[Karrot_Kream]

> So then how do we fix it if not by adding laws and rules? We don't elect people like Trump, who think they are above the law. That's it. I know it seems kind of glib but it's not a high bar to just avoid malignant narcissists.

Right but he is the President. I didn't vote for him. I donated and canvassed for the Harris campaign. But Trump won. So what are we getting by making 1000 internet comments of which 800 are about how bad Trump is?

This whole exchange reminded me why I don't participate in politics on HN. It's all just venting. I'll stick to doing things like canvasing and not reading the anxieties of HN commenters.

[ModernMech]

> Right but he is the President.

Yeah, and that he specifically is President should tell you something -- maybe the fight isn't at the pardon power.

> So what are we getting by making 1000 internet comments of which 800 are about how bad Trump is?

We might come to understand the root of the problem is the psychology of a specific individual and the cult that surrounds him, rather than what Obama did a decade ago. It's not that Obama's use of the pardon power caused a slippery slope of executive overreach that has resulted in today's corrupt pardons. We are not dealing with "overreach" here, what's happening today is categorically different.

> This whole exchange reminded me why I don't participate in politics on HN. It's all just venting.

I dunno, hopefully in this exchange you've learned that the pardon power is not supposed to be limited under the Constitution and why, so now you can stop making arguments that we should limit the pardon power. When you take that off the table, viable solutions become easier to spot. Limiting the pardon power is not viable because there is no Constitutional mechanism to do so. Under the Constitution, any limits put in place can just be ignored by the next POTUS who decides he wants to ignore them.

[Karrot_Kream]

I never said we should limit the pardon power. I just said Obama increased the number of pardons and contemporary commenters criticized that, fearing a regression of norms.

I made no policy prescriptions whatsoever.

> When you take that off the table, viable solutions become easier to spot.

So do you have a viable solution here?

[ModernMech]

You had said:

> When Obama really increased the number of pardons, a lot of contemporary opinion writers said stuff along the lines of "this is a dangerous precedent and we're lucky that the pardons are fairly popular and sane." ... the warnings from abusing these limitations from previous administrations was exactly for this moment. Nobody is saying Trump isn't the bad one, he is. But the conditions were laid for him.

I take this to mean that Obama had abused his power past his authority, and you used the word "limitations" here to mean that there are some sort of institutional or structural limits which he was exceeding, thus paving the way for the current abuses.

The implication is that if Obama had stayed within the bounds (which bounds?) then the condition would not have been laid for Trump to do what he's doing.

My point is the conditions were there whether or not Obama did what he did, because the power never had limits, never was intended to have limits, because the limiting factor was not electing a bad guy. If any conditions were laid, they were by the Founders in how they structured the Constitution and the pardon power. They just didn't think that with elections, the electoral college, impeachment, and the insurrection clause we would be dumb enough to actually elect an insurrectionist.

> So do you have a viable solution here?

Nope! I mean, as far as the Trump administration goes they are going to burn themselves out, the only question is how much damage they are going to do on the way down and what the blast radius is. The important question now is what to do with America after that happens and I don't know what that looks like. Maybe balkanization, I dunno depends how bad it gets. If some key Republicans come to their senses this can be solved relatively quickly and painlessly, then we can talk about revising the Constitution. Otherwise who knows.