The social roles that guide us through our lives — those of parent, worker, teacher, writer, editor, senator, doctor, business owner, priest, inventor, attorney, employee … and President of the United States — all have rules that must be followed if we are to occupy the role with honor and with competence.
The roles come with clear goals, strong suggestions on how to achieve them and absolute boundaries of behavior that if crossed constitute at the very least a moral breech and at worst a crime punishable by society. And the victims of the violation of those boundaries could be scared for the rest of their lives.
If you’re a teacher, your social role makes it clear you are never to exploit your students for your own pleasure or gain. If you’re a parent, your social role makes abusing your children a dreadful crime. The roles of both parent and teacher are to empower children to achieve the best within them, as citizens, students and human beings. The chief goals of most social roles are directed toward bettering the prospects of our society and of those who depend upon us.
This is especially true of the role of the President of the United States. The president has one principal goal — to protect and defend the Constitution, which he takes a solemn vow to do. This is meant to guarantee that he will pursue the democratic virtues of freedom and equality (equal justice under law) and work to govern the country within the bounds that the Constitution sets forth, with every ounce of his integrity.
The role of president is imbued with high ideals. It embodies characteristics that display the society’s most basic aims and values. When children look at the president, they’re supposed to see the epitome of a serious, honorable, courageous, level-headed, principled and responsible adulthood. The person who occupies the office and social role of president cannot validly be a scofflaw, a “crook,” a nasty little bad mouthing prankster, a cheat and chiseler, a heartless egomaniac, nor is that person supposed to convey that criminal behavior is fine and dandy if you’re one of the president’s friends or allies. The role of president is one that is meant to set the moral standard for the nation. That may seem far-fetched given the presidents who’ve occupied the role and office recently, but nonetheless the president should be someone to look up to, not turn from in shame and embarrassment.
When it comes to presidential pardons and commutations, which are both forms of executive clemency granted by the Constitution, the president’s role is not as a god forgiving sins and wiping slates clean, but as a politician who is trying to do the “honorable thing” in cases that seem to the president to be patently unjust or inhumane. Pardons and commutations are not meant to be used as a revenge on “the system” for incarcerating the president’s cronies or political hatchet men.
And it must always be remembered that those who a president frees have been convicted of a crime by a jury of their peers. Pardons and commutations are to be used sparingly because they represent a meddling of the executive branch into the affairs of the judicial branch, despite the Supreme Court’s validation of those presidential powers. But a pardon, the Supreme Court says in Burdick v. United States, is not an exoneration of guilt but rather an “imputation of guilt” and acceptance of a pardon implies a confession of charged guilt. Commutations, unlike pardons, lift remaining incarceration and financial penalties of a conviction but do not wipe out the conviction itself.
Executive clemency is always controversial, especially the 25 pardons issued by President Trump since he took office, because they are seen largely as acts of extreme political partisanship and thereby violating a moral boundary that requires a president to represent all the people of the country, to be egalitarian in his pursuit of justice and fairness and not to indulge political gamesmanship.
President Trump’s first pardon was of the notorious Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was charged with criminal contempt of court in 2017. A federal judge had ruled six years earlier that Arpaio knowingly violated a judge’s order forbidding the detaining of immigrants simply because they lacked legal documentation. Trump pardoned Arpaio even before his sentencing took place. Many saw the move as a bald political strong-arm play defending an ideological ally and interfering in the workings of the court.
Trump also pardoned Lewis “Scooter” Libby, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted of committing perjury and obstruction of justice in a case that involved leaking the name of CIA agent Valery Plame, an act of political revenge, some say, against her husband who bucked the Bush administration by challenging their rationale for a second war with Iraq. Bush commuted his sentence in 2007. Trump pardoned Libby eleven years later.
This year, in a spate of suspect pardons, Trump pardoned disgraced financier Michael Milken, who was convicted in 1990 of securities fraud, tax fraud and other forms of embezzlement. He commuted the sentence of Ted Suhl, who was convicted in 2016 of illegally increasing Medicaid payments to his company. Trump also pardoned Rod Blagojevich, former Democratic governor of Illinois, for taking a bribe to fill the former U.S. Senate seat of Barack Obama. In 2018 Trump pardoned conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza, who pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions to the 2012 Senate campaign of Republican Wendy Long.
One wonders how many white collar convicts and like-minded cronies will be pardoned in the last days of the Trump presidency as he escalates his evisceration of the rules and norms of our nation’s top office.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
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