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Trump floats pardons to ‘protect’ Elon Musk and staffers from Democrat investigations
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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Maybe it's time to float rewriting the pardon powers so there's checks and balances that can't be abused, because you know if one did it more will do the same otherwise. Invalidate his pardon power, invalidate his pardons, crimes committed by those in office should not be pardonable, etc.
We need to make it so that the president can only pardon people who they don't personally know, and who didn't commit crimes that directly benefit them.
The J6ers shouldn't have been pardonable, members of his administration should not be pardonable. Only private citizens whose crimes had no benefit to the president.
And there should be a limit to how many they get. Like 36 a year or something. Thats 3 per month; more than enough!
It's never that simple. Even the limit is a good idea on paper, but pardons also apply to people who have been convicted of "offenses" that should never have been offenses to begin with (IMO marijuana possession is a huge one.) If the prez happens to have heard or met any of them personally, they wouldn't be eligible? Hardly seems fair. And yet, someone out there would argue this, you just know it.
Easy to abuse the other way too. Just have a group lobby to pardon someone so there's no direct relationship between pardoner and pardonee. Would probably meet "legal criteria", or there'll be a subtler move that does meet legal criteria, because legal criteria change.
Unless there is a mechanism to PREVENT pardons from being issued without prior review, but even then: the review process can be abused (see: Supreme Court full of bought judges).
I also don't understand why anyone can uphold the logic of "guilty, but there won't be punishment". Any system that's based on that kind of logic needs to be abolished. If there's a confirmed offense, there need to be consequences, period. If the offense shouldn't have been an offense in the first place, there needs to be actual restitution made and some other mechanism than just saying "sorry, my bad"--it shouldn't have more weight when it comes from the president, come on. Presidents are just people, human beings holding an office. (The fact that they're venerated in some places is a fucking problem, not a feature.)
In some cases there can't be restitution without causing damage to innocents; "heads need to roll" when that happens (there should be damage to those who continued enabling whatever went wrong.) And so on, but all of those steps can be abused.
Yet we go the other way these days (oh, nobody's really "guilty" of anything) and it's no wonder the president can be a convicted felon. I'm fucking tired.