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Here’s some unsolicited advice for President Donald Trump: Don’t listen to any lawyers who might tell you that you can pardon yourself, or even that it’s a close legal question. You can’t -- and no court is going to rule otherwise.There’s a decent historical argument about why, but it’s beside the point. The bottom line is that if the president could pardon himself, we would no longer have a republic -- nor a government of laws rather than men. We would be a dictatorship, not a democracy.You know that. Americans know it. The Supreme Court knows it. Now let’s move on . . . . . . The basic problem with self-pardon is that it would make a mockery of the very idea that the U.S. operates under the rule of law. A president who could self-pardon could violate literally any federal law with impunity, knowing that the only risk was removal from office by impeachment . . .. . . If the president uses the pardon power to end investigations against his cronies and protect himself, that’s a political problem that would call for a political solution, namely impeachment.But if the president were to try to pardon himself, the courts would simply rule that the pardon was ineffectual. Once out of office, by impeachment or by the end of his term, the president would be subject to criminal charges.It won’t come to that, I believe. The Republic isn’t about to turn into a dictatorship. To make sure things stay that way, no one should talk as though self-pardon is a realistic possibility. It isn’t -- not in a functioning democracy with the rule of law.
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Topic: Trump's Pardoning Himself Would Trash Constitution (Read 324 times)
