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Comment by ncallaway | Hacker News Reader

I agree with everything, other than the two caveats below:

> Strike pardon power;

I'd go slightly narrower. I think pardons and clemency are a good thing to have in the system. I think we can put reasonable guardrails around it

- Require pardons to be published to a public register to be effective - Allow a 2/3 vote of both chambers of congress to veto a pardon within 90 days - Disallow pardons in the final year of the term - Explicitly affirm that Congress can make bribery and other forms of direct/indirect quid-pro-quos for a pardon illegal

> Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years.

I think we should also create room for Congress to create rule-making agencies that exist within the Congressional branch.

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If we keep pardons, no reason to give that power to the executive branch at all.

There are lots of executive actions which require consent of congress. I think that would work fine here. Obviously, the point is for congress to have a means of overriding a corrupt pardon (not that such a thing would ever happen!)

The benefit of vesting a power in the executive is unity of purpose (regardless of what administration is in power).

The benefit of Congress is slowing and deliberating over knee-jerk decisions.

Having the President initiate and Congress approve plays to the strengths of both offices.

> Having the President initiate and Congress approve plays to the strengths of both offices

Which wastes everyone’s time. If a case merits pardon, amend the law that convicted them in the first place.

Requiring two incentive-misaligned parties to mutually agree to effect a serious outcome was one of the Constitution's more durable controls.

These are all great ideas.

> pardons and clemency are a good thing to have in the system

Congress can do it any time. The fact that it will probably result in a statute change, too, versus a one-off benefit, is a feature of that process.

I debated this for a while, myself. Kept creating carve-outs. But at the end of the day, pardons are a shitty and ineffective check on either the judiciary or criminal statute, and they have been known to be a potential source of corruption since at least the Roman Republic, which denied this power even to their dictators.

> we should also create room for Congress to create rule-making agencies that exist within the Congressional branch

Eh, I prefer independent agencies. If the Congress wants a law it can pass it.

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