country put the man abusing it in power.

Twice. I can forgive the mistake once, but this is the second time in 10 years that America is facing this nonsense with the exact same demagogue.

(You're more forgiving than I am.)

We also re-elected Bush Jr. after he started the disastrous war in Iraq, along with doing a bunch of other terrible shit. Is it really that surprising that Trump was elected twice?

> I think we as a nation need to understand the person we put in that office has that power, and choose accordingly.

That's like taking the safety off a gun to remind people to be responsible. That doesn't work, and irresponsible people's decisions can negatively affect everyone (including other countries). We need all the safety measures we can get.

We had safety measures. It was called the Electoral College, and the entire reason it was put there was to get a small group of people separated from groupthink to really think " Are you SURE this is the right candidate?" Then states decided to pass laws to penalize the act of being a faithless elector, which is EXACTLY the mechanism of protection to keep a demagogue out of office. You can't sit here and whine about what a criminal demagogue President can do not being safe when the Safety got stripped not more than 4 Presidencies in by the machinations of political parties. You had the safety of the impeachment process by Congress. Your Senators refuse to rein the man in. You had the Safety of the Judiciary. Your Senators did everything to stack that too. There is no one else to delegate the responsibility of clemency oversight to. In fact, systemically, you can't. Not while maintaining the President's inherent check on the Legislature & the Judiciary and thereby creating problems elsewhere. You just weaken the system. We put a felon in the White House even after seeing what they did the first time. That's the effing problem. It isn't the position. It's who got put in it. That's the only damn thing you can fix. The only people who should be ashamed are the ones who got taken in by this idiot's campaign, and couldn't be arsed to understand the levers they were putting him in front of. I bloody well did. I didn't vote for him. Even if I had to swallow my disgust and vote for someone else I was somewhat less doubtful of the efficacy of. There is no blood on my hands for this Presidency. Not a drop. I did my part. Now I'm doing my part for the next one in hopefully galvanizing people to wake up and take this crap seriously, unless they wish to remain a laughing stock to the rest of the world for the foreseeable future, even though, to be quite honest, I'm pretty certain that ship has sailed. Alas, it is my civic duty, no matter how hopeless the chances of success.

For every problem there is always a solution that seems quick, simple, and is almost certainly, entirely wrong in the grand scheme of things. Dorking with the Pardon, is one of them. Is it controversial? Yes. Is it necessary? Yep. Sure is. Someone has to be able to stop the wheels of the System from continuing to grind when the System changes it's mind, and that's what the Pardon is for. It is vested in a single person. To the rest of the system, it doesn't even factor in. Take this as a lesson learned, and don't put it in front of manchildren to be abused with wild abandon. Then just as we move forward to recover from this turbulent learning experience, we'll just have to clean up the mess.

You can't fix stupid. You can only clean up after it.

That's what continues to amaze me about this, there's numerous news stories saying his approval rating is down to 33% but what it actually means is that fully a third of all Americans are quite happy with having a dementia patient running the country. All it then takes is another 20% who aren't that happy but also not unhappy enough to do anything for him to keep pushing the US further off the cliff.

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, it also makes it a lot harder for anyone to say "How could ordinary Germans stand by and let Hitler do what he did?". It took him about six to eight years to get Germany to somewhere that Trump has managed in about one year.

> it actually means is that fully a third of all Americans are quite happy with having a dementia patient running the country

Or that they think (somehow?) that the alternative would be worse.

I vehemently disagree with this idea. I think you need to understand that all humans are fallible and you should have less vertical power structures and more horizontal structures. Putting all the power into one person's hands is asking for tyrants

How so? Serious question too, as last I heard of any pardons it was Biden giving his son, and others, blanket pardons going back to 2014. Didn't even think that was possible to just willy nilly give pardons on anything and everything for a whole decade.

Have you been out of the loop on the various Trump pardon's?

The blanket January 6 Capitol assault pardons?

Drug trafficking Juan Orlando Hernandez?

To name a few.

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