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Comment by amazingamazing | Hacker News Reader

My hot take is that the presidential pardon will be eliminated in our lifetime.

This would require a Constitutional Amendment - a pretty high bar.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C1-3...

I suspect in the aftermath of this administration, the power of the President as a whole is going to be massively stripped back.

I think it'll be interesting to see what the consequences are. In India, it used to be (I haven't lived there in decades) pretty par for the course for a new party to come into power and jail all the previous party's heads for corruption and then when it yoyos over the inverse would happen. That would be a worse outcome for the US, I think. It would stall any significant action from the government.

I think we allowed a sense of decorum and a hope we could just "move on" to avoid that happening in 2021, and now we are suffering the wrath of not doing it. I suspect we will not make the same mistake in 2029.

Has not happened after other catastrophic administrations. Each party likes the power when they get hold of it.

Congresscritters like personal power. Trump has neutered even his own party's legislators and they do not like it, even if they fall in line out of fear. Keep in mind even when Trump is in power, his own party goes through processes like "pro forma" sessions which prevent him from making recess appointments.

I thought that would happen after the first Trump term. It did not.

The second one has made an even stronger case for doing so though.

That seems highly questionable given how little pushback Trump got in congress, and it was almost entirely along party lines. What makes you think they'll suddenly grow a spine in 3 years?

The issue is people are afraid of him. There was plenty of Republican opposition to Trump but people either fell in line or got pushed out. (The main problem is that people didn't have the courage to oppose him all at once, he can easily handle one threat at a time.)

I suspect even of Republicans voting in the lines today, they don't like him or his behavior but are too self-interested to do anything about it. When a new administration comes in, between Republicans happy to avoid a Democrat or one of their own have that power again, and Democrats ready to ensure another Trump can never happen again, we'll have bipartisan support for crippling presidential power.

There are plenty of rules in place today which say the President cannot do X thing. I do not see how adding rules to the book changes anything if the Congressional/judicial enforcement becomes so impotent to use the tools at their disposal.

They're probably counting on the majority of the current Congress losing their seats over this.

That might work out well for the Republicans - "rule by executive order" started under the Obama administration.

Based on this:

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or...

Looks like it really started under Teddy Roosevelt. Obama's 276 is lower than most of his predecessors.

I suggest that you actually look up the numbers for other presidents: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or...

You're right. I repeated something I'd heard elsewhere and it wasn't correct.

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