His pardons are as legitimate as his election fraud claims. The rest of the government should treating it with similar disdain

This is it exactly. Our friendly local Lemmy user is sharper than a Guardian columnist.

Which does not surprise me.

I agree. The pardon is a powerful tool with very real and valid uses, but it only works if the rest of the government is working

The pardon power is directly in the Constitution. It would take an amendment to modify it. Amendments are hard to do, they need 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of States on board.

And if you want Conservatives to get on board, you get a Liberal to start abusing it. But most Liberals have too much integrity to do that....

.... So, maybe Gavin really is the man for the moment!

I mean, that's a broad question. Personally? Practically? Politically? Constitutionally?

Legally-speaking, this is not something the President can unilaterally do. Theoretically they could amend the Constitution to accomplish the former and allow for the latter, but the chances they could actually do so are next to nil.

Could a President do it anyway? Well, maybe... It seems very unlikely that this would survive public scrutiny, and even the corruption-captured Courts would have a very difficult time trying to justify any of it under existing frameworks.

The "retroactively" part would probably be a particularly difficult hurdle. The US Constitution has protections against Ex Post Facto criminalization, and revocation of pardons would almost certainly violate that principle. Ditching that protection would be wildly unpopular, since it would allow for things like passing a law that would, for example, having ever received an abortion in the past. Or, having ever so much as touched a firearm.

Nobody is going to give up their super powers

You only need it for valid political prisoners, like the people in Texas that got 50 years for lighting fireworks at a protest.

Not for actual traitors like the people that rioted and broke into the Capitol on j6 so they could murder police officers, loot, and try and stop elected officials from carrying out their sworn duties.

That's where Congress comes in. After the j6 pardon, they should have immediately removed him from office and had him placed in a military prison until he could face a military tribunal for high crimes and treason against the people of the United States and for violating his constitutional oath.

And as for the j6 defendants they should have just retcon'd the pardon, and if they didn't feel comfortable doing that from a legal standpoint they should have charged them with higher crimes. Most of them were just charged with vandalism, rioting, breaking and entering etc. the good news is that they could still easily be charged with charges of insurrection treason and several other higher level Federal offenses.

In other words those j6 traitors aren't safe yet. They got a pardon off of one of the several charges they are guilty of. The doj hasn't brought a lot of the charges they could bring against those people, but there is no statute of limitations for treason.

I say take every single person that accepted the pardon and execute them out right.

I think we need something like this for someone on death row or something, maybe.

Why, though? What makes the person occupying the position of president uniquely qualified to make a decision in cases like this? If you have a judicial system that has been found to apply the law fairly, yet can still have its rulings overturned on a whim, doesn't that make a mockery of the system?

It feels like an equivalent of a boss saying, "I know you and your team did months of research to come to the decision that you did, but I'm going to go in a different direction anyway. Not because I did more research than you, just because I feel like I know better than all of you".

Unless theres' some kind of reason that I've overlooked.

Beyond the scope of this thread, I know, but the concept of president seems absurd to me. Especially the way it's implemented in the USA.