@Mesaclone cc
@Maj. Bill Martin @Weird Tolkienish Figure @Cyber Liberty@INVAR @Smokin Joe Let me say...thank goodness for Bill Martin. You are an island of sanity in a sea of dimwitted, emotionally driven, fact deprived absurdities in this thread.
The presidential power to pardon any American is absolute AS PER the Constitution itself. The President and his lawyer simply stated this fact.
Let me say at the outset that I respect Maj. Bill. He has frequently made good contributions on this forum, for which I am sincerely grateful. However, if you think
you have the final in the present controversy word, you are dead wrong. Heck, everything in your argument is wrong, Mesaclone.
Although I confess that I have not yet been able to read the memo from the DOJ to President Nixon in 1974, suffice it to say that that DOJ position agrees with my own bottom-line position:
a POTUS cannot pardon himself.
As I understand it, that DOJ memo was not a discussion of any applicable court precedent, but so what? The very fact that the 1974 DOJ memo maintains that the POTUS does not have the right to self-pardon destroys the snarky claims by some of TBR’s Trumpers that the POTUS
obviously has the
absolute right to pardon himself. So, if you want to scoff at me, please notice that I am scoffing right back at you. (Don’t be misled by the fact that I am so civil. [LOL])
By the same token, I am not impressed in the least by the claim that a number of legal scholars agree with you. It turns out that a fair number of “legal scholars†often prove to be spiritually dense when they try to interpret the Constitution. Even those who are usually correct in their reading of the Constitution can sometimes be horribly wrong in the heat of an argument.
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Let me illustrate: I generally like Mark Levin (quite a lot, in fact), but I think his claim that our POTUS
clearly has the right to self-pardon--is actually
PREPOSTEROUS. Although Mark seems to be following a normal, lawyerly way of parsing the language of the Constitution to “establish†his interpretation, that approach is sometimes miserably wrong. As I am fully prepared to prove, Levin’s too narrowly “logical†reading definitely does not fit what may be readily demonstrated as the Framer’s
intent in their language. Levin has been too busy looking for a grammatical loophole that a POTUS can jump through if he ever winds up needing to
escape JUSTICE (among other things, perhaps). That bizarre “loophole-seeking†approach, masquerading as fastidious exegesis, dishonors our Constitution and, by the same token, dishonors the Framers who wrote it.
In short, the standard, lawyerly approach that Levin is using is dangerous garbage. It’s a big part of how our nation has gotten so messed up over the decades (and now going on centuries). One of the very worst precedent-setting rulings by the SCOTUS was in the eminent domain case a few years ago. Our Framers would be appalled to see how the doctrine of eminent domain has gotten twisted
against private property rights. (Oh, great. Now, the correct doctrine of eminent domain, the one that genuinely respects private property, has been forever overturned by an asinine SCOTUS precedent!)
My point here is that the anti-Originalist mindset of many if not most lawyers (including many if not most judges, I’m afraid) has been wickedly eroding our Constitution by precisely the sort of approach that Levin is taking. Levin is a pretty good lawyer, but he has defaulted to pretty bad lawyering in the present case
.
Why does this sometimes happen even to a great guy like Levin? It’s partly because Mark is trying too hard to support Trump and Trump’s legal team. As a related problem, it turns out that people (which noun generally includes lawyers [ha!]) ultimately believe only what they want to believe—even if what they want to believe is nonsense.
It goes almost without saying that lawyers will often “find†arguments that appear (to them, at least) to support their hopeful presuppositions for their clients—even when the arguments that they “find†are completely specious. Levin has unfortunately been so determined to support the badly persecuted Trump team in the matter of the Mueller witch hunt that he has not noticed the sundry fatal flaws in his argument.
Mark is likely impressed with the simplicity of his argument; sadly, he should have noticed that his argument is too simplistic to be correct. To make matters worse, Mark exacerbates his own confusion by presenting his specious argument adamantly—thereby insinuating, at the very least, that if you don’t agree with his wonderfully simple argument, then you are a stubborn NeverTrumper or a Constitution-despising dunce or, more likely, both. (I’m afraid that Mark is so pumped up that he has lost the ability to think clearly, to be objective.)
By the way, a great many lawyers (possibly including Levin?) are far too willing to intimidate people into agreeing with them—e.g., pressing them very hard to marvel at the simplicity of the lawyer’s impressively blunt, impressively dogmatic argument rather than recoiling at it as too simplistic (and too hot-headed?) to be trusted.
This sort of manipulative drama is one reason why courtrooms are often circuses. The judicial theory of courtroom trials holds that the extremely adversarial nature of a trial is the best way of guaranteeing that the Truth will come out; however, some of the lawyers I have known have lamented that the opposite result is very often the case. In the present situation, I’m concerned that the clamor on the present TBR thread—mainly a clash between Trumpers versus NeverTrumpers—will leave many of the Constitutional amateurs on TBR thinking Levin is surely correct--whereas he is most certainly
wrong.
Again, I am not impressed that the Great One (Levin, not Trump!) has declared that the President’s right to self-pardon is
essentially explicit in the Constitution. Well, as you know, Levin's argument is from the Constitution's Pardon Clause, which says that the POTUS can pardon any
person for a crime--and since the POTUS is a
person, that "surely" allows the POTUS to pardon
himself. But with all due respect to Levin—and that’s considerable respect, indeed—his reasoning is just snaky, legalistic
nonsense. I am guessing that it’s the single worst blunder he has ever made in Constitutional interpretation. Perhaps I am being too charitable, but I frankly cannot imagine Levin making a worse mistake in handling the Constitution.
(Constitutional issues aside, by the way, Mark’s mistake in the present matter is not the first really bad mistake Mark has made in recent years. I am now referring to the fact that Mark has repeatedly declared that Obama was born in Hawaii—as though this were a settled matter. [It suited Mark to refuse even to consider the mountain of evidence to the contrary—preferring rather to disparage Birthers, as I recall.] When Trump finally prosecutes Obama for the birthplace fraud, as I am convinced that Trump will, Levin is going to be badly embarrassed. [So will our esteemed conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh, who is also wrong about the Constitutionality of self-pardoning by a POTUS. The moral of the larger story that I am recounting is, of course, that some of our best guys make shockingly bad mistakes—often involving herd stupidity, I think.])
Anyway, you need to re-read Oceander’s Post #52 and my own Post # 55. These posts, which you did not really address, actually
crush Levin’s claim, my TBR friend.
Oceander's
reductio ad absurdum argument, cited above, is hereby offered just for starters in the debate. Hilariously, it gets even worse for you when we delve further. You will discover that the already crushed position of Trump's legal team gets ground to powder.
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The good news for Trump in all of this is that the correct position—i.e., the position that
the POTUS cannot pardon himself—surprisingly but rather massively buttresses the important claim that
Mueller cannot indict him. Period. (As I will demonstrate in a later post or two, that very important position becomes a
slam dunk as soon as you quit making the
distracting and utterly
repugnant claim that a POTUS is ultimately above the law. [For now, read my Post #77 and Post #82 to see why I say that the legal theory advanced by Trump’s lawyers is both
distracting and
repugnant.])
In my forthcoming posts, I will prove beyond any doubt whatsoever that
a sitting POTUS cannot be indicted and simultaneously prove that
a sitting POTUS cannot pardon himself for anything whatsoever. These two matters are Constitutionally interlocking in ways that the loudest legal scholars appearing on camera and on the radio haven’t even
noticed. (Here’s my concluding teaser: Trump’s lawyers evidently sensed a connection of some kind between these two matters but didn’t elucidate the connection correctly—because they stupidly negated one of the two premises. [Oooops.])
See you around soon, my TBR friend.
