When you think about the act of “self-pardoning,” as in President Trump’s assertion that he has the “absolute right” to get away with anything he wants to because the office of president is “sacred,” as his lawyers contend, it doesn’t take long to arrive at the bottom-line conclusion: self pardoning is what all mafia dons do, all despots do, all generals in all juntas do, all dictators do, all kings and emperors do. It’s not that they are above the law, they — their biases, whims, furies, paranoias and hatreds — are the law.
So if a president of the United States, not the “capo di tutti capi” of the Corleone crime family, pardons himself, let’s say, for colluding with a traditional foreign enemy power to defeat his legitimate political opposition in a U.S. presidential election, what’s to prevent him from pardoning himself for assassinating journalists, economists, professors he loathes, pardon himself for dissolving Congress and using armed militia to take over local control of major police departments, pardon himself for sending goon squads to his opponents’ homes in the middle of the night or pardon himself for giving the tacit go ahead to domestic terrorists like Tim McVeigh to bomb major federal buildings?
Nothing that I can see — except custom, the democratic character of our national history and maintaining a vast electoral majority opposed to a president king. It’s not in the nature of our national character to do such horrible things too much at home — the poor and ethnically, racially and sexually marginalized are preyed upon all the time, of course. And ICE is at work orphaning children from their deported parents as I write. But we don’t expect the White House to act like a narco cartel and bump off its detractors … yet. But with self-pardoning, anything could go.
Self-pardoning is self-coronation.
In the case of President Godfather, a man who lost the popular election by 2.9 million votes — that’s one million more people than the population of New Mexico and the largest popular defeat of any American President — self-pardoning is the kind of hubris that Zeus, the ultimate Capo, used to strike down with bolts of lightning.
It’s not hard to get to this conclusion, if you consider the rule of tyrannies in the 20th century and the fundamental fears of the founding fathers in the 18th century about the executive branch of government becoming “imperial,” or donning the aegis of kingship. If you consider the violent language of the Right, the years of liberal bashing, the swastika gangs at post-election Trump rallies, so-called white supremacy movements, you have a hard time not going to the worst. But then you have to check yourself and ask, what are the probabilities that a 241-year-old democracy can crack under the strain of single man of laughable arrogance with a good three-fourths of the country against him and the henchmen, some of them reluctant, of his political party?
I’ll bet self-pardoning isn’t a coronation just yet. But, God help us, who knows?
There is, of course, the specter of “White Power” advocate Tim McVeigh who was executed in 2001 for murdering federal agents (killing 168 people including 19 children and injuring 684 others) with a truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April, 1995. The language and emotion at President Corleone’s rallies reminds me a lot of McVeigh’s rhetoric, his musings about another Civil War, his anti-government paranoia, display of weaponry and Mighty White of Ya callousness about the “collateral damage” of the destruction of the Murrah Building. Those are Turner Diaries rallies, a favorite book of McVeigh. It’s not too far a leap to imagine a coordinated attack on the “deep state” by those who hate the government so much they think it’s morally justified to kill federal employees and anyone else around them, infants and toddlers or not. Would a self-pardoning presidential capo be a pied piper leading such rats into battle?
Claiming to have an “absolute right” and Constitutional authority to self-pardon, President Capo and his lawyers don’t seem to have a working knowledge of Article II of the Constitution, which lays out the president’s authority and duties.There is “absolutely” no mention of “self-pardoning” in Article II, or anywhere else in the Constitution, just as there is no mention of such things as “executive privilege” which so many presidents hide behind, nor any mention of “executive orders,” of which more than 3500 have been written since President Washington invented the idea. Aside from being the Commander-in-Chief, the president is obligated in the 5th clause of Section III of Article II on “presidential responsibilities” to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” This Take Care Clause pertains to the presidential duty to enact the laws passed by Congress not to enact laws of his own invention. And even executive orders must not contravene Congressional authority or be beyond the pale of federal law. In fact, the president may not refuse to enforce a law passed by Congress. It would be unconstitutional to do so.
So, far from having an “absolute right” to pardon himself of crimes, the president has only an “absolute duty” to enforce and obey the laws of Congress.The absolute right of self-pardon is an absolute delusion. When the president takes his vow of office, he promises to “preserve, protect, and defend” not the “homeland” or whatever we want to call it, but the Constitution of the United States of America.
I don’t see how any president could keep that vow by putting himself above the law with the bogus concept of self-pardon.
ThinkProgress recounts an attempted self-pardoning moment in Watergate days before President Nixon resigned from office in l974. Acting Assistant Attorney General, Mary Lawson, of Nixon’s own Justice Department, wrote, “under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the President cannot pardon himself.” A Washington Post panel last year, made up of White House counsels for Presidents Bush and Obama among others, as saying, “The Constitution specifically bars the president from using the pardon power to prevent his own impeachment and removal. It adds that any official removed through impeachment remains fully subject to criminal prosecution. That provision would make no sense if the president could pardon himself.”
Democracy is an exercise in modesty, philosopher Albert Camus said at the end of WWII in an editorial in the resistance paper Combat. It’s not an exercise in arrogance or narcissism. Camus as Combat editor wrote, “when parties and peoples are so convinced by their own arguments that they are willing to resort to violence to silence those who disagree with them, democracy no longer exists. Modesty is thus salutary to republics at all times.”
Self-pardoning as self-coronation does violence to the Constitution, replacing it with the “divine right” of moneybags, big shots, egotists and plutocrats — hardly a modest or salutary lot.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Great piece. Thanks so much for laying this out so clearly.
Everyday I get more scared for the state of our country, and more horrified about the man who leads us domestically and on the world stage.
Even Mafia kings have not been able to pardon themselves… eventually the law caught up with them. But with Trump we seem to have a different situation. The Mafia only enjoys the support of its inner community; the public doesn’t identify with its crimes. Trump, despite tepid declarations to the contrary, seems to enjoy the support of most of the Republican Party. He controls that part of the electorate that voted for him through fear and an appearance of being “his own man,” and a year and a half into his presidency that support doesn’t seem to have diminished. Despite his flagrant disregard for the moral values we say we hold dear. Despite his wanton destruction of alliances developed over decades. Despite it all. At last night’s Tony Awards Robert De Niro called the president an epithet the New York Times refused to print. The audience of theater people went wild in approval. Not so the general public, which appears dangerously cautious with regard to the despot in the White House. Until we demand that politicians, on both sides of the aisle, effectively rally against Trump’s kidnapping of our nation, he will remain in power and continue to do damage, some of it irreversible.
Everything said in this article about the ignorant, thuggish, vulgar, racist, behavior disordered frat boy that poses as president is true, but let’s not forget that all presidents feel themselves above the law and common morality. The liberals’ darling, President Obama, had a “kill list” that he consulted every Tuesday and decided who the empire’s drone victims of the week would be. On his third day in office Obama ordered a drone strike in Pakistan that killed 22 people, including four children. To be president one must show the world that he or she is ready, willing, and able to kill, plain and simple. Recall Hillary Clinton’s words after the death of Qadafi, “We came, we saw, he died.” The list of murder overseen by US Presidents is long and bloody. The current president can’t (yet) hold a candle to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc., who invaded and destroyed an entire country, resulting in the deaths of two million people, and sowing the seeds for the rise of ISIS and permanent conflict in the Middle East. Now some people are looking back fondly at W’s administration in the darkness of the present: a charming and feckless fellow, yes, and look, he paints! How soon we forget, and how we love to garb our butchers in freshly laundered robes.
Well said. Trump is a terrible president, but the problems of this country go far deeper than Trump. As you point out, he is only the most recent in a long line of very bad presidents. Our problems are structural, not unique to Trump.
Good point. While the particular occupant of the presidency does have a great effect on the state of the union and the international situation, some major institutional reforms would make a significant difference. To take an obvious example, Trump would not be president if we did not have the anachronistic electoral college being used to select the president. Yet we hear few calls for its reform or for many others. Perhaps we cannot expect people who benefit from the “rules” to change them?