As to pardons, the problem is that their is no mechanism that TPTB will accept for reining in rogue politicians, prosecutors and judges. Basically, it is only low level police officers that ever go to prison for violating the civil rights of citizens; the others operate with impunity. So pardons are the only tool that Presidents and governors have. What ever you think about J6, the civil rights of the prisoners were clearly violated. Withheld evidence, indefinite detention before trial, coerced pleas and inhuman conditions are not a good look. As for Biden some of his pardons were, in his mind, designed to prevent the same thing happening to his supporters. There is not any evidence from Trump's first term that this would happen but this time who knows. The problem isn't pardons, it is violation of civil rights.
Here, here. I really do feel like we are at a low point after these past few days. The rule of law and the liberal promise of America was already laying on the ground, bloodied and wounded, and both the incoming and outgoing president, rather than aid it in any way, gave it a good kick and spat in its face, to reaffirm rather than disavow their prior acts of violence against it. I have a very smart 14-year-old son who is already asking questions about all of this and it is a herculean effort to try and answer them truthfully without being fatalistic about the future.
It is insane to me that we went from winning the cold war 30-some years ago to this. Talk about a fall from grace.
I understand Biden’s genuine fear of Trump’s retribution. But there is no excuse for the blanket pardon of his son and his 14th amendment nonsense. The latter was surely concocted by his out of touch, progressive staffers that Biden seemed rarely capable of pushing back against. It’s a shame.
Entirely agreed - his son is pure self-dealing and the 14th Amendment reeks indeed of not being able to say no to the very Lefty Left Progressive admin staffing, own staff and the Secretaries, who undermined - if one agrees with Silver (https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-biden-failed) , I do - his presidency. What Klein calls the Everything Bagelism, every initiative has to load on every wishlist of the entire Groups / Lefty Left with no trade-offs. Empty gestures or even self-harming ones (if one is playing a long-term agenda and not engage in Campus style grandstanding for grandstanding sake, where the Power is a often limp college admin, and not an electorate).
Boob bait for the core supporters is hardly an Biden innovation. The same may be true about Trump's action though there is more substance there. The 14A was not about immigrants but about freedmen (though there was some discussion of immigrants in the ratification process). And the citizenship status of "Indians not taxed" was changed by the executive back in the Coolidge administration. My own mother was a subject of that change.
Maybe so, but I doubt anything will come of his order regarding birthright. I’m sure there would have been an attempted challenge by now if there were serious questions regarding its legitimacy.
Probably. One could wish for provisions to be clear. The Privledges and Immunities part of the 14A has been nullified by the courts sinc the late 1800s. I suppose this could be the Right's version of the Living Constitution after a century of the Left making stuff up. Wilson, at least, was explicit about what he was doing.
John is right: national politics is hopelessly broken. Kudos to him - too many experts still think we can just tinker with the system.
Polls show 85% of Americans across the spectrum agree with him.
So how can it be that we are stuck, that there’s nothing a citizen can do? We have a massive bipartisan majority for fundamental change. All that’s missing is consensus path forward - or at least a first step.
Fighting money in politics can be that consensus goal to rally Americans. Majorities north of 75% - regardless of party - see campaign finance as a major problem. It’s the single most undemocratic feature of our politics.
While the Supreme Court sharply limits our options, public financing of elections would survive judicial review.
Of the public financing mechanisms, the most impactful, easiest to implement, and easiest to sell politically is voter dollars (aka democracy dollars/vouchers). We just have to break through the noise, get the word out, and overcome people’s pessimism.
Yes the system is broken, but it’s way too early to give up.
So what do you do about "independent" committees? Repeal the 1A? The only way to get big money out of politics is to reduce the range of issues that government deals with.
Thanks for commenting, Richard, and you make a good point: thanks to SCOTUS we can’t limit anyone’s political spending, because the Court says money = protected free speech.
So the only way forward is to give every voter the chance to speak, with campaign cash of their own to donate. That adds to the amount of political “speech,” so it would be hard for the Court to invalidate it on 1st Amendment grounds.
You say if the government does less there will be less opportunity to corrupt it with campaign donations. But unless you want to abolish the government altogether, the problem remains.
If we have to have a government, we the people must be in charge of it - instead of big ticket donors who disenfranchise us.
I don't deny that huge sums of money for campaigning are a factor in influencing people's votes, but people still get only one vote each per candidate and are not being directly bribed to cast it in a particular way. I think that they need to demonstrate a willingness to vote for centrist candidates regardless of party affiliation when they have a chance to do so, and that going to ranked choice voting or approval voting would give them more chances.
Thanks for your response, Carlton, but here’s the problem: as long as both parties are in hock to donors, we face only bad choices when we vote.
Polls show that most Americans are pretty centrist on policy. If we support extremist candidates, it’s probably out of frustration with the system and hope that an extremist might “shake things up” (a phrase I hear from voters every day).
We the people are not at fault. The parties and the system have failed us.
When criminality is forgiven in the name of political expediency it's a slippery slope. What began with mayors and governors allowing lawlessness expanded to non governmental organisations providing instant bail and legal fees, and then politicians themselves bragging about contributing money. The huge prosecutions and investigations post Jan 6, and the prosecution of Trump that included some things justifiable and other things trivial.
The Biden administration seems to have known a lot more about the politicization of justice than they let on as they saw fit to blanket pardons before people were even charged.
I would hope Trump avoids making the same mistakes. It looks like he has plenty to do other than witch hunts.
The comparison is a non-sequitur as the Jan-6 protestors are powerless American citizens and all that Joe Biden pardoned are political power brokers or connected to power.
The failure to discern this difference is possibly the primary reason that the Democrats lost this election and will continue to lose.
Democrats have lied that they are all part of a victim class or otherwise virtue-signaling advocates of the victim class. But what they are is the power Regime with a track record of decisions and behaviors that only benefit the power Regime and not the people.
The ‘sequitur’, as it were, is that both Trump and Biden’s pardons are assaults on liberal democratic institutions. Erecting legal protections for those committing violence on behalf of keeping you in power (as Trump did) is classic authoritarian behavior—it’s how Mao got his Red Guards, and how Mussolini got his brown shirts. So is granting legal immunity to political insiders and your own family members. (as Biden did). Both erode the foundations of the rule of law, and create perverse incentives—particularly in terms of legitimating criminal behavior so long as it either furthers the end of keeping the head of state in power, or originates within the head of state’s family or circle of political influence.
Well, I can give Biden a partial pass as excepting his goofy and frankly somewhat pathetic demarche on the Amendment (pathetic not as subject matter in itself on which I am neutral, pathetic as futile and empty gesture that obviously won't win anything legally real), his actions are more reactive. Not going to applaud them as such as certain of the Lefty Left are doing, but as reactive, they don't rise to the same level of toxicity of the Trump lawlessness.
and oh man Trump is in his first days reminding me of why I voted against him every time even when I actively disliked both Clinton and Biden. PT Barnum Show.
There is nothing disgraceful or reckless about Biden's having proactively pardoned the members of the January 6 committee, who Trump has repeatedly identified as targets of political retribution. It was both prudent and necessary.
The rhetorical trick of calling them "politicians" to make them seem less than is beneath the dignity of this publication. It's telling that this piece did not even attempt to demonstrate the moral equivalence of Biden's pardons and Trump's pardon of the January 6 convicts, even the violent ones, because there is none.
As for the accusation that Biden's pardons of the January 6 panelists breached his pledge to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, please cite your legal authorities. For better or worse, the Founding Fathers placed no limits on the president's power to pardon. Disliking that doesn't change matters.
He lied to Americans about a nonexistent 28th Amendment. It’s not the law of the land and the president has nothing to do with the amendment process anyway. That’s not preserving or protecting the Constitution. It’s propaganda and he knows it too since he did it at the last minute after a bunch of activists pressed him and he didn’t even bother to force the issue.
You have to understand that the road to authoritarianism is paved in dialectics.
Biden issuing a preemptive pardon to the January 6 panelists, even if done to protect them, now opens the door for Trump (or some other right-wing authoritarian) to issue preemptive pardons to allies--whether it's financiers, attack dogs, or some other species--that will make them functionally unrestrained by the law. Now Kash Patel can break every rule of due process and not worry about the consequences, because Trump has a precedent to preemptively pardon him for doing so--in essence, the pardons that were supposed to protect his victims have now made them *more* vulnerable.
Biden once understood this on other issues--he wisely cited it as the reason for not following the radical 'pack the court' strategy many on his leftmost flank urged him to not that long ago. He knew that once he packed the court with his judges, some GOP successor down the line would do the same, and the court would in effect be destroyed, bit by bit. It's both sad and infuriating that he couldn't show similar restraint here.
There was always the possibility of Trump pardons for Jan 6. But would he have taken that step to blanket pardon all if Biden had not issued all of the pardons he did, along with other actions during his remaining time in office? That is no excuse and I can think of many other responses Trump could have made. However disgraceful, there is an unfortunate logical path for how all of this has played out. Otherwise, I think your advice is good for life in general!
Nope. False equivalent bs. Biden was protecting his family and others from retribution by Trump and MAGA scum. Trump pardoned murderers of cops. Even the Police Union that endorsed Trump is pissed off. Guess what Maga scum? FAFO losers.
It is very difficult to pass a constitutional amendment. I would argue that the extremely high bar for amendments is one of the drafters' worst mistake. Perhaps, though, there should be limits placed in the pardoning power. Given that both parties have been burned on that, maybe a compromise could be reached.
Or you could just declare it so. "President Joe Biden on Friday declared that the Equal Rights Amendment is the law of the land, attempting to ratify a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in a last-ditch effort to protect women’s reproductive rights."
When network news budgets rely so heavily for ratings on the antics of the Joe Bidens and Donald Trumps, and today's lame press obliges with 24/7 coverage, they empower what is rapidly becoming an imperial, authoritarian executive branch and a vastly diminished legislative and judicial branches.
So much for checks and balances and constitutional order.
There are still enough sources of news that a discerning person is capable of cutting through the bias of the left and right in figuring out where individual politicians and parties stand on issues. The Liberal Patriot is one source of centrist political commentary. The Michael Smerconish show on CNN, the No Labels organization, and the Forward Party are others.
I lay the blame for the general lack of centrist choices on the dominance of the two major political parties by a relatively small number of activist extremists. Trump's election (hardly by a "landslide") was largely a backlash to the extreme leftist policies of the Biden Administration, as endorsed by the Queen of Woke, whom the Democrat elite nominated to continue those policies.
Welcome to the party, Mr. Halpin. Watching the Al Braggs of the world, watching swat teams arouse pro-lifers from bed, thumbing the nose at the Supreme Court (student loan giveaways to 1 percenters), pardoning a crackhead son, this was all ok. But once Trump gets elected, then this suddenly becomes a problem?
Both sides have a lot to answer for, but I never heard a peep out of anyone in the Democrat party when all Biden's antics were going on.
The criticism of Bragg in that article seems to be that his torturous bending of the law might help rather than hurt Trump. Very mild, weak observation that it might be bad for the country.
Can you name anyone in the Dem party who rose up to condemn Biden thumbing his nose at the Supreme Court for student loans or the eviction moratorium? Why be surprised that Republicans are going to play by the same set of new rules (re Tik-Tok).
The whole thing makes me sick, because I can see each incoming president preemptively pardoning everyone who crosses his path.
As to pardons, the problem is that their is no mechanism that TPTB will accept for reining in rogue politicians, prosecutors and judges. Basically, it is only low level police officers that ever go to prison for violating the civil rights of citizens; the others operate with impunity. So pardons are the only tool that Presidents and governors have. What ever you think about J6, the civil rights of the prisoners were clearly violated. Withheld evidence, indefinite detention before trial, coerced pleas and inhuman conditions are not a good look. As for Biden some of his pardons were, in his mind, designed to prevent the same thing happening to his supporters. There is not any evidence from Trump's first term that this would happen but this time who knows. The problem isn't pardons, it is violation of civil rights.
Here, here. I really do feel like we are at a low point after these past few days. The rule of law and the liberal promise of America was already laying on the ground, bloodied and wounded, and both the incoming and outgoing president, rather than aid it in any way, gave it a good kick and spat in its face, to reaffirm rather than disavow their prior acts of violence against it. I have a very smart 14-year-old son who is already asking questions about all of this and it is a herculean effort to try and answer them truthfully without being fatalistic about the future.
It is insane to me that we went from winning the cold war 30-some years ago to this. Talk about a fall from grace.
I understand Biden’s genuine fear of Trump’s retribution. But there is no excuse for the blanket pardon of his son and his 14th amendment nonsense. The latter was surely concocted by his out of touch, progressive staffers that Biden seemed rarely capable of pushing back against. It’s a shame.
Entirely agreed - his son is pure self-dealing and the 14th Amendment reeks indeed of not being able to say no to the very Lefty Left Progressive admin staffing, own staff and the Secretaries, who undermined - if one agrees with Silver (https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-biden-failed) , I do - his presidency. What Klein calls the Everything Bagelism, every initiative has to load on every wishlist of the entire Groups / Lefty Left with no trade-offs. Empty gestures or even self-harming ones (if one is playing a long-term agenda and not engage in Campus style grandstanding for grandstanding sake, where the Power is a often limp college admin, and not an electorate).
Boob bait for the core supporters is hardly an Biden innovation. The same may be true about Trump's action though there is more substance there. The 14A was not about immigrants but about freedmen (though there was some discussion of immigrants in the ratification process). And the citizenship status of "Indians not taxed" was changed by the executive back in the Coolidge administration. My own mother was a subject of that change.
Maybe so, but I doubt anything will come of his order regarding birthright. I’m sure there would have been an attempted challenge by now if there were serious questions regarding its legitimacy.
Probably. One could wish for provisions to be clear. The Privledges and Immunities part of the 14A has been nullified by the courts sinc the late 1800s. I suppose this could be the Right's version of the Living Constitution after a century of the Left making stuff up. Wilson, at least, was explicit about what he was doing.
John is right: national politics is hopelessly broken. Kudos to him - too many experts still think we can just tinker with the system.
Polls show 85% of Americans across the spectrum agree with him.
So how can it be that we are stuck, that there’s nothing a citizen can do? We have a massive bipartisan majority for fundamental change. All that’s missing is consensus path forward - or at least a first step.
Fighting money in politics can be that consensus goal to rally Americans. Majorities north of 75% - regardless of party - see campaign finance as a major problem. It’s the single most undemocratic feature of our politics.
While the Supreme Court sharply limits our options, public financing of elections would survive judicial review.
Of the public financing mechanisms, the most impactful, easiest to implement, and easiest to sell politically is voter dollars (aka democracy dollars/vouchers). We just have to break through the noise, get the word out, and overcome people’s pessimism.
Yes the system is broken, but it’s way too early to give up.
www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
So what do you do about "independent" committees? Repeal the 1A? The only way to get big money out of politics is to reduce the range of issues that government deals with.
Thanks for commenting, Richard, and you make a good point: thanks to SCOTUS we can’t limit anyone’s political spending, because the Court says money = protected free speech.
So the only way forward is to give every voter the chance to speak, with campaign cash of their own to donate. That adds to the amount of political “speech,” so it would be hard for the Court to invalidate it on 1st Amendment grounds.
You say if the government does less there will be less opportunity to corrupt it with campaign donations. But unless you want to abolish the government altogether, the problem remains.
If we have to have a government, we the people must be in charge of it - instead of big ticket donors who disenfranchise us.
Thanks again for a thoughtful response.
I don't deny that huge sums of money for campaigning are a factor in influencing people's votes, but people still get only one vote each per candidate and are not being directly bribed to cast it in a particular way. I think that they need to demonstrate a willingness to vote for centrist candidates regardless of party affiliation when they have a chance to do so, and that going to ranked choice voting or approval voting would give them more chances.
Thanks for your response, Carlton, but here’s the problem: as long as both parties are in hock to donors, we face only bad choices when we vote.
Polls show that most Americans are pretty centrist on policy. If we support extremist candidates, it’s probably out of frustration with the system and hope that an extremist might “shake things up” (a phrase I hear from voters every day).
We the people are not at fault. The parties and the system have failed us.
When criminality is forgiven in the name of political expediency it's a slippery slope. What began with mayors and governors allowing lawlessness expanded to non governmental organisations providing instant bail and legal fees, and then politicians themselves bragging about contributing money. The huge prosecutions and investigations post Jan 6, and the prosecution of Trump that included some things justifiable and other things trivial.
The Biden administration seems to have known a lot more about the politicization of justice than they let on as they saw fit to blanket pardons before people were even charged.
I would hope Trump avoids making the same mistakes. It looks like he has plenty to do other than witch hunts.
The comparison is a non-sequitur as the Jan-6 protestors are powerless American citizens and all that Joe Biden pardoned are political power brokers or connected to power.
The failure to discern this difference is possibly the primary reason that the Democrats lost this election and will continue to lose.
Democrats have lied that they are all part of a victim class or otherwise virtue-signaling advocates of the victim class. But what they are is the power Regime with a track record of decisions and behaviors that only benefit the power Regime and not the people.
The ‘sequitur’, as it were, is that both Trump and Biden’s pardons are assaults on liberal democratic institutions. Erecting legal protections for those committing violence on behalf of keeping you in power (as Trump did) is classic authoritarian behavior—it’s how Mao got his Red Guards, and how Mussolini got his brown shirts. So is granting legal immunity to political insiders and your own family members. (as Biden did). Both erode the foundations of the rule of law, and create perverse incentives—particularly in terms of legitimating criminal behavior so long as it either furthers the end of keeping the head of state in power, or originates within the head of state’s family or circle of political influence.
Well, I can give Biden a partial pass as excepting his goofy and frankly somewhat pathetic demarche on the Amendment (pathetic not as subject matter in itself on which I am neutral, pathetic as futile and empty gesture that obviously won't win anything legally real), his actions are more reactive. Not going to applaud them as such as certain of the Lefty Left are doing, but as reactive, they don't rise to the same level of toxicity of the Trump lawlessness.
and oh man Trump is in his first days reminding me of why I voted against him every time even when I actively disliked both Clinton and Biden. PT Barnum Show.
Right Falous. Biden gets a pass, because....Trump.
Read WaPo/Ruth Marcus for your validation: Biden’s Pardons Were Disappointing. Trump's Are a Travesty
There is nothing disgraceful or reckless about Biden's having proactively pardoned the members of the January 6 committee, who Trump has repeatedly identified as targets of political retribution. It was both prudent and necessary.
The rhetorical trick of calling them "politicians" to make them seem less than is beneath the dignity of this publication. It's telling that this piece did not even attempt to demonstrate the moral equivalence of Biden's pardons and Trump's pardon of the January 6 convicts, even the violent ones, because there is none.
As for the accusation that Biden's pardons of the January 6 panelists breached his pledge to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, please cite your legal authorities. For better or worse, the Founding Fathers placed no limits on the president's power to pardon. Disliking that doesn't change matters.
He lied to Americans about a nonexistent 28th Amendment. It’s not the law of the land and the president has nothing to do with the amendment process anyway. That’s not preserving or protecting the Constitution. It’s propaganda and he knows it too since he did it at the last minute after a bunch of activists pressed him and he didn’t even bother to force the issue.
You have to understand that the road to authoritarianism is paved in dialectics.
Biden issuing a preemptive pardon to the January 6 panelists, even if done to protect them, now opens the door for Trump (or some other right-wing authoritarian) to issue preemptive pardons to allies--whether it's financiers, attack dogs, or some other species--that will make them functionally unrestrained by the law. Now Kash Patel can break every rule of due process and not worry about the consequences, because Trump has a precedent to preemptively pardon him for doing so--in essence, the pardons that were supposed to protect his victims have now made them *more* vulnerable.
Biden once understood this on other issues--he wisely cited it as the reason for not following the radical 'pack the court' strategy many on his leftmost flank urged him to not that long ago. He knew that once he packed the court with his judges, some GOP successor down the line would do the same, and the court would in effect be destroyed, bit by bit. It's both sad and infuriating that he couldn't show similar restraint here.
Ah yes, the shoe is on the other foot now and it pinches.
There was always the possibility of Trump pardons for Jan 6. But would he have taken that step to blanket pardon all if Biden had not issued all of the pardons he did, along with other actions during his remaining time in office? That is no excuse and I can think of many other responses Trump could have made. However disgraceful, there is an unfortunate logical path for how all of this has played out. Otherwise, I think your advice is good for life in general!
Nope. False equivalent bs. Biden was protecting his family and others from retribution by Trump and MAGA scum. Trump pardoned murderers of cops. Even the Police Union that endorsed Trump is pissed off. Guess what Maga scum? FAFO losers.
It is very difficult to pass a constitutional amendment. I would argue that the extremely high bar for amendments is one of the drafters' worst mistake. Perhaps, though, there should be limits placed in the pardoning power. Given that both parties have been burned on that, maybe a compromise could be reached.
Or you could just declare it so. "President Joe Biden on Friday declared that the Equal Rights Amendment is the law of the land, attempting to ratify a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in a last-ditch effort to protect women’s reproductive rights."
When network news budgets rely so heavily for ratings on the antics of the Joe Bidens and Donald Trumps, and today's lame press obliges with 24/7 coverage, they empower what is rapidly becoming an imperial, authoritarian executive branch and a vastly diminished legislative and judicial branches.
So much for checks and balances and constitutional order.
There are still enough sources of news that a discerning person is capable of cutting through the bias of the left and right in figuring out where individual politicians and parties stand on issues. The Liberal Patriot is one source of centrist political commentary. The Michael Smerconish show on CNN, the No Labels organization, and the Forward Party are others.
I lay the blame for the general lack of centrist choices on the dominance of the two major political parties by a relatively small number of activist extremists. Trump's election (hardly by a "landslide") was largely a backlash to the extreme leftist policies of the Biden Administration, as endorsed by the Queen of Woke, whom the Democrat elite nominated to continue those policies.
Welcome to the party, Mr. Halpin. Watching the Al Braggs of the world, watching swat teams arouse pro-lifers from bed, thumbing the nose at the Supreme Court (student loan giveaways to 1 percenters), pardoning a crackhead son, this was all ok. But once Trump gets elected, then this suddenly becomes a problem?
Both sides have a lot to answer for, but I never heard a peep out of anyone in the Democrat party when all Biden's antics were going on.
We wrote a whole piece on Bragg and have criticized Democrats for our entire four years of posts. https://open.substack.com/pub/theliberalpatriot/p/braggs-indictment-of-trump-is-nothing?r=7e8tb&utm_medium=ios
The criticism of Bragg in that article seems to be that his torturous bending of the law might help rather than hurt Trump. Very mild, weak observation that it might be bad for the country.
Can you name anyone in the Dem party who rose up to condemn Biden thumbing his nose at the Supreme Court for student loans or the eviction moratorium? Why be surprised that Republicans are going to play by the same set of new rules (re Tik-Tok).
The whole thing makes me sick, because I can see each incoming president preemptively pardoning everyone who crosses his path.
This will not end well.
Manchin, Tester, Sinema, Golden, and Gluesenkamp Perez voted with Rs to repeal Biden’s student loan plan.