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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

> everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption

This is absolutely what should happen, but what will almost certainly happen is that the most openly corrupt president the US has ever had will blanket pardon everyone who remains loyal to him for the remainder of his term and there will be no federal level criminal legal consequences for any of these people.

And this is kind of the optimistic outcome, the one where the corrupt people in power don't find a way to extend their power indefinitely, which is certainly their plan (their incompetence may stop this from happening).

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I never understood the presidential pardon. It's like America is basically admitting it has no faith in their own justice system. Or want a cheat code to skip it lol.

To be fair, the power was added as a failsafe to be used for legitimate clemency in cases of judicial overreach which is also a concern. I do believe it was added with good intentions.

But like many aspects of US federal government, the people who drafted the rules naively presumed the people invoking them would have some level of integrity and a shame response that would stop them from using it for openly corrupt purposes.

They were, of course, wrong.

At the very least they should have ignored Hamilton and made it so that Senate approval was required for the pardons... though even that wouldn't be enough of a check today because we now know that Congress is capable of completely abdicating its power to the executive branch.

Well I am not against pardons but having a single person parsing them out instead of parliament/Congress reeks of the kingly powers that the Founding Fathers correctly opposed.

But it is difficult to make a system Trump/asshole proof.

Complex systems don't pop out of thin air.

The US form of government is highly based on the existing British one and the British King had the ability to pardon and so that was copied over.

I do think it makes a lot of sense to do things like mass-pardon people for things that are no longer crimes (i.e. weed legalization) but I really don't see how singling out cases is correct since the supreme court already can do that.

> Complex systems don't pop out of thin air.

You've obviously never been part of an SAP/ERP implementation. /s

You can rest assured Trump is going to preemptively pardon everyone associated with him. On an ungodly scale.

And why wouldn't he? Biden preemptively pardoned his family, which was unprecedented, and Democrats said it was fine.

This is now the world we live in, and why these precedents are bad.

I think it's also fair to say that the Biden pardons wouldn't have happened without Trump coming into office after, and telegraphing his intentions to abuse power and go after all of those who Biden ended up pardoning.

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