It's important to note the reason the President has the power to pardon anyone for any reason is it's one of the checks and balances, the Constitution is full of them. It's meant as a check to blunt overzealous prosecutions.
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.
Sorry to break it to you, but as with many things in the US constitution, the reason the President can pardon people is because it's a modified copy of the British constitutional system of the time. The House is Parliament, the Senate is the House of Lords, and the president can pardon people because King George III could and the office of the presidency is a limited term elected kingship.
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.
While pardon power originated from British law, the reason we kept it was what the OP referred to (see the federalist papers [1]).
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.
That's a perfectly reasonable take especially on the federal/state separation which was novel, but is it really not possible there was some back-rationalisation going on?
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.
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.
> That's a perfectly reasonable take especially on the federal/state separation which was novel, but is it really not possible there was some back-rationalisation going on?
No real point. I'm not even saying it's a bad system. I just find it amusing that the US system is held up as a shining example of modern enlightened constitutional innovation, where in fact the president is an elected, limited term British King circa 1770.
In addition, the US Constitution introduces another dimension to the idea of separation of powers - that the various branches of government should be able to counteract one another in certain circumstances.
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.
> 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.
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.)
Correct, but that wasn't given to them by the US constitution. Rather, that power rests with each individual state constitution. Further, depending on the state, it can be anywhere from unlimited to completely bound. [1]
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.
> It's theoretically possible for a state to decide that it doesn't need a governor.
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?
The pardon power should obviously at this point be severely limited, it has a purpose, but clearly its major use is corruption or the threat of corruption in order to secure deals. So many modern presidents have used it to do crimes and then pardon their helpers.
This is not so obvious to me. I don't think the evidence supports your claim that its "major use is corruption." The vast majority of pardons seem to be entirely unrelated to corruption.
However much you may dislike the particular individuals that trump has pardoned, he has used the pardon in a much more restrained way than Obama, who gave an order of magnitude more. So far, the pardon power is still a net good.
Okay, but why should the President be able to pardon people close to him including himself? Shouldn't the power be circumscribed to things that aren't obvious corruption? GWB pardoned Scooter Libby. George HWB pardoned Iran-Contra conspirators. Ford pardoned Nixon.
You could start by forbidding pardons to members of presidential administrations for offenses incurred during their term. You could also make "crimes against humanity" ineligible as well which would forbid the pardons of the Blackwater contractors that massacred Iraqi civilians.
Trump has pardoned far fewer people, but for the same reason the ratio of compassionate to corrupt pardons under Trump is much worse. Dozens of Trump's pardons had some direct benefit to him or his cronies. And among modern presidents he has pardoned strikingly few people.
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.
> 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.
Being able to pardon for things from your administration during your own term seems to erode checks and balances. Some kind of limitation on that or maybe at least some kind of congressional approval could keep out the truely egregious stuff. Aside from that the self-pardon question should be ruled out entirely or all checks and balances are basically gone.
I like to think that US democracy is self healing in the long run. Assume for a moment that pardons are, on balance, a good thing. This time around it was a little "too good".
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
The presidential pardon has allowed our country to move on from problems that would lead to decades of prosecutions and counter-prosecutions as power changes party. Nixon and the civil war are both examples.
Actually the "moving on" that Andrew Johnson enabled after the Civil War effectively terminated Reconstruction, launched nearly 100 years of Jim Crow, and gave permission for the South to regress (see "KKK").
Of course, that's a fair point. I suppose the elected nature of the Presidency certainly give the office a democratic legitimacy Georgie and his successors never enjoyed, and that insulates the office from reform.
This is sort of correct, except for two parts: The first constitution was the Articles of Confederation, which was extremely different from British constitutional design of the day; and the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty is distinctly British and did not migrate into the US Constitution.
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.
> and the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty is distinctly British and did not migrate into the US Constitution.
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.
> 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.
And the power of Congress to override the presidential veto is... what?
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".
That's barely even a difference, the ultimate sovereignty of Parliament was established in the Civil War. We didn't need that mechanism because we had another end-run on the principle that the Sovereign cannot withhold consent against the advise of the Cabinet an d no sovereign ever did so since 1708.
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.
Origins for the creation of a practice need not be the reasons it continues to exist today, unless we're mindless lemmings just copying what every previous administration did. (That may well be the case though)
The track record of a practice should be taken in account when considering removing them. As mentioned, this one in particular is part of a very well designed system of checks and balances. As with any power, it can be misused; the president, however, has many other powers that can be misused in much more spectacular ways.
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.
Constitution has some excellent checks and balances but the blanket pardon isn't one of them. The pardon doesn't do anything to address systemic problems in the justice system and has become a channel for doling out political favors.
This myth that the US constitution is in any way "good" is weird. It's one of the earliest; and fortunately others leared from its mistakes. Including the US itself, when it had considerable influence in drafting the WW2 losers constitutions, which uncoincidentally are quite different from the US.
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).
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.
> Is adding states too easy? There are three million US citizens in Puerto Rico without representation in Congress.
"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.
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:
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:
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:
Texas is only slightly smaller. But perhaps splitting both in 3 (or whatever) would be a good start. Or split any state that has more than 4% of the nations population (that would include FL and NY).
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.
The House is supposed to represent the interests of the people. The Senate is supposed to represent the interests of the states.
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.
The intent is all fine and good, but that doesn't excuse legislative influence that is so disproportionate to population. In general I'm a a little skeptical that "intent" matters at all; what matters is practical political power no matter how you label it - but even if we were to constrain ourselves to the notion of representing states, not people: they can represent their states just fine even if the number of senators varies by state. The idea that all states are equal should be dropped.
> the senate needs proportional representation too
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.
Regardless of how senators are picked, it's deeply problematic if representation is so divorced from population size. Alternatively, if we insist on retaining a fixed number of senators per state we could strip the senate of essentially all of its powers (perhaps becoming more advisory in role, with only the capability to temporarily filibuster house legislation); but that strikes me as being even more unachievable.
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).
A proportionally represented Senate is just a duplicate of the House. It would have no reason to exist.
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.
The senate is elected on a slower cycle, and simply by nature of its differing powers you might get different dynamics. You see that happen in some other democracies, at least.
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.
And also the United States form a federal republic. It makes sense for the states qua states to have a voice in the federal government (just like it makes sense for the states of Europe to have a voice in the European Union government).
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.
> 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 .
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.
Apparently Puerto rico overwhelmingly voted in favor of statehood, but turnout was low.
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.
> 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.
Which is exactly what someone from a large state focusing only on their parochial interests would say. IIRC, the Senate being a place where all states are equal was a pretty important compromise when the Constitution was written.
Yeah, I have no illusions that any of this is likely easily achievable. Though I disagree fundamentally that proportional representation is in any way parochial, it makes complete sense for small states to cynically hold onto to influence they hold even if it's not democratically reasonable (just like I wouldn't expect UN security council veto-holders to willingly give up their seat even if it were reasonable). But similarly, the current system is extremely undemocratic.
A more realistic path therefore would be to split the large states; small states don't get as easy a veto over that.
In 2012 PR voted AGAINST becoming a state, and in 2017 a vote on the issue was scotched because of anti-statehood boycotters. They just (Nov 3) narrowly voted to welcome statehood, easily lost in the recent noise, let's see what happens.
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.
> 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.
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.
On nixon: might well be. But it's never happened so far, and that's because congress is hyper deadlocked by design and a ridiculously high bar of non-proportionally-represented senators need to agree to convict. Just compare that to other democracies that can switch their executive with a simple majority in one house, yet remain stable.
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.
> The US has a solid set of traditions and an extremely civic culture; and that's why it works
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.
I mean, it would help if people didn't confuse the federal-level instantiations of social norms with restrictions on the power of said government specifically, too...
> 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.
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.
You just saw the checks and balance function today - the sitting executive used every trick he could think of to keep himself in power. He was rejected by Congress (the other arm, who he does not control), and this was affirmed by the Judiciary (who he does not control because of the lifetime appointments and other history, despite appointing a number of people aligned with his party to it).
In many countries he could have just insisted (or tell a crony he insists) and that would have been that.
Right, but how much of that is (a) coincidence, and much more critically, (B) US culture?
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?
Polish constitution has plenty of checks and balances. For example we had fairly well functioning constitutional tribunal. The difference is political culture. Especially the judicial branch of USA withstood the attack from Trump beautifully, but they were no more or less protected than Polish courts are. Polish culture is compromised by the communist mindset.
I don't believe this helps, at all. If anything it makes things worse, because it lets congress off the hook, and that's exactly what happens in the US - lots of congressional powers are abrogated to the executive, which is essentially a monarchy that hasn't devolved into a dictatorship simply because of tradition and popular unease at that route - but it's really unsafe.
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.
> the executive ... hasn't devolved into a dictatorship simply because of tradition and popular unease at that route
> I'm not really sure to what extent a constitution really can or should protect against popular despotism
I was trying to get across the point that democratic freedoms necessarily imply the freedom to make mistakes; at best you can slow them down and make em less likely by historical happenstance. And as pointed out, no legal document matters if enough popular sentiment opposes it; people just throw it out (it's happened in other countries before). So perhaps this benchmark is too high a bar.
I sincerely hope that we all (the people of the US, Congress, the Judiciary) take what happened on Jan 6th as a concrete warning of this hazard and work to pare back and reign in the executive. It has been needed for a long time.
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.
Exactly! And the best thing is that, unlike most European countries, executive and legislative branches are actually elected in separate elections. European system with Prime Minister being elected by Parliament is pathological, because it does not provide full separation.
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.
I think we know that Mitch would have blocked every Biden appointment if the Dems hadn't won Georgia. Waiting 2/4/6/8 years to resolve a deadlock isn't a great idea. The checks and balances in the Senate were ignored by Mitch to get things done, rather than compromise.
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.
> 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.
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.
Sure, I meant the qualitative feel by the entitled hindsight of somebody living the good life in 2021 which is possible because of it. It's definitely not all bad (certainly not for its age) nor was it an entirely novel creation in some sudden bolt from the blue. It's just showing its age.
"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."
How do you pick judges if you don't appoint them or elect them?
The category of 'appointment' contains many different methods, some of which may be better than the US system.
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).
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.
> name 1 check/balance that's actually particularly good!
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.
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 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.
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?
Well, when it is not used to cover up massive federal government misconduct making a mockery of "checks and balances" - think Watergate, torture and spies.
Technically, a president could pardon all federal marijuana convictions, and announce that they will continue to do so for the remainder of their term. Basically, it could be used to address systemic problems in the federal court system. A large portion of Biden's term will probably be spent trying to return to norms, so I doubt anything like this would happen.
> I’m for legalization of marijuana but think that’s a terrible idea. This effectively makes one person the arbiter of law.
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.
If you have laws that are passed with racial control in mind, such as our drug laws, then mass pardoning is an act of justice and not someone becoming the arbiter of law.
> If [criteria], then mass pardoning is an act of justice and not someone becoming the arbiter of law.
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.
Right, but the point gp made was that large scale blanket pardons make a single individual the arbiter of law. That's true. (if you want a less charged example, instead imagine the president pardons everyone convicted on fraud charges).
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.
I read the statement as "consider an alternative" or "consider this alternative". With this reading, the line of reasoning implied is correct and relevant.
Typos happen (and this is an international community including people unfamiliar with some idioms). Obviously the alternative presented isn't THE alternative.
I'm not necessarily advocating one way or another, just using an example to address the claim that while "The pardon doesn't do anything to address systemic problems in the justice system", it could.
The pardon power—for federal crimes only—also comes from a time when there just weren’t very many federal crimes. The framers did not predict the explosion of 18 USC that we’ve seen in the last century.
Which is probably an apt statement on the overgrowth of the federal government. The 10th Amendment has been so twisted and bent as to almost be unrecognizable.
As a foreigner Presidential pardons + the appointment (and life terms) of Supreme Court judges baffle me. How can a country that claims to be a leader in democracy have these two wildly abused bugs?
Edit: fixed use of election instead of appointment
The people who created the system and decided on lifetime terms for Supreme Court judges had a lot of enthusiasm for democracy, but they could see it had flaws, and they wanted the judiciary to be much less sensitive to the mood of the public than the rest of the system. As disappointed (and angry) as I am to see the Republicans steal the Merrick Garland appointment and then replace RBG with someone who has flaunted her enthusiasm for overturning Roe v Wade, I'm glad Supreme Court justices can't be held politically accountable for their decisions. It means that power ranges from being accountable to the public on very short time scales (legislators in the House) to slightly longer (the president) to pretty darned long (senators) to extremely long (the Supreme Court, which reacts very slowly through presidential appointment after retirement or death.)
Elected representatives get to try to make rules then the other side can chuck lawsuits at it for a decade trying to overturn it. The power to determine what rules are valid and how those rules are interpreted is a very powerful lever on how the country is run.
That's not how common law systems work. Things like executive privilege, qualified immunity, the fighting words doctrine, are all essentially just made up by judges.
They might not be directly elected, but they are political. If they weren't political we wouldn't divide them into liberal and conserative jusices. It seems like everyone already knows how they would 'interpret' any case involving abortion.
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.
>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)
That isn't as big problem as you paint it. Yes, Trump was particularily "lucky" (for the lack of the better word) that during his single term in the office 3 Supreme Justices died, so he could appoint replacements. But Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton, George Bush senior, they each appointed 2 Justices. So it seems to me that the system is deliberately designed to capture long-term political trends - Democratic presidents appoint democratic judges, Repliblicans appoint Republicans, and the net result is: Supreme Court reflects society's deeply ingrained values, not its current mood.
Trump appointed 50% more judges in half the time. So, triple the rate.
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.
Eventually you have to break out of the mindset where the government is ever for "the people". It's very naive and in practice things have never worked that way.
While I agree with virtually everything you're saying here, I'm not convinced the Founders had a high opinion of democracy itself. The Federalist Papers are full of warnings about mob rule, and the goal of the Constitutional framework was explicitly to insulate government from populist and direct democratic influence, while setting up structures that were supposed to mold the government into the form of an aristocracy (in the sense of Plato's Republic).
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.
What we call oligarchy now and what they called democracy then -- it's the same picture. Re democracy's weaknesses, I think the most important factor was that whatever their radical ideas, they were living in a country that had been born out of a revolution / civil war and were living through the failure of one attempt at creating a country (the Articles of Confederation) so they were primarily concerned with creating a system that could actually work for a while and maintain stability through turbulent times. They were true believers in (what they called) democracy, enough to bet the future of the country on it, but they also believed it had weaknesses, and they did not want to embarrass and discredit it by building a democracy that failed because of something that seemed inherent to democracy itself. That's one reason they were obsessed with its weaknesses. Another other reason is that they had to sell their new system to democracy skeptics. So, they had to convince both themselves and others that their system built around the idea of democracy was designed in a way that guarded against its weaknesses.
It should be noted that the Federalist papers only represent the views of a few of the Federalists (Hamilton, Madison, Jay), i.e. from one of the two major parties. The Democratic-Republicans had a greater distrust of centralized government and were more supportive of democracy and rule by the better of the average Joes (Jefferson's 'yeoman farmers' and all that).
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.
> It should be noted that the Federalist papers only represent the views of a few of the Federalists (Hamilton, Madison, Jay), i.e. from one of the two major parties. The Democratic-Republicans had a greater distrust of centralized government and were more supportive of democracy and rule by the better of the average Joes (Jefferson’s ‘yeoman farmers’ and all that).
“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.
Regarding judges: How would you appoint them? Basically there are three options:
- 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.
You can also mix-and-match further, and add another layer of indirection.
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).
Judges deciding cases based on what the law says, free from fear of political reprisal is the intended feature. Lifetime appointments get you that (or very nearly to it). If you know of a strictly better way to get the same feature, what is it?
America surely does not have such a shortage of well-qualified lawyers that each justice needs to serve for decades. It's certainly not an argument anyone would accept regarding the President. Just have them serve a single long term, and then that's it.
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.
The point about having them "serve decades" is to ensure that a single government period isn't enough to swap out all judges. If a new political faction comes into power they can't after a short term replace all judges with whatever the view of the season is, but only when the movement is established over long period will gain those powers with election in between, which can rebalance.
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.
> If you know of a strictly better way to get the same feature, what is it?
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.
Yes, they are an issue. The idea is to make them independent from future career things etc. and the rule is from a time where people didn't get as old as these days. This makes them independent from the politics of the day.
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)
If you make it 18 year terms and stagger the appointments (as grandfathered-in justices die or retire) to every 2 years, you can make it so that each presidential term appoints two justices, which at least removes some of the potential for luck to dramatically shift the balance of the court.
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.
> the election (and life terms) of Supreme Court judges baffle me
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.
If I understand correctly, the lifetime appointment is meant to avoid political pressure. Don't you think the judges might be swayed to vote one way or another if they knew there was a vote coming up in a couple years and they'd be on the chopping block?
Couldn't this be mitigated by making terms a fixed number of years? e.g. UK Supreme Court - No life terms. Justices selected by peers + independent committees. There is one member of the government with a veto that is rarely used and highly scrutinised when it is.
You might want to look at the electoral vote and how 1 vote in Wyoming accounts as much as roughly 4 votes in Texas and California.
Pretty serious bug that is enabling the far right to be over represented imo.
The federal government is the government of the individual states. A state is a sovereign entity. Each vote in the United Nations general assembly is identical regardless of the size of the country voting. Ireland’s vote is just as valuable as India’s. That’s the point of the United States — it’s a republic, not a democracy.
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.
That made sense before nearly everything was declared interstate commerce. The federal government now directly affects people on an individual level in a way it did not when the system was originally formed.
My understanding is the vast majority of Americans are in favour of harmonization at a federal level. In the original days of the USA I think citizens identified more with their state than the country as a whole. Outside of Texas that is no longer the case.
I never went as far as saying the the USA is not a democracy but you did.
Goes far behind my point, but that was the direction.
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?
The people do not elect the president, that is what all the brouhaha around the Electoral College is about. By convention, each state has agreed that the people vote for who their state is going to vote for - but that is not constitutionally required.
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.
The citizens don't vote directly for the president, the electoral college does. Usually the distinction doesn't matter but it does affect outcomes. States have different rules in how their electors vote for the president.
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.
Yes, I am aware of how it works and indeed it would be interesting to see a change in the election laws.
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.
> Rural areas are incredibly over-represented imo. This should be addressed more than the tiny details that don't really change the outcome.
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.
Hmm.. I struggle to understand your logic. Embedded in the concept of Democracy is the fact that there is a rule by which a decision is made and once taken it impacts everyone lives.
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.
Ideas that make sense to people in cities don't always make sense in rural areas. Let's say for an overly simplistic example everyone in a city thinks it's a great idea to tax anyone who lives in a home that has more than 2000 sq ft of living space. In the country _everyone_ meets this criteria so thereforethey are unfairly taxed.
This sounds very weak. It's like saying "Ideas that makes sense to the lower class don't always make sense to the top 1% net-worth people. For example taxing the rich more. For the top 1% net-worth individuals, _everyone_ meets the criteria and therefore they are unfairly taxed".
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.
Wait... I think I misread when I first answered:
"Some states have tied their electoral votes to the national popular vote in the name of increases democracy."
Is this a thing? I had no idea. Do you know what states do that ?
Technically, the state legislatures are entirely in control of which electors are sent for the Presidency. It's just that all of them use the popular vote to determine that. They could pass a law that the governor decides who goes, or that the state legislature chooses exactly who. But they don't at this time.
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".
The issue you're referring to with the Senate is, of course, the fact that each state gets two senators, regardless of population. This means that the sparsely populated North Dakota has the same number of senators as California.
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?
>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?
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.
Because of the resources those states provide. In almost all cases, resources (food, minerals, oil, energy) flow from those more sparsely populated states to feed, fuel, etc. the more densely populated ones.
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.
California produces, by far, the most food of any state, ($50B for California, $27B for #2 Iowa)[1]. Texas produces, by far, the most oil of any state (1.8B barrels vs 512M for North Dakota)[2]. Catastrophic famine? The data doesn't support that assertion at all. Rude shock? I guess I'm more shocked at how much California feeds the nation, but is ruled by sparse smaller states. Your initial claim is so wrong I'm interested where you got it - maybe I'm Googling the wrong information.
Not sure you're supporting the point you think you are, or are addressing my points?
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.
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'.
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.
>Not sure you're supporting the point you think you are, or are addressing my points?
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.
Ah - the reason being those were the terms the state joined under? If they hadn't, many likely wouldn't and the nation would not be what it is?
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?
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?
If the population of a State wants to leave the Union and the Union forcibly prevents them from doing so, then the United States is no different than the Romans, or the British, or the Soviets. They all had their own state documents which declared secession illegal, of course, so perhaps you're comfortable in that company.
>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?
That's a feature, not a bug. I can get behind changing the presidential election to be based on the popular vote, but I don't think I want the Senate to be based on the popular vote given the terrible job done by the CA and TX legislatures.
I think you are overestimating how intentional this was. The King of England had pardon powers, which was delegated to the King's governors while the US were colonies. The US adopted common law as a system, so they brought in pardon's for the closest thing for a king.
The issue is that the check on presidential power is Congress and it’s plenary power to impeach a president for maladministration. Sadly congress has consistently and constantly surrendered both power and independent initiative to the president within living memory, leaving the presidency vulnerable to abuse.
Thanks for highlighting that, it's important to bear in mind Chesterton's fence. But it's also important to consider whether this particular feature is working as intended.
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.
> It's meant as a check to blunt overzealous prosecutions.
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?
I think it was more intended as a check for "justice". Where someone could technically be guilty of a crime, but the conviction was considered unjust. You wouldn't necessarily want to repeal the law, but instead use the pardon to fix "edge cases".
There's at least 3 steps of bureaucracy between the president and the prosecution: Junior prosecutors->US Attorney->Attorney General->President.
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.
As much as I disagree with some pardons, I think the negative effects of looping in Congress would outweigh the positive.
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.
The pardon and its exercise are yet another reason to be sure that the person you're sending in to the job will exercise the power responsibly.
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.
What if the president pardoned literally... everybody. I wonder what would happen. Maybe he got drunk and wrote something down and handed it to somebody. It's such a simple action, nobody can stop it, he can't take it back when he comes to his senses. Would the system even respond to it? Would they just open all the federal prisons?
We have had prior presidents commute sentences of people who bombed the senate while the other party had a majority, so your nightmare scenario has basically already happened (but the shoe was on the other foot)
> ...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...
A blanket pardon, unbounded pardon, issued without a backing legal theory would amount to overruling both the justice branch and the legislative branch.
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.
Pardons don't work like that. They have to actually be delivered to the recipient to be effective. Pardoning everybody would be a massive printing and mailing operation.
"On January 21, 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter grants an unconditional pardon to hundreds of thousands of men who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War."
Carter was effectively offering a pardon to any eligible person who wanted it. Affected people still had to request the certificate for the pardon to have any legal effect.
The actual title is "Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Grants of Clemency". Took a second to realize that the editorialized title is referring to Anthony Levandowski[1] (of Waymo / Google / Uber).
Upon first read I just saw the last name and thought it was related to his former campaign chair Corey Lewandowski[2]!
My partner and I were talking about this and honestly wondered if there had been either a mistake in reporting or a mistake in the actual process. The input of Thiel made it more clear.
The fact that even fox news was onboard with pardoning Julian Assange and then he pardons Levandowski is... well ironic is an understatement. I am failing to find a word that encapsulates my feelings.
The most famous pardon in history - Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon - involved no convictions or charges/indictments:
> [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.
You can pardon people before they're convicted of anything.
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 questionable if you can pardon yourself or your coconspirators, and you specifically can't pardon yourself for things you were impeached for.
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.
>It's not questionable if you can pardon things that haven't been charged yet. You can.
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.
If a president were to do something really nutty like "Everyone now has a clean slate with respect to federal crimes" I suspect the Supreme Court would find some way to invalidate it. Carter's pardon, while controversial, fell into the category of these weren't exactly serial killers and a lot of people in the country were ready to move on.
> This showed that pardons could both apply to actions which hadn't been charged and categories of people.
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.
> you specifically can’t pardon yourself for things you were impeached for.
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.
That may be the rationale for the limit, but the legal reason is because the Constitution expressly limits the pardon power to exclude cases of impeachment.
I was expecting a pardon for Assange if purely because he did Trump a solid during the campaign. I'm guessing it was killed by the national security types in his administration
> Trump is also not expected to pardon Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, whose roles in revealing US secrets infuriated official Washington.
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.
john kiriakou said he was seen by trump on tucker carlson and requested jared look into him. jared reached out and part of his pardon "application" was 1/4 of the single page dedicated to how being pardoned would help get trump reelected.
I'm disappointed in Michael Ovitz, who I've thought well of before now. Why would he stoop to this? Lewandowski was clearly very much in the wrong. Justice was in no way miscarried by his conviction.
I don't know if you've read Mike Isaac's book on Uber? Michael Ovitz very famously screwed over Travis Kalanick when he invested in Travis' first startup.
I don’t know what the current going rate is; we’ll see if Joe Exotic met it.
Supporters of Snowden and Assange have only a few hours to get the cash together.
Well, in hindsight none of them provided enough transactional basis. Mr. Exotic once got 19% of the vote for governor of Florida. Seemed like a natural ally in a swing state.
Earlier in Trumps presidency, one explanation for a Snowden pardon is that he would appear on stage at a Trump rally.
But, it’s not clear what Assange would be pardoned for. He might be in better shape without the guilt conveyed by a pardon.
Will investors put money on him again? Or is he relegated to working on trump’s personal Twitter replacement kind of projects now? Have a feeling this is the only thing he can do now, go deep maga and suck up to the cult
Obviously support their pardons but there was little expectation from me that they would considering the government is prosecuting them so aggressively.
> He pardoned a literal spy who was convicted of espionage of state secrets but he did not pardon Assange. Incredible.
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.
> He was also recently steered away from pardoning himself
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.
Even if he could, I don't think he would want to. It would mean admitting guilt and opening himself to give testimony on the crimes in prosecuting others as well as emboldening civil lawsuits. Also, since its an ex-President and leader of a political party there is no way to punish him without it being political, which means the next President is likely to pardon him anyways for expediency.
Just so you know, this isn't reddit, and joke replies are discouraged.
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.
I’m sorry, my bad. You asked that question as if he/she (will just cal her/him X) is talking about the Big Foot so I couldn’t help myself.
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.
The funny part of this thread is that while there was hope Trump would pardon Assange, in comparison there is little to no hope that Biden will pardon Assange. I wonder why that is.
Because Trump doesn't give a shit or care about anyone but himself so theoretically he could be persuaded to do something if he thought it might piss people off
I think people on the right and the left are perhaps skipping over just how much McConnell was manipulating the admin not just over the last four years, but esp since Jan 6th.
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.
This is an amazingly ridiculous take especially on Sessions and Barr
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.
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?
What evidence is there of McConnel having access to Trump after Jan 6? I have the impression that their relationship cooled. McConnel stated that Tump “provoked” the mob on the senate floor.
Well for one; McConnell could have gone through with an impeachment vote had Trump started to burn things down on his way out the door.
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.
What you're saying here is contradictory. Sure the GOP hates Trump, and Trump also hates the GOP. And that's exactly why Trump didn't give a damn to GOP criticism of his pardons.
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.
Not quite. Trump knows they're more or less okay with him pardoning Bannon - it pisses them off, but at the end of the day it's water under the bridge. Whereas Assange getting pardoned would absolutely infuriate the "deep state" to an extent that's hard to describe.
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).
If you were waiting until now for trump to prove that he was a righteous man who keeps up on his promises then you willfully avoiding reading the story that repeats ad nauseum for the man's entire existence.
> McConnell has no influence. That's why Stone, Kushner, and Bannon are on the list among others.
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.
Yeah, it's kind of funny that this is what is making some people come to this realization. And not, you know, everything else that has happened over the past four years.
I just wonder why. It seemed like pardoning Assange and Snowden could win him a huuuge bonus to popularity among people all over the world. Perhaps that was considered "too much" and could probably imply worse consequences so he hesitated to.
He was investigated for 2 years and is still accused to this day for Russian collusion. Pardoning either Snowden, who is in Russia right now, and Assange, who is accused of being a co-conspirator in the Russia collusion accusations, would be like throwing gasoline on that fire. I don't see how he could do it without alienating most of his establishment support, which he still needs after leaving office.
IMHO nobody (including and especially members of the establishment) seriously believes Snowden or Assange are actually Russian spies, really. Snowden just had to flee to Russia because that was the only counterpart to the US which is sufficiently powerful and interested to possibly hide him and also just enough civilized&westernized to tolerate.
> IMHO nobody (including and especially members of the establishment) seriously believes Snowden or Assange are actually Russian spies, really
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.
> IMHO nobody (including and especially members of the establishment) seriously believes Snowden or Assange are actually Russian spies, really.
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.
No, it's not about the Russia collusion hoax (yes it was a hoax btw).
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]
Trump doesn't care about the GOP or the country or anything but himself(and he doesn't care about the law)
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
I think Trump is afraid of pissing off the establishment. The FBI has been criminally investigating Trump literally his entire time as president. The Mueller investigation is over but the SDNY office is still investigating his finances hoping to find something they can nail him on.
It's also been reported that Mitch McConnell threatened to support the impeachment if he pardons Assange. Though this claim has not been substantiated.
I don't think that he could have gained much support by pardoning them: I'd expect the groups of people who might still be pulled (back) on Trump's side and the group of people who would celebrate a Snowden or Assange pardon to be mutually exclusive. And if Trump is good at anything besides golf, it's correctly assessing whom he might sway and with whom all efforts would be wasted.
Last night Trump also revoked his own 2017 executive order that prevented federal administration officials from becoming lobbyists after leaving government:
The nice thing about executive orders is they can be added by the next guy. Would be nice to see this as actual law, and not an executive order -- but if Trump cancels anything on his last day, Biden can re-do it on his first day.
But it won't apply to former Trump administration workers. That's the point, I'm sure Biden will have a better ethics policy but it can't be retroactive
My Republican friends are all angry that the last minute pardons are white collar criminals and hip-hop stars. They were really hoping for an Assange/Snowden pardon to stick it to the "deep state". But honestly at this point they're acting like drained husks and just feel so let down.
I personally look at the pardon list and I'm at a loss for words. What a weird mix of scammers and celebrities.
I voted for Trump because his policies more closely align with my beliefs than any other candidate on my ballot. I am very disappointed in his response to the election results after it was clear there wasn't proof of enough fraud to change the result, and I'm very disappointed in the pardons.
Please stop down voting posts like this. If we want HN to remain a welcome space for civil discourse for everyone, we need to respect other people's candid statements.
Remember, Trump won 47% of the popular vote which likely includes a large number of HNers. We should not alienate those people.
I am op (asked the question) and even though I don't agree with throwaway, I appreciate him having the time to respond (so I upvoted.earlier to try to offset the downvotes).
This is ridiculous. How is graying out a comment on Hacker News "holding to task" anyone?
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.
I didn’t downvote in this case but I am highly likely to downvote anything that comes from an account called throwaway* unless it contains some whistleblowing info or similar. If you can’t stand by your opinions even with a pseudonym because you are afraid of losing fake internet points then no one needs to see what you have to say.
"I invested with Bernie Madoff because his returns matched my investment goals". Yes, knowing why someone got conned is itself valuable information. But standing on its own, it reads as an endorsement.
Trump supporters have done nothing but alienate and engage in acts of harassment and violence against non-white folks, religious minorities and members of the LGBTQ community for the past 4-5 years. Should we be civil toward members of the KKK as well? Why is it always on us to be nice to people who hate us and want us dead?
Just like how you've been brainwashed by the TV into thinking the "others" are evil, trump people are brainwashed into thinking you hate them and want them dead.
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?
I am from the Deep South. I have evangelical family members who have disowned others because of their beliefs. Who wish for the Kingdom of God to be realized, so that the non-believers can spend eternity in suffering. I grew up with peers who told me I would burn in hell for believing in evolution. Peers from middle class backgrounds with financial security, who then worry about "white genocide" and the "great replacement".
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.
There are shitty people of all walks of life. I'm sorry to hear that you didn't have a good family/upbringing. Glad you found a place that you are more happy in.
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.
Thank you, however I am not asking for your sympathy. I'm challenging your assertion that critics of Trump's supporters and OP are just "brainwashed by the TV", and your framing of this dynamic as just "both sides" seeing "themselves as the victim and the others as the attacker".
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.
"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.
Acknowledging systemic racism, racial bigotry, and racist behavior, especially in the south, is grounded in plentiful historical evidence. Consequently, these are not "statements of prejudice against groups of people [I] don't like", and are no way "the same poison" as statements like "minorities are lazy criminals".
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.
Not now, not ever. I will always call out those that supported racism, bigotry, violence and Trump's admin did all that. The voice and platform he gave to the most deplorable people, has made me and others lose faith in all Americans.
95% of them are already reshaping facts to fit their narrative. Maybe a few will start to see how much they were hoodwinked. Even those few won't be able to admit it until they figure out a way to save their ego.
Snowden overdid it. He found illegal behavior in a spy agency, but he also exposed legitimate activity. Sure, NSA was spying on Angela Merkel and other allies. You might agree with Henry Stimson, that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail", but the reality is that countries spy on one another. Snowden might deserve whistleblower protection for some of his revelations, but not all of them.
Sir William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, 9th ed., book 4, chapter 27, p. 358 (1783, reprinted 1978), says, “For the law holds, that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.”
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?
The blame for what he was forced to do belongs with the officials that were violating the constitution. They should be exiled for failing to uphold their oaths. Instead, Snowden is in exile.
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.
HN loves Snowden so much it makes no sense to me. He could’ve gone to the Senate/House intelligence committees, and not been in trouble. Worst case nothing would’ve gotten done, but since they were lied to, I don’t think he would’ve been ignored.
They also leave out the fact that he had been reprimanded for his actions numerous times, to include being removed from roles and duties because of his negative actions. The fact that he moved from the CIA back to an NSA supported role without this being disclosed is ridiculous in of itself.
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.
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.
So you're saying he was never in China? He literally fled to Hong Kong first. So again, what did I state that was a lie?
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.
> 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.
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.
You are against retaliation on the part of whistleblowers or organizations? It sounds like you are saying that if a person blowing a whistle is “told no” by the organization whose actions bring the whistle forth, that person should just drop the whistle. This doesn’t seem to make sense outside an incredible credulity for the organization’s ability to evaluate their own behavior. Is that a fair summary of your assertion?
It’s more so the worship of the military that made me assume they’re part of it. Couple that with referring to everyone as the “American public” and the knowledge they imply they have of classified documents that won’t be made public for some time. Doesn’t seem like a stretch.
Yes that’s what I’m talking about when I said the committees were lied to. I’m sure they would’ve been interested to hear from someone working at the lower levels that the NSA director lied.
The absence of prosecution or any act of accountability in response to that allegation might lead one to believe that there was never any interest in hearing from the “lower levels.” (Or that the allegations were not true.) What makes you “sure” of the opposite?
Your comment displays a bit of naivety on how power structures work in this country. There’s a reason thousands of people knew about these programs, including his superiors, and it took Snowden going to the press. You believe a no name, low level, intelligence contractor can just walk into the intelligence committee and tell them they’re spying on their own people? The same committee that despite knowing about it know hasn’t made serious efforts to curtail these operations? I might have a bridge to sell you.
You realize Snowden didn’t just dump all of these documents on a torrent site right? Given that he’s not a professional journalist and was risking his freedom he grabbed what he could and took it to reputable journalists to do the work of ensuring the leak doesn’t endanger others without a good reason. What else do you expect him to do? If he’d gone to a superior he’d be rotting in jail and we would have no evidence of mass surveillance in this country.
> 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.
For one, to piss off Democrats and Biden’s administration. Snowden and Assange both revealed years of illegal activities and corruptions that occurred while a Democrat was president.
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.
- 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.
I'd love to update my understanding. Could you share the policies that Trump made that centralizes his or his government's power or reduces the rule of law?
The fact that all a POTUS does after presidency is enrich oneself, it's quite clear where the motives are.
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.
If they get rich by selling books and speeches I have no problem with that, and am surprised by the number that do. People might not like that, but it isn't corruption.
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.
I have a problem with that. It shows moral corruption. It's not corruption in the legal sense but outlines the issue of why the pardons do not make sense.
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.
Honestly most former presidents do “good work” in this sense. The power is gone so now there’s less outside influence. This law seems arbitrary and has no purpose, there’s like 4-5 former presidents alive at a time? This “problem” is at the bottom of my list of problems that need solving.
Well, if a law was put I'd definitely include all of the public servants in executive positions, which includes congress, mayors and alike. It's going to be a much different crop of people wanting to work for the public, because eventually, now, they all become "consultants" for companies dealing with the public sectors, and enrich themselves.
Would this be an example of the exception proving the rule?
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.
He was already a billionaire before he got elected. What I find particularly disgusting is how lifelong politicians with relatively meager (compared with the private sector) salaries can become so wealthy while in office. But yes the revolving door is a thing and it should be addressed. Yellen earned over 7 mil in speaking fees in the last two years. It is impossible that that will not have any influence over her decisions when she's back at the Fed.
Pretty much every major figure in the Fed (and minor figures too) has come straight from from Goldman or JPMorgan or some other major bank. It's called a 'revolving door' for a reason.
The argument that "all Presidents have imperfect morals" is obvious and uninteresting. The quality of "moral character" varies tremendously among people.
Thankfully, he end up being the first presidential candidate bankrupted by the position. The dude's primary asset, his brand, is not completely toxic and can no longer be used to prop up his other failed ventures. And the only bankers wiling to finance him will the the predatory ones, who will all extract every penny left then leave him with nothing.
That kind of remains to be seen there's a lot of people out there that are still very on board with Trump, it may not be a luxury lifestyle brand much going forward but it'll almost definitely still be a brand.
>And the only bankers wiling to finance him will the the predatory ones, who will all extract every penny left then leave him with nothing.
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.
He seems, as an outsider (UK), to be fomenting racial divisions - around the World - just so he can play at being a big cheese. His motivation appears to be purely money, but he and those who voted for him don't appear to have a problem with the cost of that being democracy and racial unity.
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.
>He seems, as an outsider (UK), to be fomenting racial divisions - around the World - just so he can play at being a big cheese. His motivation appears to be purely money, but he and those who voted for him don't appear to have a problem with the cost of that being democracy and racial unity.
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?
Honestly, I get the impression that he's easily outflanked by smart people. And that something about his personality drives people to take advantage of him. That impression comes from his apparent business incompetence. He is capable of screwing up "sure things" such as casinos and hotels. Best I can tell, he ends up getting a raw deal, then proceeds to make the shit roll down hill by screwing over people down stream of him (i.e., not paying contractors).
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.
>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.
> is [now] completely toxic and can no longer be used to prop up his other failed ventures
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.
If there’s anything that Trump is actually good at, other than carnival barking, it’s shielding assets and wealth from bankruptcy, and remaining rich after “insolvency”. Don’t expect him to show up homeless on Venice Beach any time soon.
Pay attention to that list, each pardon has a list of people who supported each pardon.
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.
>but they clearly have no pull or influence or backchannel despite our tech scene thinking they do.
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).
What part of the EFF and ACLU should have gotten involved? He plead guilty to a trade secret theft charge which doesn't really seem like the ACLU's bag and only tangentially related to the EFF's.
What a strange criticism. That these orgs are useless because they couldn't get Pardons from a President more or less totally opposed to their goals? It's completely unreasonable to expect otherwise.
Respectfully, fuck off. This article cites the origin of the memo as the ACLU defending white nationalists' rights to protest in 2017. This is a hard issue. They're not saying free speech isn't absolute, they're saying they have finite resources and a number of civil rights they're trying to protect- and they're clearly outlining, explicitly, the right of hate groups to say their bullshit even when it runs directly opposed the ACLU's values.
> “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
I thought your point was that the EFF and other great institutions would normally and successfully sponsor people to be pardoned and so this year was a notable exception?
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.
I'm saying that the internet and tech culture needs an organization that is more inspired and proactive.
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.
I think I'll be the one to stake out "influence within the Trump administration was highly unusual and doesn't reflect influence in more standard Republican or Democratic presidencies". I guess I wasn't aware this was controversial, but I feel I can support it with evidence.
When I go to a country to get a result, I don't say "hey wait a minute, you're quite a bit more extreme than prior leaders and a lot of your citizens don't want to associate with you at all!" I just go to the mixers and try to get as much influence as possible and I'm glad to hang out in those circles.
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.
I have to say there is quite a lot to learn from Levandowski.[0] I am not a fan of corruption but it's undeniable that he played whatever cards he had in life and played them hard. He'll probably be a shadowy billionaire quite soon.
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.
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?
> "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."
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.
I've updated my post to clarify my argument as it missed some important details. To me the value of history is trivial to state, but it's the relationship people have with it that can become a problem. There's a lot to learn indeed, but it is a mental trap as well that causes people to overestimate their own importance.
I don't think it's ignorant, it's just another framework of looking at the world. Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position.
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.
That is only because subgame perfect equilibrium is applicable to chess. An imperfect information game like Poker cannot have that. Technology is not a process with complete information therefore the chess analogy in the context of technology cannot work. And as bananabiscuit points out, Leela Zero can get away with considering orders of magnitude fewer positions than Stockfish because of the extensive experience from past games encoded into its weights.
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.
> Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position.
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.
A better analogy would be Taleb's "green lumber" story.[0] The narratives we assign to things don't necessarily correspond to what really moved the needle forward. The ability to get things done might sometimes be influenced by historical reading, but it is mostly a factor of reading the present, creating new knowledge, and spending most of your energy on the problems at hand as they actually stand. A person like Zuck might draw parallels from their reading of the classics (to name one notorious example) but in practice their success will be contingent on making decisions in real time with few helpful analogies, or general principles for which historical reading is not strictly necessary. The journalists then comparing Zuck to Augustus are then probably misattributing the causal relationship.
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.
In an ideal sense that’s true, but to use your analogy to make the opposite argument: consider someone that has no knowledge of what kinds of moves where made previously in this chess game and other historic chess games, even though theoretically they can figure out a good move given enough time to read the board but that is prohibitively infeasible. On the other hand it is people who have studied games of chess played in the past that end up building an intuition for what a good move is and are much more likely to come close to making a good move in a reasonable amount of time.
> I don't think it's ignorant, it's just another framework of looking at the world. Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game.
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.
> Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position.
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.
Also analyzing your moves that got you to that point. Don't like where things are now? Well, what did you do to get here?
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.
This seems naive at best. The goal of studying history is not to be paralyzed and constrained by it, but to learn from it. Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries, there is much to gain from understanding past mistakes.
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.
> Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries, there is much to gain from understanding past mistakes.
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.
> People are basically the same as they always have been
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.
The downvoters are thrashing a straw man. Obviously nobody believes you're supposed to recreate society every 20 years ex nihilo. What I'm arguing is that the case for reading history has been overstated. Specifically, I was reacting to the claim that, "Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries." I agree. It is. Human beings react to the same emotions and incentives they always have and there's no library big enough to change that.
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."
> Human beings react to the same emotions and incentives they always have
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.
Fine, but by your own argument, reading history gives you some insight into how the humans of today will react to certain situations. You can read history to find out what humans actually are like, not what theory says they're like.
Literally everything about the world we live in has been shaped directly and indirectly by historical events and ideas. Everything, from what you wear, what you eat, the shape of the surface of the planet, the ideas you think, your conception of human beings in the universe, and the fact that you are reading this comment (and not listening to it or feeling it.)
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.
There is another layer to look at the problem. Studying history often does not do what it says on the tin for a few reasons
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.
I worked with a CEO who shared this sentiment about history. After two months with no paychecks, half truths about our funding, and the dev team quitting, he wanted me to start building up a crew of contractors.
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.
Is there a lot to learn from him? His amorality has left his reputation in tatters. Yes he earned some money but at what cost? Is being a reviled shadowy billionaire really worthy of praise or respect?
I don't know what his personal life is like. But a person with the freedom to do the things they want and the energy to embark on ambitious projects will have no trouble having a genuine social circle and having great experiences barring some serious psychological obstacle in doing so like Howard Hughes.
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
It doesn’t matter. You can have a good reputation and zero human relationships simply because you are not extroverted enough to initiate or maintain them.
He's got a point about history, it's just a story we tell ourselves that only resembles what really happened. There's value in that though, because there are many lessons that can be learned from history. Plus it's just fascinating. We like stories, and history is our story.
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 only thing that matters is HEAD+1. I don’t even know why we use version control. It’s entertaining, I guess—the commits and the bug fixes and the rewrites, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to have the past snapshots to make changes to the current code. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow."
>I am not a fan of corruption but it's undeniable that he played whatever cards he had in life and played them hard.
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
To stick to with the poker analogy, the measure success is not if you win the hand when you flop a full house, but how big a pot you walk away with. Anybody can walk away with the initial stakes in that situation, the real skill is to use that hand to walk away with all the money at the table.
Lots of people start life with a lot more than he was given and walk away with a lot less.
He was arrested and charged with ~30 felonies and plead guilty to 1 in a plea deal and was due to spend over a year in federal prison. So what exactly did he win?
I believe that the most useful parts of the history are the parts that are not taught in history classes. Especially monetary history and past enterpreneurs, inventors and scientists. Not history written by winners of wars.
While there are temporary monopolies, great products win long term. Without capitalism we would live like monkeys in the forest. That would be an interesting life as well, but far not as interesting than what we have now.
I’d go further. Most current news is purely entertainment. You really don’t need to know everything that’s going on. Almost none of it is actionable. It’s fine as entertainment, but people are convinced they’re doing something important when they read the news, when as far as I can tell it’s just something they enjoy as a leisure activity.
My current approach, for whatever it's worth: I subscribe to the Sunday print edition of my city's daily newspaper. For those too young to remember, this is the week's largest edition, which includes summaries of many of the week's stories. I read it over coffee on Sunday morning (away from my laptop). I'm roughly as informed as anybody else about the events of the day.
I don't remember the exact quote, but one thing that struck me that Alan Kay mentioned is that one of the best way to invent new things is to look at the past. And that our modern times are just a tiny view into the last 100 years. Lots got left behind. And there's a lot of genius inventions that lost out due to no real fault of their own.
Bitcoin scams are a great illustration of how to monetize knowledge of history. Or I guess you could just use modern day regulations and emulate what they prohibit in new markets?
I think it's really important for society as a whole that there exists the rule of law and not the rule of law for the poor only.
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
To be honest I don't know the fine details about the allegations against him and what he already paid. His reputation would definitely never be the same. The fact he didn't spend time in prison might be a good thing. I recall seeing a horrifying doco about a guy in prison who stabbed another inmate like 100 times and killed him. The stabber was already doing life in jail for murder. But his partner who helped him by holding that inmate down is a guy who ended up in prison for a minor fraud of a check or something along those lines. The fact they mix those people in prison is crazy (that was a pretty old case, maybe today things are different).
I doubt this type of crime would land in the same type of prison this type incident you mentioned happens. But I might be wrong. If anybody knows, What chances are for convicted white-collar criminals to end up with violent cellmates of non-white collar crimes?
As someone convicted of a low level white collar crime, who ended up in a prison with many violent criminals and saw people get stabbed, I would have to disagree. This is a totally incorrect speculation. BOP has no oversight and is totally wack. I'm glad he didn't go to prison: he's already suffered the reputation consequences he deserves.
What's not serious about stealing and selling trade secrets, jeopardizing life-saving R&D, blatantly disrespecting the law, and walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars expecting not to be caught?
He declared bankruptcy, hence walked out much poorer than he started. At the end of the day it was IP theft, which for regular people creates more competition and can accelerate the "life-saving R&D".
IP laws exist for a good reason, but it's hard to say that he has done serious damage to society.
It's weird to see the Republican party embrace intellectual property theft. Levandowski stole from his employer and his colleagues at Google to enrich himself at Uber. Why would that possibly be worth a pardon?
Reportedly its "worth a pardon" for about $2M a pop. Much cheaper then paying the amount Levandowski owed in the settlement, so its just good business.
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?
No I think perhaps you are misreading the announcement. Thiel, Luckey et al were backers of the pardon for Levandowski and involved in the process, not recipients of pardons themselves.
Adam Serwer, an excellent writer, explained it: [1]
> 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.
I saw reporting that Thiel (and Palmer Luckey) also received a pardon. Anyone have a link to that, I'd like to see specifically what he was pardoned for...
You can say that when any significant percentage don’t follow him in lockstep. Very few elected officials are willing to disagree with him in public, most backed dishonest claims or opposition to public health measures, and he has high approval ratings from Republican voters: it’s his party.
Yes, but in the context of presidential pardons there is nothing the GOP can do to either back the president or not back the president. It doesn't make sense to attribute presidential pardons to The Republican Party when there is a sole individual who decides who to pardon and why.
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.
It's true that the direct decision was his but this doesn't happen in a vacuum. People talk beforehand — this is reportedly why he didn't pardon himself or his children – and especially now there's no reason why a member of Congress or other national leader couldn't speak against something like this. It practically writes itself — “Republicans support private property rights, thievery isn't something we condone” – so if they want an easy way to show that Trump isn't the party, all they have to do is start.
> 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.
Come on, suicide? If you loose your job for saying "this is unethical" do you call that suicide? It's called having a backbone. "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." These GOP folks who stood behind Trump but are now critical choose the side that's winning at the time rather than stand up for what's right.
Oh keep telling yourself that. As President he was the literal head of the Republican party. Also as we've seen, the party is so afraid of him they can't even denounce a literal violent insurrection he started. Trump and the GOP are one, and it's not good for the GOP or America.
I can say similar things about many of the Obama pardons, but I'll get downvoted into oblivion if I do so. Pardon is by definition an admission of guilt, and Levandowski has already paid a steep price for what he did.
I suspect in this case that you are getting downvoted /because/ you didn't provide specifics. It's certainly possible that some Obama pardons were self serving, I didn't hear much about his pardons at the time, but I'm open to the idea that some are morally dubious, but I would need names and why it is dubious, rather than innuendo. Many people on both sides felt Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich was pretty iffy.
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'.
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.
Literal whataboutism. Be glad to hear which Obama pardons you don't like, I might even agree. The Clinton pardons, particularly Marc Rich, are a better source for evidence of corruption from a Democratic president though.
The 'bias' in this community is for demanding evidence, of which you have provided none. You said "I can say similar things about many of the Obama pardons" - well, if you can, do, otherwise, well, STFU.
And I'm not being facetious. It's worth comparing Obama's (or any previous president's) process for granting pardons with Trump's.
Yes, exactly like that. That is a good, specific example that anyone can investigate and see how it compares to Trump's pardons. Still waiting on the examples from Obama that "you can say similar things about".
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.
Point of pardon is to restore one's rights such as voting and gun ownership and eligibility for public and other positions. Commutation is only one aspect of pardon.
Most of yesterday's pardoned folks also either fully served or served a majority of their sentence.
I'm going to go around the interesting tech angle here and comment on how many people on this list have been pardoned for petty drug crimes.
*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.
Didn't think I'd seen Corvain mentioned on HN. He's actually a great guy and a hell of an entrepreneur. Without trying to take any credit for his release my team was involved in the process of raising awareness of his incarceration for the last year and got deeply involved in bringing his cannabis brand to the California market. We've been early-celebrating all week about his pending release.
I'll also add that his crime was trafficking 37 tons. He wasn't the seller or buyer.
> I'll also add that his crime was trafficking 37 tons. He wasn't the seller or buyer.
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.
> bringing his cannabis brand to the California market
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 was imprisoned for trafficking and had no legitimate cannabis business at that time.
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.
Congrats! If only all inmates unjustly incarcerated could receive fair re-trials / pardons / relief / release depending on circumstances. There are so damn many people in need of justice in this way.
If the goal was real justice, why is this left to the 11th hour storm of bullshit pardons? Isn't this being used as an obvious distraction when it could have happened much sooner?
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.
One theory: they're not in office anymore, so they won't as easily be bothered because [person pardoned] committed a crime, which of course they'll be chased like a hawk for doing, just in case, especially in the case of certain pardoned people.
edit: removed some inflammatory text that was unfair to all involved.
Maybe he should have just commuted the sentences of offenders like him instead of the likes of Bannon, Levandowski, and Broidy. Makes Marc Rich look tame.
It is honorable to pardon or commute the sentence of people in this situation. It seems Trump has only done it for a few dozen people. I can't help wonder why specifically these people deserve this and the hundreds of thousands of other people still in prison for similar charges don't deserve it. If he truly believed these laws were too harsh, he could have worked to change the laws as president.
It was a grassroots effort and, in the end, lobbied through the right channels. He caught a lucky break. Now that Corvain is getting release he'll be lobbying for the release of other non-violent cannabis offenders. It will take time but we'll get all non-violent cannabis offenders released.
Most pardon's are recommended to the President by the Justice department after reviewing cases. Currently, they have a mandate to go over all large sentences of non-violent drug offenders.
Whats up with sprinkling of "xyz is an upstanding citizen and father to n beautiful children." ? They are clearly not an upstanding citizen - otherwise they wouldn't require a presidential pardon. Being father to children is not an achievement and any two consenting healthy adult man and woman can produce them irrespective of their standing in society. And beauty of children is a criteria for pardon now? What if the children were ugly - "clearly he doesn't deserve a pardon, look at his children!" ?! What utter bullshit.
It's a way of saying that person who is pardoned is a good parent (and therefore not irredeemably bad) and the (blameless) children will benefit from the pardon.
This! Always baffled me. This probably is something from the colonial age when the population was tiny, conditions were harsh, labor hard, medicine nonexistent so producing a fellow colonist was considered an extremely valuable act, also requiring genuine dedication and courage.
The beauty thing is interesting, beauty is our way of assessing quickly if someone is a good mate (biologically). Good mates strengthen the species, by definition [assuming the system works, maybe it doesn't]. So, beauty of the children is an appeal to tribal instinct that it would be useful to society for this family to prosper.
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.
I would argue that creating a new human being is an act of charity. Most people are very happy to exist, and probably grateful that their parents chose to create them. Especially given the fact that parenting requires a huge investment of time and resources.
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.
I've read it. Benatar does a lot of mental gymnastics to arrive at his conclusion.
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.
Sure, that's true. And in past times that was a stronger critique. But in the modern Western world, this only applies to a tiny fraction of parents. The vast majority of parents today willingly chose to become parents.
No idea if it's true but first google git says 45% of pregnancies in the USA are un-intended. Of course it's still a choice to birth the child and become a parent
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.
Paid a lot of money for
that pardon I reckon even though he was clearly a criminal. The trump admin is such a sham. So glad that they are out of power - hopefully forever for the sake of the Us.
That's what I was thinking too but it is possible he'd be pardoned by any other president for the right amount. I'd just think Trump would be the easiest to obtain a paid pardon from.
That's what I was thinking too but it is possible he'd be pardoned by any other president for the right amount. I'd just think Trump would be the easiest to obtain a paid pardon from. (cash-for-pardon)
I'm a little bit confused.. I am ecuadorian (efefctively 3rd world), we manage ourselves in dollars.
I live in a somewhat affluent side of a main city, even tho I am not rich myself, and on a daily basis I see cars which are 50k+, one behind the other.
Even though this people are corrupt (most of them, tax evasion, etc..), I'd argue that US corruption would be on another different scale...
20k for a presidential pardon from the president of the US, that's the price of a Chinese manufactured brand new car.
It is a function of the current corrupt president and his close aides. This would never be the case on any of the former presidencies - presidential pardons aren't bought. It's such a sham that it is apparently something that can be bought and really speaks to the depths of depravity and how low the Trump presidency can go.
I think the OP has the numbers wrong but regardless, it isn't something that should ever be bought.
"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.
If this is true, then Trump has made what? At least 100 million dollars? I hate the man but I can't help but respect him on some level for gaming the system so well!
Pretty sure Giuliani is just pocketing the money since Trump stopped paying him his legal fees and Rudy probably just wanted to come up with a new vertical.
>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.
The "ok" hand sign isn't a white power sign just because some people have decided it to be. It's meant ok since as long as anyone can remember. I'm not willing to accept I can't say okay now because some liberal thinkers have decided that that's now become racist. People need to lighten up a bit and not make everything an affront.
Or you can use context instead of absolute judgment. When done under water in a scuba suit, it probably means ok. When done when posing with Steve Bannon it probably means white power sign.
Having researched the issue carefully [0] I would suggest there is an alternative symbolic interpretation. One that goes something like "our opponents believe anything they read on the internet".
Even if it is used extensively as a political symbol, it doesn't represent white power. It represents a political sub-group disrespecting their opposition for being gullible.
Insofar as it even could represent white power - white power to do what? Have political opinions? It isn't seriously associated with anything heinous.
My take is that Poe's Law is bidirectional. You can't tell irony from extremism, nor extremism from irony.
It might have started as an ironic joke, but if it gets adopted earnestly by actual white supremacists (see the Christchurch shooter using it in court), then in some contexts it can be interpreted as a genuine symbol of white supremacy.
Mr Christchurch Shooter doesn't have that much power. If he wrapped himself in a rainbow flag, it doesn't mean people should stop using rainbow flags. Ditto him using a thumbs up gesture or an OK handsign. His use or disuse of symbol sin his crime is distasteful, but unimportant.
If he thought he could get people to stop using Islamic symbols by displaying them, he would have been festooned with them.
The whole thing was started as a deliberate meme by /pol/ to take an innocent, commonly used hand signal and make the left treat it as a white supremacist dogwhistle. So it can mean anything ranging from "ok" to "this will make the libs angry" to "I am an actual nazi among like minded friends". Which one it is must be discerned from context, meaning that the symbol itself is largely meaningless.
I use the symbol to help identify people who believe anything they read on the Internet.
I don’t think I’ve used this symbol since I was a kid to mean “ok,” and I certainly won’t use it now due to potential association.
But it is nice to be able to easily tell if someone is either stupid or duplicitous by reading them talk about this symbol always meaning white power.
I’m sure if I went looking on nazi sites I would see it used in hate, but every story I’ve read about it has been a waste of time. I only see a few come through threads like this but when I read the link it’s usually someone trolling or ambiguous.
People in this thread must know what plausible deniability is.
When someone is standing next to Steve Bannon posing intentionally with a symbol that could refer to white supremacy, being able to laugh it off as "haha, I just meant OK" gains them the benefits of deniability. (But not very plausible, I think)
People use it precisely for this reason - because it identifies them as a white supremacy sympathiser without being actionable: they keep a trolling or ambiguity defence in their back pocket, wherever that is needed.
Except using as 'this will make libs crazy' means the speaker is still intentionally and loudly embracing racism & racists, even if not their primary aim. So it is a symbol of two forms of racism: direct and supporting. Important to not give racists a free pass just because they are clever, delusional, or are a part of some popular political coalition.
The sedition just happened, and it was because of exactly this kind of manipulative messaging by the same exact people. Breitbart's former editor Bannon even came out of hiding for helping with the riot's speeches and got a pardon in return. I'm hoping that will have been the last straw for most people for tolerating racist double talk and those promoting it.
Personally, I don't care if someone is elaborately trolling or being ironic by displaying a swastika. They are still willing to display a swastika.
White supremacists - Nazis, the KKK, Evropa - love Trump. They use this symbol. Who cares whether someone is "ironically" using a symbol indicating their support for that cause or sincerely?
Yeah, context is key. We played a game as kids where if you looked at one of us with the ok sign, the one doing the sign got to punch you in the arm. It was joke.
Even though this new origin is a bit of the tail wagging the dog (it started as a joke on 4chan), the ok sign has taken on the meaning of a white power sign in certain situations.
Unfortunately, people have trawled old pics and attacked people for using normal hand gestures. Context and nuance appears to be completely lost on many.
Wow, that game seems to be surprisingly common! It was played on my school in Munich, Germany.
The rules were: if you look through the loop, you are punched in the upper arm. The puncher has to draw a bull's eye first, then punch, then the recipient must say "thank you" and the puncher must reply "you're welcome" (of course in German, i.e. bitte, danke). Any deviation from the rules is punished by a punch, to be administered in accordance with aforementioned ceremony.
In the southeastern US. I'm a bit older so things like minor scuffles and fist fights with friends wasn't uncommon. We certainly didn't have as many rules as you outlined, and just used it as another reason to pick on and bruise each others arms.
> the ok sign has taken on the meaning of a white power sign in certain situations.
>> When done when posing with Steve Bannon it probably means white power sign.
When a no-kidding, self-admitted, non-LARPing, Stormfront-reading, Klan- or Nazi-party member says "Yeah we've been using the OK symbol for years" then I'll believe it.
But all I've ever seen about this is leftists of a certain type asserting that it's true, with some variation of "I know it's true because all my friends and thought leaders say it's true, and you can see yourself that such people as Steve Bannon use it, and people have even been fired for doing it. Definitely true. Your move, white-supremacy-denier!"
So, no. It's a conspiracy theory, in which denial of the conspiracy is yet more evidence of the conspiracy.
How about the Christchurch shooter flashing it in court? He may have been doing it ironically still, but at that point does it even matter? He was explicitly associating himself and his actions with the symbol. Context matters of course, but what started as a joke has taken on its own life
And if you make the okay sign while posing next to celebrity Steve Bannon, it's up to you how you control your messaging, and it's up to the audience to make a judgment call on receiving your message.
On a more lighthearted issue, Ray Bradbury once abruptly left a guest lecture because students wouldn't agree on themes for his novel. Does a man own his own words? And does a man's meaning belong to him as well? Or is it like sand through one's fingers?
In reality, these days -- along with most other so-called dog whistles it's quite effective in trolling reactionaries on the left. That's all. Everyone is in on the joke.
If I'm Don Jr. or Charlie Kirk or whoever, my prerogative is to invoke liberal "tears" so yeah I'm gonna use all the dog whistle words like "thugs" and flash the OK symbol, because it scores them points with the right, multiplied by the amount of outrage it causes from the left.
Of course this dynamic only really exists in political contexts. Elsewhere it just means "OK" as always. However, it would be equally absurd to assume that politicians haven't caught on to public perception of this kind of stuff and are exploiting it for their advantage (via democrats clutching their pearls and republicans trying to induce said pearl-clutching)
Some of the comments below are rather heated. I’d like to quote an excerpt from the Anti-Defamation League’s page on the “ok” sign. [1] I think it is a reasonable take that acknowledges the validity of the perspectives posted here. Context is important.
> Use of the okay symbol in most contexts is entirely innocuous and harmless.
> In 2017, the “okay” hand gesture acquired a new and different significance thanks to a hoax by members of the website 4chan to falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol, claiming that the gesture represented the letters “wp,” for “white power.” The “okay” gesture hoax was merely the latest in a series of similar 4chan hoaxes using various innocuous symbols; in each case, the hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist.
> In the case of the “okay” gesture, the hoax was so successful the symbol became a popular trolling tactic on the part of right-leaning individuals, who would often post photos to social media of themselves posing while making the “okay” gesture.
> Ironically, some white supremacists themselves soon also participated in such trolling tactics, lending an actual credence to those who labeled the trolling gesture as racist in nature. By 2019, at least some white supremacists seem to have abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy, such as when Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant flashed the symbol during a March 2019 courtroom appearance soon after his arrest for allegedly murdering 50 people in a shooting spree at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
> The overwhelming usage of the “okay” hand gesture today is still its traditional purpose as a gesture signifying assent or approval. As a result, someone who uses the symbol cannot be assumed to be using the symbol in either a trolling or, especially, white supremacist context unless other contextual evidence exists to support the contention. Since 2017, many people have been falsely accused of being racist or white supremacist for using the “okay” gesture in its traditional and innocuous sense.
You could use the exact same argument for the swastika. The swastika became the symbol of nazism because the nazis decided it to be. It was a religious symbol for thousands of years at that point.
The key is to use context. A swastika on a temple that's older than nazism? Yeah, not a nazi symbol. A swastika on a flag at a right-wing protest in America in 2020? Probably not a religious symbol.
> The key is to use context. A swastika on a temple that's older than nazism? Yeah, not a nazi symbol. A swastika on a flag at a right-wing protest in America in 2020? Probably not a religious symbol.
What about an Indian student with a swastika tatoo passing by a right-wing protest? Is it a religious or political symbol then?
It is of course possible to construct fictitious contexts in which it is hard to tell what symbols mean. That doesn't mean that those symbols don't have meaning.
The white supremacy sign is a white power sign because white supremacists use it to signal each other. It is called a "dog whistle" because people like you cannot hear it accurately.
Context matters in almost all human communication. And humans are pretty good at negotiating context. Scuba divers won’t lose the symbol. But scuba divers also don’t protect a bunch of people posing with Richard Spencer and making the gesture.
> And humans are pretty good at negotiating context.
In politics? I think people are pretty bad at understanding context about people they see as having different values. The way you handle uncertainty is to fill in the blanks with prior knowledge, also known as bias. When someone has a bias against the person, that turns quite ugly.
When you read "inflammable", you can often, from the context, determine whether it means flammable or not. Sometimes you can't.
The same applies to the OK sign.
Flashing it surrounded by notorious racists after the 4chan hoax leaves no doubt about the intended meaning.
Also, given that's it's now been coopted by nazis, you may want to be careful when flashing it if you want to avoid embarrassing ambiguities, yes. It was probably a fad in these circles, not sure it is still used, but still.
> Flashing it surrounded by notorious racists after the 4chan hoax leaves no doubt about the intended meaning.
Trolling is a meaning. I think in that situation it’s even more ambiguous since the “troll power” is so much greater then.
I think it’s unambiguous that the user is a shit-stirrer certainly, probably an asshole. But not necessarily racist. Or no more so than your average run of the mill “everyone is racist subconsciously” racist.
I think what’s hard is that it’s a negative thing to do that brings more chaos and harm into the world. It could be racist/white power that is super bad, let’s say 100 on the bad-o-meter. Or it could be trolling the pearl clutchers that is mildly bad, let’s say 11 on the bad-o-meter. And for scale, punching someone in the face is 200 and murdering someone is 1000.
It can signal kinship with troll-clan. So it’s used by non-racist trolls. And racist trolls. And racists. And just normal people who aren’t up on current events (eg, elementary school).
My issue with the term "dog whistle" is that it's being abused to attribute nefarious meaning to just anything you want irrespectively of the actual content of the message- by definition the "dog whistle" is something that the message doesn't obviously contain. It's a free interpretation license card.
I think out-of-context interpretation is the major issue of our times: we got used to the idea that it's perfectly fine to report the most damning combination of words in a sentence as if it were the original full sentence; that a joke made on twitter is the same as a political manifesto sent to the press; and that a hand gesture can get the meaning it would have in its worst possible case. This has to stop.
Getting photographed smiling next to two notorious white supremacists is already fishy. The picture was taken after the sign became a notorious rallying sign for racists. Do you really think that Luckey is aloof to the point of not not knowing what he's doing there?
If you borrowed Occam's razor, you may need to sharpen it a bit before using it.
The "ok sign is a white power symbol" thing started as trolling on 4chan. It doesn't mean anything apart from being useful to infuriate other people. You're being trolled.
What evidence? That it used to be (and still is in many contexts) totally non-racist? I agree with that. But it's also been coopted (humorously, but it still is a rallying sign).
To this day, the swastika is still a religious sign in Hindu and Buddhist cultures. It also carries a nefarious meaning in other contexts.
I agree that a bunch of people from 4chan spreading misinformation online could be considered trolling. Taking it into the real world is a step I have a hard time believing. What would the troll's logic be? "I'm going to make all these suckers think I'm a racist"? That seems like an unusual step from anonymous online activity.
Trolling, at least in its original meaning, is not "spreading misinformation". It's saying things for the sake of provoking anger in other people that you despise or you just don't connect emotionally with. So it makes perfect sense to me for rightwing trolls to excite anger and confusion in leftwing people by appropriating a completely innocuous gesture and using it as a provocation. It doesn't really have to mean anything or to capture or express your true beliefs- the important thing is just that others will go nuts over it.
Someone creates a weak troll, like "the OK symbol is now an alt-right symbol" and people go crazy over it.
"Oh it's a dog whistle" no, it's an internet meme that got gratuitously amplified for free (this phrase could also be a summary of the Trump campaign).
(Also "true" dog whistles are not explained - their meaning is extrapolated from context. Kinda like saying "yaml lovers" to indicate k8s users)
The question is, why has it become popular for white supremacists to flash this hand sign? If they are intending to convey that they are white supremacists and we are successfully understanding the message then that is what the hand gesture means. It's like a new word. The trollish origin doesn't change the fact that it has this new meaning in these contexts.
We can't let trolls and white supremacist steal the ok symbol. We must fight back. The problem is that whoever makes the the first step will get called a white supremacist, so nobody want to volunteer.
No, I'll volunteer. It's a stupid conspiracy theory, and I have nothing but contempt for it. I use it all the time, and always will, regardless of context or the presence of gullible idiots around me.
Why do you insist and insult the people who are agaisnt the racist people who call out the symbol. If the symbol is so important to you then your fight should be with the actual white supremacists who have co-opted the symbol and not the people who don't let racists get away with recruitment/trolling/owning the libs by flashing their co-opted gang sign.
It's like you being furious at black people because your great grandparents used to always win their Halloween contest with their pointy hat ghost costume and you're not going to let stupid guillable people keep you from wearing it at parties.
> Why do you insist and insult the people who are agaisnt the racist people who call out the symbol.
Because they aren't against racist people. They are pro-idiocy. They're only pro a good thing (being non-racist) by an accident of history and circumstance, certainly not because of sober reflection and empathy. These are the same idiots who would be all in on bullying the Satanic Panic preschool teachers in the 80s, or burning witches ye olden days, or hunting Communists in the 50s
I think it's a little telling that you're calling out historically conservative movements and trying to conflate them with a very progressive movement of not letting white supremacists use their favorite recruitment tool of "it's just a joke bro... unless you actually believe it"
To believe that dog-whistles exist as an actual thing used effectively, one would also have to believe:
a) A group of people (e.g. white supremacists) do not already know that the dog-whistler (e.g. a politician) is a member or sympathizer of their group
b) That this person who sympathizes with this secret group wants to signal sympathy with this secret group, but cannot do it directly (that is, by email or letter or direct contact), and so must somehow signal through public words and deeds
c) This signal will somehow, hopefully, be invisible to everyone who is listening except for members of the secret group
The prototypical example is politicians talking about "thugs" and "welfare queens" as dog-whistling a racist contempt for black people. I can definitely accept that using such language could be such a signal, especially with the context of aligned policy pronouncements, but it's pretty blatant and not a dog-whistle.
Exactly. The only reasonable use of the word “dog-whistle” is ”’dog-whistle’ is a dog-whistle used to signal support of political correctness and belonging to the left-wing elite and/or an unwillingness to engage in rational argument”.
I'm guessing their complaint is not about whether it is technically true, but the hypocrisy of the people saying this when they are the ones who create the consequences. Like if your boss tells you you are free to say anything you want then fires you if they don't like it.
It is a trite stick hung above arguments that people want to silence before they even happen which makes it intellectually uninteresting and shallow. And more than anything it is used to further attempt to shame people. There is no compassion in the phrase.
I had to read the Scarlet Letter in high school. Hester Prynn had to live with the outcome of saying whatever it was. It was literally puritanical to make her wear a red “A.” as the outcome of her speech (v-a-v extramarital sex).
I think the point isn’t that speech should have no impact, but that the response to speech should be proportional and what proportional means. The Puritans in Hawthorne’s novel thought that making someone a pariah was a proportional response. They were wrong, I think.
But the lesson, I think, is not that we should be more precise in meting out moral judgement, but that we should judge less.
These are such weird arguments. The origins are irrelevant because it wasn't just a trick pulled on normies; white supremacists also fell for the joke. Once they started genuinely using the gesture it did become a symbol of hate. The Wikipedia article you linked says exactly that a few paragraphs below the paragraph you quoted.
The Christchurch shooter, whilst likely in on the "joke", made the gesture in court. At that point, the difference between it being a joke made by a white supremacist, or a symbol of white supremacism evaporates. It is a symbol used by a white supremacist, therefore it is a white supremacist symbol.
Context matters of course, but I don't feel you can truly deny it has taken on meaning outside of the original joke
> I don't feel you can truly deny it has taken on meaning outside of the original joke.
It hasn't. The supremacist using it in court room is using it entirely within the context of the original joke. Within the context of the joke, that is, but not within the joke. He's using it knowingly. The original joke is "get people to see the OK gesture as a racist symbol, so that people are then pranked in situations in which someone who fell for the hoax embarasses himself by calling out someone else who uses the gesture in the usual way and has no idea about the hoax. Hardy har har, hoo hoo."
I'm not a white supremacist or neo-nazi. Can I put a swastika on my jacket, such that everyone understands it's not a symbol of nazism, because I'm not a confirmed nazi, not standing in a court room for crimes connected with my ideology?
You have to start a war and kill at least a few hundred thousand people before you get to hijack a common hand gesture for your ideology.
Context matters of course, but I don't feel you can truly deny it has taken on meaning outside of the original joke
Oh I do deny. Nearly every example ever shown is indistinguishable from accident or people using it for other purposes. Mexican workers "flashes" it while driving around: fired. West Point cadets goofing off, punching each other: sanctioned. Random individuals in photos: obviously white supremacist.
to inflate this non-issue, and then use the very fact of its inflation as justification for its further inflation is reprehensible, and then get actual innocent people labeled as racist. Truly despicable
You asked for an example, so I gave a particularly egregious example of exactly what you asked for. You suddenly switch your position to "nearly every example" and do not address the very specific and relevant example I gave at all.
I was very clear elsewhere what it would take to convince me that there is something to this nonsense. One guy using it in a courtroom ain't it. Did anyone interview him about it? Ask what it was, where he heard about it, what our who he was trying to signal, if he was? Or, did the journalist make up the association on their own?
I'm not here to read your entire comment history. I replied to a specific request of yours with a relevant example. You go off on a mostly irrelevant screed.
Come on. Does it really need to be speculated on? That "one guy" is a white supremacist who killed 50+ people - I think it's pretty clear what his intentions were. On top of that, his written manifesto was a) steeped in 4chan memes and winks to those in the know, b) released on either 8chan or 4chan itself. So it is clear he would know the origins and was playing it up
> I'm not here to read your entire comment history
I wouldn't ordinarily expect that of anyone, except that you had already replied.
Perhaps we should define terms. When people use the term "white supremacist symbol" I hear something that is used by everyone including white supremacists to unambiguously signal white supremacy. A Nazi flag. A burning cross. Shaved head, bomber jacket, combat boots, and most importantly, white laces.
The content of these particular symbols stem self-consciously from their progenitors: putative Aryan heritage in the case of the swastika, the purity of Protestant Christian values for the burning cross, etc
A symbol that everyone uses - including white supremacists - to mean something else - "OK" - is not a white supremacist symbol by that definition.
Its history as a purported white supremacist symbol, a joke on a trolling board, doesn't follow that of actual such symbols
The movement to turn it into a white supremacist symbol is now driven largely by serious, earnest, white leftists, curiously enough. I point to the people who are constantly pointing it out as evidence as my evidence. Why is this, I wonder? It's curious.
> his written manifesto was a) steeped in 4chan memes and winks to those in the know
Assuming that's true, then it's even more evidence to me that OK is not a "white supremacist symbol" his own white supremacy notwithstanding. He, your best evidence that it is, this fellow who used it, is well versed in its origin as a joke.
White supremacists didn't "fall" for the joke; they were obviously instantly infatuated with the idea of hijacking a thoroughly familiar, positive hand gesture for their purposes.
Let's talk about what's really going on here. Certain factions of society would like to present white supremacy as more prevalent than it is, and these include white supremacists, but upsettingly, also include organizations and political stances that "fight" white supremacy. These "opposing" factions would love to hijack the OK symbol as a white supremacist symbol, so that each can claim that white supremacy has more support than it does. Each of these factions will feel satisfaction of fighting their fight, as they point at pictures of West Point cadets, Mexican truck drivers, Japanese tourists, college kids having fun and say "See! White supremacy is everywhere!"
I have contempt for all of these people, who insist that "OK" is white supremacist. They promote white supremacy, irrespective of whether they are for it or against it. They turn a stupid joke into a battle cry, because they want to. This is despicable. Reprehensible. Awful.
If you actively insist that OK is white supremacist, you are a bad person and I have zero respect for you. Noam Chomsky talks about how the most violent of two opposing factions gain prestige within their factions by escalating drama and violence with the other faction. That's you. You "fight" white supremacy by promoting it. Contemptible.
The very next sentence of that comment referred to the previously linked Wikipedia article with its own citations. You were one click away from being able to answer your own snarky comment.
Firstly, the OK gesture is a deeply entrenched, familiar, everyday gesture—at least in North American culture. Only a complete moron could think that it suddenly has to do with white supremacy, and accept it for such use to the point of believing that it is a white supremacist symbol and not the OK gesture any more, so that anyone using it is a racist.
Secondly, anyone who has any doubts about it whatsoever can search for it, and learn about the 2017 4chan campaign in seconds.
Therefore, thirdly, the situations in which the gesture refers to the hoax-induced meaning are very narrow, like someone pulling the gesture on camera behind a black man's back or something like that, or a known white supremacist pulling it in courtroom. Then we know "oh, he's referring to that 4chan meme". Where by "we" I mean that minority of people who are informed about this.
And that's all it is; some damned Internet meme, and a minor one. Nobody will remember it in 5, 10, 15 years.
Do you know Dancing Baby? 1996 3D video meme of a 3D rendered dancing baby: probably the world's first viral video.
Do you remember people saying a delayed "...not!" at the end of a sentence to negate it? "I wanna be your friend ... NOT!"
Ok, let's try an example in which this issue is further heightened. Would you be comfortable displaying a swastika in the western world today? That symbol didn't originate with the Nazis. Most people simply don't care about the origin.
Also I am not saying every use is racist or anything that extreme, but it is clear that in some instances there is a connection between this symbol and white supremacy.
That symbol is associated with mass murder of millions and a world war.
Previous to that, it was not a common, everyday symbol used in western culture.
It's not a dumb little joke from 2017 from 4chan.
The Nazis had a hand gesture: the raised arm Roman salute. You can use that salute today without being dubbed a supremacist or Nazi. Just maybe don't shout heil anything while doing it.
“According to the ADL, by 2019 some white supremacists had begun using the OK symbol "as a sincere expression of White Supremacy", and many white supremacists have acknowledged using the symbol as a gesture of White Power.”
I have to give 4chan credits where it's due, the weakness of the human mind is fully exploited like what happens when nations use massive propaganda machines. A complete non-issue of people "accidently" making a hand gesture has turned into a full-blown conspiracy theory that validates itself by groups willfully coopting part of the ruse. Whats the use of knowing the hand gesture for white supremacy? we've always had gang signs and they were similarly irrelivant outside the groups that use them.
Really makes one think what I believe to be true that just aint so.
The ok hand sign can be a perfectly innocuous hand sign in some circumstances, or a white supremacist dog whistle in others. The very purpose why it was adopted by white supremacists is this confusion - this has been explicitly researched by human rights groups.
Of course, the symbol itself carries no white supremacist overtones, just like the swastika in itself does not carry any nazi symbolism (as opposed to, say, a crosssed out star of David, which would be an explicitly anti-semite symbol). However, it's association with and repeated use by Nazi Germany is what gave it a nazi symbolism. Even for such a widely reviled symbol, there are still non-taboo uses. In particular, a left-facing swastika (sauwastika) is a common Buddhist symbol, found often in Asian media with no Nazi connotation. That means that a bald person waving a swastika flag could either be a nazi skin head, or a buddhist monk - context will usually tell you which.
This is similar to "states rights" rhetoric - it has both its literal sense, the discussion of the amount of power states should have vs the federal government; but it also refers more specifically to the "right" to slavery the civil war was fought over. When you hear someone speak about it, you need more context to know which sense is being used.
I'm confused by this comment. It isn't an "or" situation. Thiel is a billionaire and Luckey is pretty close. Those two are powerful primarily because they are rich and they aren't the only two on that list with at least 9 digit fortunes.
EDIT: Or did I completely miss that this was a joke and "powerful" was playing off "white power".
His conviction is based on being a fall guy for Uber’s corporate espionage.
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.
yeah it struck me as odd. Got downvoted like crazy for this, which is weird since I'd expect people to be leaning towards intellectual freedom here.
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.
This is all so hilariously corrupt. I'm not sure I can even muster anger for this, just laughter. (I'll reserve the anger for the pandemic and this administration's callous, frankly criminal handling of it).
(So Levandowski and Jared are going to launch a venture fund soon, right?)
Don't forget to have the additionally-pardoned Michael Liberty join the efforts to attract investors. Over $50 million defrauded [0][2] from investors, and it wasn't his first rodeo with the SEC[1].
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.
Isn't that exactly why federal hate-crime legislation exists? To allow a do-over in federal court if juries in some jurisdictions ignore crimes against some victims?
And for that matter, even if acquitted in a criminal trial, someone can be found guilty in a civil trial (with a lower standard of evidence). See, famously, OJ Simpson.
A pardon requires delivery and acceptance. (Actually, I think delivery is incomplete without acceptance.) Theoretically an incoming president could recall the pardon if it hasn't been delivered. Not sure what may constitute as delivery; or acceptance, for that matter. I don't think the manner of delivery or acceptance has been tested, let alone enumerated. If it's as simple as a phone call, then presumably nothing could be done.
I think a more interesting question is whether there's a specificity requirement. AFAIU, that hasn't been answered, either.
This is not mentioned anywhere in the text of the pardon power of the Constitution.
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.
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.
A Youtube video of someone's opinion is not a reliable source.
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 was an even more interesting question raised on r/NeutralPolitics about whether the pardon has to even be made public. It seems there's an interpretation of the law where the pardon only becomes public when the recipient makes use of it in a public court.
Not to "both sides" this too much, because I do feel like there's a new, special level of corruption and self-dealing on display with this administration, but it's not uncommon for these guys to use pardons for personal gain or the benefits of their friends. For a little context and flavor, remember that Clinton pardoned some real winners on his last day too, including some guy who paid $200k to Hillary Clinton's brother for the pardon [0], Bill Clinton's own brother (codename: "headache" [3]) and a Democratic party loyalist who was convicted of child porn and sexual assault with a minor [2].
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
Pardons have an interesting characteristic in that you can be both angry at unnecessarily harsh punishment (therefore, be happy with it being undone) but also be angry at the corruption that leads to the pardon (therefore, be angry at it being undone.)
Not to agree too much with a both-sidsing of Trump corruption, but in fact I agree here.
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.
If you're going to both sides this you should at least mention Clinton's most corrupt pardon (Marc Rich).
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.
As of November 2020, Trump utilized both pardons and clemencies much less than any president in modern history according to Pew Research [1][2].
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?
I don't really think it's about "both sides", I think it's about contextualizing the action. Because the Trump administration was so insane in so many ways, we tend to forget (or maybe misremember) that there is a very real and persistent form of corruption in our politics that far predates Trump. The end of the Trump regime does not mean the end of political corruption, not by a long shot, and we would do well to remember that.
I think one of my biggest fears with Biden is that because he isn't Trump, everyone will take a deep sigh of relief, and then ignore the more mundane "political corruption as usual" aspects of his presidency.
They framed a relevant point that furthers the discussion in a way that was less ambiguous and less likely to do harm.
For me personally, it's frustrating to see comments about things like whataboutism when they're obviously just to deflect and distract.
At the very least, with caveats like saying "I don't support this, but..." there's some level of acknowledgement of, "yes, this might be veering into sketchy waters".
The most interesting pardons are the no name ones. Pardoned restaurant chain fraud for an italian not even charged in NY. Sounds like mafia related crime to me.
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.
"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."
Gun possession is a non-violent crime. It’s insane that Lil Wayne can’t possess a gun because he once possessed a gun in a place that only the rich, well connected, or retired police officers can possess a gun.
They were pardoned because they paid Trump campaign favors, putting his corrupt administration and their own self interest over the good of a nation in crisis. That's far worse than their original crimes.
Many pardons are recommended to the President by the Justice department for various reasons. A lot are for non-violent drug crimes that someone in the department felt was too harsh/etc...
It's not like they are all Trump's friends. But obviously conspiracy theories will prevail, sadly.
You must have missed the declass on the origins of the Russia hoax, where Steele admitted that he intentionally leaked information and engaged in info-laundering because he saw Trump as being potentially damaging to UK/US relations.
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.
It was criminal to enable pharma to fast track development of vaccines, in half the most optimistic forecasts of how long that would take? It was criminal to invoke the defense production act to make ventilators -- far more than we needed? Building those field hospitals (that were never needed)... the ships?
It was deeply irresponsible to play into political divisions rather than promoting mask use. It was deeply irresponsible to undermine states’ efforts to mitigate spread, to the point of encouraging “lock her up” chants about Gretchen Whitmer that encouraged a kidnapping plot.
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.
> Stephen K. Bannon – President Trump granted a full pardon to Stephen Bannon. Prosecutors pursued Mr. Bannon with charges related to fraud stemming from his involvement in a political project. Mr. Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement and is known for his political acumen.
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.
You should recite the facts correctly. Supposedly, Bannon represented to the public that 100% of donated funds were going to build the wall. In fact, prosecuters allege that ‘hundreds of thousands’ were diverted to pay Banon’s personal bills. That’s out of 25 million raised.
> 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.
According to the unsealed indictment, bannon received $1m through a non-profit, which he used to transfer to pay for unrelated shit using fake invoices.
The earlier comment implied that Bannon stole all the monies raised, when in fact, where talking about what - 10%? - diverted?
There's no question that 100% of the monies did not go to the construction of the wall. From a practical standpoint, a non-profit that manages to run with a 10% overhead is very unusual. Most non-profits spend most of their money (70%+) on marketing and administration.
> Mr. Levandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good.
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.
much imprisonment is based on just this, even if an action is required to send you on the road to prison your ethics are used as indicator of whether you should actually go there or not.
> Last summer, after a man died in a Tesla that was using the car’s Autopilot system, which allows for autonomous driving on highways, Levandowski told several Uber engineers that they were not pushing aggressively enough. “I’m pissed we didn’t have the first death,” Levandowski said, according to a person familiar with the conversation. (Levandowski denies saying this.)
Where do you get this "the airplane should never have been invented" from? Nobody has made an argument even remotely like that.
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.
I'm also only commenting on what the parent wrote to be fair. My point is that being disappointed not to be involved in a death - as that comment suggests - is a level of callousness that goes well beyond accepting the cost of progress.
Since I don't know the man, I prefer to be charitable and am willing to assume he was just being inept in his choice of phrasing rather than assuming he is evil.
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.)
Ok, it's fine to make different assumptions about the context. I think you could have made it clearer in your initial response that that's how you saw it.
Yes, what is the difference between a passenger willingly getting on an experimental airplane that subsequently crashed and an entirely unrelated pedestrian mowed down by an Uber SUV as a fully predictable consequence of their trash engineering practices?
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?
Pardons by the executive branch are a weapon of peace. It exists to allow the chief executive, whether the President or a Governor of a State, to settle any matter in their jurisdiction.
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.
Exactly - it's notable that the power of pardon is the tail end of the clause that give the president power over the military - that's not random phrasing.
> 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.
These aren't problems with the power, they're problems with people that abuse the power.
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.
After the last 4 years, maybe it is time to realise that a working democracy can not rely on the assumption that those in power will just use their powers responsibly and honourably, and that "checks and balances" need to actually have the ability to both check and balance.
If Trump taught this country anything, I hope that it is 'relying on long-standing norms of the office is a bad idea'. I think we need legislation to make sure the 'norms' are 'required'.
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.
If the argument here is essentially that we should trust the president to know better than the legislature and courts, why don't we just go with absolute dictatorship for all purposes?
The power the President is entrusted with here is solely to remit punishment. The idea is that this is an area where going overboard is less harmful than the alternative.
To add, it's easier to throw somebody back in jail if they aren't rehabilitated than it is to get someone out of 400 year sentence if they are technically guilty, no matter how extreme or ridiculous the prison sentence is for the crime they committed.
> they are both a carry-over from the time of kings
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).
It's arguably a bit of a historical oddity that the US has them at all. In most countries, particularly former British colonies, a pardon power of some sort exists, but in developed ones it's typically not, de facto, wielded by an individual (in the UK, for instance, it's theoretically wielded by the Home Secretary, but in practice a Home Secretary who used it unilaterally would find themselves immediately looking for a new job, and the norm is that it's barely used at all).
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).
There is considerable variation in how pardons are applied around the world. Many with simple checks and balances:
- 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.
Did you read the article? Are you opposed to the pardon of Davidson?
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 speaks to the inherent flaws in any justice system. Presidential pardons are just one check against that. This lies squarely in line with what a presidential pardon is intended for.
A few people saved largely at random from a broken justice system is no sort of real solution; if anything it may actually make things _worse_, as it acts as an escape valve for sufficiently scandalous cases.
In some cases it can be used to broadly pardon people due to injustice. Carter blanket pardoned all Draft dodgers [1]. It doesn't have to be a "real solution" as that isn't the duty of the president to create law, which falls squarely in the hands of congress.
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.
I'm not a US citizen, but to me it seems to be ridiculous to give one person the ability to unilaterally make decisions on the lives of individuals. Not just these pardons, but also the barbaric rushed executions Trump performed. It appears to me to be antithetical to a democracy that claims to have a separation of power.
I believe the US Government (as opposed to states) hadn't executed anyone for something like 12 years (covering 3 transition periods) and then in about 3 months, executed 13.
Right ok, But what I'm trying to find out is if these execution dates were set when the people were found guilty, or if someone just decided the execution dates recently.
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.
I think it's very good that you have them, so at least a select few people can get a second chance. Instead, you should get rid of ridiculous penalty stacking and plea deals, an often obviously unjust justice system, and a penal system that systematically violates the most basic human rights and standards of decency.
No offence, but most of these pardons make perfect sense. Unfortunately, Snowden, Ulbricht, and Assange were left out.
You're absolutely right, trading pardons for cash would be completely out of character for the previous administration. Anthony Levandowski's conviction was obviously a miscarriage of justice and its a good thing it was corrected at the very last minute.
Your response shows the effect of the mainstream media which intentionally denied all the positive things Trump and his administration has done to the country.
Bad example? It's the entire point of the original post.
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.
Look, all you need to know is the glorious philanthropy!
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.
Apparently Trump screwed up many of the pardons [1]
> 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)_/¯
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.
curious if this is a direct challenge to Google by people like Thiel who have had a historic beef with them [0] - according to the "Super Pumped" book [1], it was Larry Page who personally ordered the litigation against Levandowski - and he was pretty decisive about it.
> 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.
Aside from Assange, Sownden and all the rich criminals.
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!)
I see these series of pardons but I don’t get how it works logistically in terms of federal vs state. Let’s say Anthony Levandowski was guilty for California charges, what would that mean?
>Anthony Levandowski, 40, was sentenced in August to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty in March. He was not in custody but a judge had said he could enter custody once the COVID-19 pandemic subsided.
That's the part that caught my eye, not Trump's pardon.
So that's how rich people are treated by the court system...
Anecdotes are not useful in deciding policy, and trends do not show an unusual number of people of color being shot.
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.
Playing devil's advocate here; if you take many steps back and try to look at what's best for the country, you might want to look at citizens with great potential who are currently under lock and key.
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.
I believe Trump's policy was that anyone that contributed something on the order of $1-2 million to whatever he's calling his slush fund these days (Re-election campaign? Legal defense fund?) is eligible for pardon.
Heartbreaking to see how long some of these people were locked up for their crimes. Some of them just don't match up.
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.
Pardons should be strictly limited. Pardoning criminals who used their positions of power, wealth, and influence to do financial and legal harm like breach of contract or fraud is de facto corrupt.
I'm no fan of Levandowski's, but it did always seem to me that criminal penalties (including incarceration) for corporate espionage was a co-option of the criminal machinery of government for what should always have been a civil court affair.
That 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.
Google steals intellectual property itself https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 . No surprise one of it's own stole IP from them (where'd he learned to do such) and in the end they get what they give!
Definition of Karma .. which im sure you may already know...
"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?
They both are no good and Google blasted him legally and his name in the media yet Google does the same thing this guy did and gets away with it? The pardon is their karma.
Huh and what would've happened if they didnt get caught and this is what they do. THat's not the first time! Google and Anthony L. are one in the same two thieves in a pod! How one can not see that their actions are exactly same makes no sense.
I'm glad to see kodack black pardoned. He's a super genuine artist. His music changed my life. His crime was lying how many white boys have lied in court and served less than 46months in prison. He truly turned his life around for many years now and it reflects in his music.
Most of these are people accused of various drug crimes (many nonviolent).
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.
It does not take a lot of brains to say, "Every outgoing President does this, you should do the same."
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.
I am aware of that. But I was expecting Trump to issue a blank commutation for all "patriots" involved in any way in the Capitol riot. With the purpose of making it harder for legal consequences of the indictment to reach him.
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.)
It's important to point out that the President's pardon does not apply to civil cases, only to criminal ones.
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.
Also in Trump's last hurrah is pardoning Kwame Kilpatrick. https://www.crimetownshow.com/ I have no idea how he fits in the profile of Trump's other pardons. Maybe just resonates with Trump as another shameless, corrupt politician.
Interestingly enough as I understand it, if the pardons haven't been delivered and executed yet they can still be withdrawn. But it might be too late already depending on the execution of them.
You don't have to be high-profile or the President's buddy to receive an executive pardon (you can realize this by going through the article's list). Anyone* can petition and receive a pardon.
*: state offenses are handled by governors or a state pardon board, not the President
Trump pardons former Uber executive Anthony Levandowski on the recommendation of a panel that includes Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey.. (EDIT: Palmer Luckey) -> who famously caught on camera flashing a white supremacy sign in a photo with the conspiracy theorist Chuck Johnson and Steve Bannon (who was also pardoned today)- just hilarious levels of corruption all around
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!
Well this is strange, this was up until a few minutes ago but it now 404s. Whitehouse took the page down (coincidentally at the same time Biden was sworn in).
EDIT: Well whitehouse.gov itself was switched to Biden's page, so I assume the page may have been lost in the migration.
Happens every time we get a new president. Nothing unusual about it.
Everything from Trumps whitehouse.gov site is now located at https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov
If it's any consolation Trump is probably going to be under investigation at the State level for probably the rest of his life unless he leaves the country - New York wants blood not even including the foundation, Georgia is probing along those lines etc.
Issued on January 20th, 2021.... Didn't Joe Biden just win the popular vote with 51.3% on... November 3rd, 2020, over two months ago? Why does the US political system wait months to enact the peoples' will? I don't understand this at all.
It's an artifact of history, when 200 years ago it may have taken weeks for states to count votes, certify and send representatives with the results, assuming they made it to the capital and didn't die during travel when their horse fell into a river or something...
Plus, once confirmed (on the 6th), it does take some time to change cabinets etc.
It's pretty swift in a number of European countries, days not weeks.
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.
The core of the issue is that the US president has way too much power and does replace a large number of civil service positions. "Just after the presidential election, a revised edition of the Plum Book is published, which lists over 9,000 federal civil service leadership and support political appointment positions which an incoming administration needs to review, and fill or confirm."
> It's pretty swift in a number of European countries, days not weeks.
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.
Assuming the newly elected parliament can agree on a government. This is not always so easy, Belgium are famous for not having a government for years at a time.
This is not a 'Europe is different from USA' thing. Each country/system is peculiar in its own way.
I believe, in many parliamentary systems the parliament is dissolved first after which government becomes a caretaker government and cannot enact major new policy changes. After an election is held, new members of parliament are elected and must form a governing coalition that has a majority of the members (sometimes with one party, sometimes with multiple parties) can select a new prime minister and start governing in earnest. Sometimes, they cannot come to an agreement on a governing coalition and they continue without a government for a while until they can. Belgium is infamous for having gone years without a real government that can enact policy due to their failure to establish a majority coalition. This is however very unusual.
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
> Or are you suggesting the second we know the winner the previous president should be booted out?
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.
So, most developed democracies are parliamentary democracies, and don't have executive presidents. In that case, it's normally pretty rapid. For instance, Ireland held a general election on the 8th of Feb 2020, the 32nd Dail was dissolved on the 14th of Feb 2020, and the 33rd Dail convened on the 20th. In that particular case, the cabinet (the executive) stayed in power as a caretaker government for months afterwards (and took major decisions over covid) because the new Dail struggled to either appoint a new prime minister or call a new election (covid was unhelpful there), but that's very abnormal.
In presidential and quasi-presidential systems, it typically takes a week or so. The US really is an anomaly here.
Yeah, it's a serious question. In the 2015 Canadian General Election[0] the new Prime Minister and cabinet were sworn in two weeks later (though others seem to be often about a month later). I recently saw someone talking about their country swearing in the new party the actual next day(!), though I can't seem to find what country that was. Two months seems crazy to me.
The Trump saga lasted 4 years though it will probably take the rest of my lifetime for the US to heal from Trump and all the acolytes his administration emboldened; from the radical right, to enabling grifters, to draconian and in humane immigration policies (kids in cages, wtf?!?), and a whole lack and mistrust of science, not to mention the rise of QAnon and just the overall tarnishing of any semblance of American leadership abroad (because he is such a joke and his administration, too).
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).
> 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.
Seems the comments here are mostly negative — saying his pardon is an example of corruption and that he should be in jail.
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.
In general you may be right, but stealing code from one employer to give to your next, and explicitly being paid for this and advancing your career, is not a good example. His actions were clearly wrong, and this is just an example of the way white collar crime, even when it causes massive damages, is not practically punished as badly as blue collar crime.
I’m not really interested in seeing Levandowski sent to jail either.
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.
It’s a good point. I’m resigned to the pardon happening, but won’t accept this person being allowed to run a business again in the future. That’s the line I draw in the sand, somewhat pragmatically.
There are certain positions of trust that hopefully they will not be able to hold.
George hotz said that Anthony Lewandowski was a real leader and the problem with real leaders is they do first and ask questions later. I don't know Anthony Lewandowski but I agree with the sentiment. Disruption is disrupting, and tends to be illegal. Its pretty hard to stay in the right side of the law, if you think you have not done anything this is because you are not big enough for someone to try find something.
Even if it were true that True Disruption => Illegality (it isn't), it does not follow that doing illegal things makes you a genius disruptor. Levandowski's crime was not his disruption, it was stealing code from his former employer for his own personal gain.
Why so negative, a little bit of clemency even if people are guilty will do a great deal to help heal the nation. This list reads like an indictment of the justice system, life sentences for non violent drug offences, yikes. I'm glad for everyone, welcome back.
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.
Healing can not happen without some form of holding the perpetrators to account. Otherwise, society has not shown that the behaviour was unacceptable and the perpetrators are not seeing any consequences for their actions. To give an example, hardly anyone would be able to forgive someone that has e.g. stolen your car, and continues to drive by your house with it and showing no remorse for taking it.
It's also ironic that the demands for unity and forgiveness are now coming from a side who has made law&order a central part of their platform, in a country with one of the most broken judicial systems and one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.
Even in the kindest philosophies, forgiveness is conditioned on some kind of regret for the crime (if indeed a crime did happen). Almost none of the people on this list are repentant for their actions - if anything, many are defiant - and I see no reason to forgive them. It may be a kindness to them, but there is also a problem of kindness for their victims.
I support a lot of these pardons for non-violent drug offences, mainly because the US justice system issues such needlessly long sentences, and the US penal system is so harsh.
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.
"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.
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.