view the rest of the comments
News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
We have it here as well but it isn't a free for all. The President receives a list of proposed pardons that have to be vetted one by one by a legal team. Certain offenses are not eligible and only sentences below a given number of years may be pardoned.
It's not like the man can hand out pardons on a whim.
How does it work in the US?
Generally, the pardon power is meant to be a check on the legislative and judicial branch, and thus it is designed to be this powerful.
Obama used his pardon power to free individuals who were nonviolent drug offenders who got sentenced to years often for simple possession. This doesn't mean that he didn't use a slew of lawyers to find these cases. He very much did. But he could, literally, go through a roster of inmates and just pick random people to pardon.
Trump, if reelected, will likely pardon himself and it will need to go through the courts to see if that's even feasible. Given the current nature of our highest court, it likely will be found constitutional.
Pretty much. From the strict text reading there is nothing about it.
Justice Thompson will get a new boat from a GOP aligned group so at least so it isn't all bad. Sure it is travesty of the justice and breaks the entire concept of no one being above or below the law but when has that stopped the Robert's court before?
Nobody knows, including the president. Trump thought he could pardon himself. There aren't any restrictions other than it must be a crime with federal jurisdiction, the only jurisdiction over which the president has direct power. He can even pardon people in advance.
It is very open for abuse but historically hasn't been abused that much. Seems like the states are moving towards making it less powerful.
The US seems to work on "I pinky swear not to abuse this" and then is shocked when that turns out poorly.
sometimes when these systems are designed, the designers, simply didnt contemplate the crazy shit people will try that are within the systems legal bounds. for example no-one would have ever thought a prime minister would secretly swear himself into multiple minister portfolios even behind his own cabinets back, but thats exactly what the former PM of australia did (and now calls into question the things he signed off on in secret at the time).
You need a balance. You can't have a government that can't respond/change and you can't have a government where whomever won the last election is now dictator whose whim is law.
A lot of this stuff was ripe for abuse since the beginning but it was only rarely abused so everyone just left it. Kinda how Vietnam war wasnt declared but went on for like a decade. The potential for that abuse of power was there since the founding days but wasn't abused until much later.
As I said the states seem like they are moving away from it being an unchecked power so maybe one day there will be a constitutional amendment.