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I mean... libertarian and anarchist types were indeed complaining from at least Obama onward.
Are you in agreement that this executive is overstepping its powers, and just think it's justified?
If you think both this administration and the previous one are overstepping its powers... do you think they are doing it to the same degree? Which Biden-admin actions do you think are of a similar level to those mentioned above?
Biden went so far as to proclaim a new Amendment to the Constitution.
Yeah, Biden did a lot of indefensible stuff towards the end of his presidency, and eroded any ounce of moral high ground the Democrats might have had left.
I think Biden and Trump have both abused the pardon power, and I would personally be in favor of a Constitutional Amendment requiring Congressional approval for each use of the power going forward. It's a shame too, because I mostly like the pardon power.
Biden proclaiming a new Amendment was a cynical move, but considering he didn't actually do any official presidential acts to make it so, it's closer to Trump's "gaffs" where he says he's going to do something unconstitutional and norm-breaking, but doesn't follow through.
But I also agree with other posters in this thread that we can criticize both Democrats and Republicans when they do bad things. We don't have to try and parcel out who was the first to defect. That's just partisan-poisoned thinking.
He did a lot of stuff in the beginning and middle of his Presidency too. Student loan forgiveness -- after getting slapped down by the Supreme Court, he just "found another way". Remember the rent moratorium? After the deciding vote on the Supreme Court says basically "it's unconstitutional but I'll allow an orderly wind-down", he extended it. DEI everywhere. He made a rule all but banning gasoline cars. He floated the idea of banning gas stoves through the CPSC, and when that failed he had the Department of Energy pass regulations to make them crappy instead. There's probably lots more.
No, the pardons, at least the ones specifying people and laws (including the one for his son), were pretty firmly within his power. This is another soldier; mildly criticize Biden for his use of the pardon power to provide cover for criticizing Trump for his even-more-justified use of it.
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Biden gives 10 year broad pardons for any "non-violent" crimes known and unknown to his immediate family, all of whom are involved in corruption and pay-for-access schemes, including his own son who has been the bag man for Biden family corruption for at least a decade and left a laptop of him recording himself doing it among like 100+ other crimes
Trump pardons a bunch of regular Americans who were targeted for political reasons and given heinous sentences way above any treatment similar situated people who weren't targeted for political reasons have ever received, and this was done after embarrassingly unfair clown-trials, and leaving the 14 most serious convictions to only be commuted. What were the facts of each case? Who knows, the trials were tainted and corrupt with the government lying and hiding evidence.
think whatever you like about the Biden pardons, but the Trump pardons were entirely justified and further reinforce just how important the pardon power is and why it should remain
and even if you don't think they were fully justified, putting them in the same category of "abuse of the pardon power" as Biden giving full pardons for crimes known and unknown covering 10 year periods to his family is ridiculous and stinks of "poisoned partisan thinking"
what is a "presidential act" which "proclaim[s] a new Amendment"?
Biden attempted to direct the Archivist and the Office of the Federal Register to declare they had received sufficient documents to proclaim an Amendment has been added to the Constitution, but they refused. So instead, he had to settle with twitter and a media blitz trying to make it happen.
I'm willing to use the hypocrisy standard here. Biden claimed he wouldn't pardon Hunter, then he did. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of himself, but he did.
J.D. Vance, when clarifying Trump's intention to pardon the January 6th protesters, said they obviously wouldn't pardon people who committed violence on the day of January 6th. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of the Trump administration he was going to be a part of, but he did.
I'm okay with holding both administrations to their own standards in this case, and saying that they both acted wrongly. I don't share your belief that we simply can't know the facts of each case. Trump isn't stupid. If he had wanted to actually investigate all of the people with violent offenses, he could have, and I bet he would quickly arrive at a gut feeling about which were legitimate and which were actual gray areas. I don't believe for a second that the number of unambiguously violent protesters was 0 or 14, given that 140 law enforcement officers were injured and 15 were hospitalized.
The following statements can all be true:
I'll bite the bullet on this one. I don't have to carry water for Biden - he did wrong here, and I'm willing to walk back my weak defense of his actions.
I think I could weakly defend my original words, because even during Trump I, a lot of the cases where he didn't actually end up following through on his stated intentions was because underlings refused to follow his unconstitutional orders. But, "I couldn't get my underlings to violate their oath to defend the constitution, so I didn't violate the constitution" is still really bad, and I think I'm more willing to say even here we should strongly condemn both Trump and Biden.
Why should we use the hypocrisy standard when speaking directly to the substantive pardons themselves? No, the pardon "abuses" aren't the same nor should be treated the same because JD Vance, who is not the President, said people who committed violence "shouldn't be pardoned" (and soon after clarified he meant people who weren't provoked or didn't receive garbage trials, etc. ), and Biden said he wouldn't pardon his son but then pardoned his son not for charged crimes and convictions but for a 10 year period for any crimes known and unknown and even gave him a full day or two of prospective pardon left if he wanted to rush out and commit some more federal felonies. You can think "hypocrisy" occurred and yet the fact they both pardons happened anyway (and we're going to ignore there is any difference in a commutation or pardon) do not make the underlying pardons the same or in the same category of abuse. Nor any of the other 8,000+ other pardons issued by the Biden admin.
I'm not accusing Trump (or I guess his VP elect) and Biden of not being in same category of hypocrites. And this hypocrisy standard accusation assumes a whole lot about either admin's standards and degrees of wrong they would apply which I don't think is supportable either.
Putting pardons used by Trump and by the Biden admin even in the same zipcode of "bad," even if you don't think Trump was justified in every single one of the Jan6 examples, is ridiculous.
Protests across the country, especially during the BLM riots of summer 2020, see these kinds of numbers because cops are heavily incentivized to record and log each and every injury from a small scratch from a branch to spraining their ankle to smashing their finger while attempting to baton a protestor on the head. For e.g., when a BLM protest breached security barricades and lit the road and St. John's church on fire right outside the Whitehouse. We can compare the prosecutions, convictions, and sentences, from that example if you'd like.
And it's not 14 "unambiguously violent" protestors, there were 14 which were identified and charged not that this represents all violent protestors there that day, and given I watched the livestreams when this happened this doesn't seem unreasonable especially if you condition this on Vance's caveats. It's not unreasonable to claim this is close to meeting Vance's clarified standard anyway.
I didn't say the facts are unknowable, I said the process which was supposed to be used to determine the facts was fatally corrupted and the government actors involved intentionally hid, destroyed, and manipulated evidence and the courts helped them do it. I've noticed many a person complaining about these pardons endorsed or at least never complained when other criminals are let out of jail because of some error in the trial that convicted them, but suddenly the fact that hundreds of clown-trials sent regular Americans to jail and failed to protect them from a weaponized DOJ isn't enough to justify a President pardoning them to stop the damage. Who/whom explains these differences far better than torturing some alleged twisted principle they just discovered.
And I did look at and follow a lot of these cases and they all fell well-below what I or anyone should consider a fair trial. We don't know how much of a "case-by-case" review was done, but given even a supportable standard for fair trials and government conduct, it wouldn't be hard to quickly review and note all of these cases fall well-below it. You imply this review wasn't done, but clearly there was one because Trump didn't fully pardon 14 convicted people.
Yeah, well they were. All of them have suffered quite a bit; their houses were raided, their property was seized, they were detained pre-trial, some for years, they were tortured in jail by screws, they lost houses and families, and they lost years of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is all well beyond any of the people who engaged in similar conduct who weren't being politically prosecuted. All of which makes me really question people who portend these pardons were even in the same zipcode as a dude pardoning his corrupt family members for crimes, known and unknown, for a period of 10 years, before they've suffered even a small fraction of the damage these regular Americans have suffered.
No one should accept the double standard if you want to enforce a standard; you either prosecute and punish similarly situated people equally or you don't at all and anything otherwise is the direct undermining of the rule of law, something you claimed to lament. Your "both sides are bad" feels empty when the de facto result is "For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law."
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Vance is not the President. Worst case, he was lying about Trump's intention. That doesn't make the pardons an abuse.
And arguably he didn’t lie. Commutation isn’t pardon.
Not only that, Trump specifically commuted their sentences instead of pardoned, and pardoned the nonviolent ones; he made a positive decision to treat them differently.
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You need to be looking at the subset of unambiguously violent protestors within the set of those convicted -- it seems quite unlikely that everyone guilty of violence was identified and arrested.
Which makes '14' at least plausible -- what criteria do you suppose Trump was using in deciding whom to pardon and who's sentence to commute?
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That just doesn’t make any sense. The Obama admin expanded its power. This admin is cutting down the bureaucratic state. It is cutting down the unconstitutional fourth branch; not impinging on the first branch.
Yes it is muscular but muscular in a pro constitutional way.
There is nothing “pro constitutional” about attempting to abrogate birthright citizenship via executive order. Whether or not the administration’s interpretation of the 14th amendment—which strains the limits of legal credulity—is actually valid, the idea that the executive can just decide one day that clear Supreme Court precedent actually isn’t binding anymore because “I really don’t like it!” is monarchist, not republican.
Ehh I think you need to look closer into the precedent. Do I think Trump Has the better argument? No. But you don’t actually need to overturn precedent to come to Trump’s conclusion.
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"justice 40" and the total drilling ban are two things that come to mind. How about this?
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