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The majority of the J6 prisoners had the book thrown at them for minor crimes and impartially enforcing the laws against your own kin is a lot to ask- on the contrary, I think the pardon power is fine. Instead, weaponization of the justice system is the problem- and most of the j6 defendants would already be out without it.
The median sentence for participating in Trump's attempted self-coup was 60 days. I looked through a few of the longer sentences and they seemed justified given the violence that had taken place. I don't consider BLM leniency to be an excuse because I also would have liked for the book to be thrown at those protestors as well.
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it's something we ask of everyone in government, especially people involved in prosecuting and judging crimes, and it's very reasonable and useful
Really?
I thought judges and prosecutors are expected to step aside and let someone else handle the case when their relatives are involved.
Ok I clearly should've written more than one sentence. Yes, that is what I meant, and we should also restrict the president's pardon power to not apply to their relatives.
How about just "No pardons between presidential election day and the next inauguration"?
I realize this wouldn't prevent Trump's Jan 6 pardons, but as a dem, I find Biden's pardons worse than Trump's. I hope Trump may face some political price for this BS, but nothing can be done to Biden.
You know, restricting the formal powers an elected official has, between an election and the next guy formally taking his job, isn't a bad idea. A caretaker President, so to speak. Common in parliamentary democracies.
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Maybe move it back to a week before the election? In an abstract sense, I'd agree that maximizing the effect of pardons on a subsequent election would be one of the most straightforward ways to trim back the unilateral power of the Presidential pardon.
Probably would have hampered Biden's recent spree, but you'd just get any second-term president trying to front-load controversial pardons so that everyone will have forgotten about them by the time his successor needs to campaign. (as we are seeing at the moment to some extent; although Trump will of course have his own lame-duck period in which to get really crazy)
Recent presidents liked to issue many EOs on their first day, pardoning people seems similar. And while the masses will naturally forget what happened slightly less than four years ago, democrats have an incentive to bring it up if they think it will harm the next R candidate by association.
It is at least possible to cite past alleged misdeeds, Trump couldn't attack Harris during the campaign for Biden's last minute pardon.
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And the pardon on both federal and state levels is an important check on law fare against those on the other side. If the State knows that no remedy exists outside of the judiciary, the temptation to use it to silence opposition is pretty strong, as only a few of those wrongfully convicted will have the money to continue to fight the state apparatus for often a decade or more the economic and psychological damage done by a decade lost to prison etc would be a pretty hard thing for most people to take.
Further, the knowledge that lawfare is a thing and that the state will come after you creates a huge chilling effect. How many people would be afraid to go to a protest if they had reason to believe that the state would start combing through their past to find something they could be jailed for? Or that tge state might well just make something up. Even expressing support might make you a target.
This is a good point and I feel like further adding that this was actually done to Trump in his first term - people who earnestly and in good faith signed up to work in this administration knew that the Eye of Sauron would be pointed directly at them. It claimed multiple scalps as well. While a lot of the people who ended up in trouble had actually done bad things, if the same standard and scrutiny was placed on just about anyone in Washington you'd be able to find deeds that were worse or just as bad.
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The entire J6 and Trump prosecution campaign has at least IMO raised valid questions about the representation and "peer"-ness of urban juries for crimes committed more abstractly against the state. Why do DC and NYC juries, which are overwhelmingly left-leaning metropolitan areas, get to decide such nationally-important (or at least state-wide in the case of the NY state charges) cases exclusively? There's plenty of Civil Rights Era case law suggesting that non-representative juries are disallowed in the American system.
For example, I think it might be reasonable to (randomly?) shuttle national cases to other jurisdictions, or summon jurors from around the country.
Maybe, but once you start doing that you start undermining the fiction that consent of the governed is equally geographically distributed. It isn't, obviously (really, it's NYC/NJ, DC/MD, and Bay Area vs. the entire rest of the nation), but the shared pretense that it is legitimizes the government even in places over times where their regional interest parties lose elections.
I think doing such things would be explicitly acknowledging that the current methods are such a fiction, and that it would be an attempt to deliberately re-establish that geographical distribution: give some folks from Iowa, or even California a say in how violence against their Capitol should be tried in court.
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Is it really though?
The benefits of prosecutorial discretion and the need to consider a prospective defendant's race, gender, politics, etc... when exercising that discretion has been a core progressive belief/talking-point since the first Clinton administration.
Why is considering the specifics of a defendent's circumstances not impartial?
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Democrats have always been the first to defect on this sort of stuff, letting terrorists become professors and respected figures
I wonder what the arguments from either side would be if "the other guy did it first" wasn't acceptable to the voting public, and we held all of our public officials accountable to serving the good of the public as a primary purpose. While I agree that both leftists and democrats do bad things and have for a long time, I don't think refuting the partial benefits along with the outright bad/ridiculous is best.
Unfortunately, things are so heated that any political discussion is less about how society should be run to benefit the people living in it, and more about finding ways to stick it to the other guy. That might help placate half the country emotionally, but I'm not sure it does any material good for people who aren't politicians or above a certain income/class.
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