A coalition of right-wing organizations and activists is lobbying the White House to grant mass pardons to junior staffers in the administration. “A pardon for all junior administration personnel is viewed as unlikely,” one source told the Washington Sun, “but the president could issue blanket pardons for all employees involved in particular policy areas, such as deportations, war or trade.”
Oh, just war, deportations and trade? Is that all?
There’s a raging debate within the Democratic Party, mostly beneath the surface, about whether President Trump should be impeached for a third time. It’s relevant because the Democrats are almost guaranteed to win back the House, and therefore the power to impeach.
But the debate isn’t over whether Trump has done anything impeachable. That question is settled: Of course he has. Democrats are debating whether it would be politically wise to stir up all the drama only to inevitably fail at securing the two-thirds vote requirement for conviction in the Senate. Spending the next two years on a failed impeachment wouldn’t fulfill their promises to deal with “affordability” and the like.
I don’t really care about the politics one way or another. But if Democrats decide to go down that path, Trump’s abuse of the pardon power would be a good place to start.
There’s ample evidence that various figures have outright bought pardons, or received them in trade for political services rendered. If you don’t think that’s impeachable, take it up with James Madison, who insisted that a president handing out pardons in exchange for nefarious activity done on his behalf would be impeachable. You know, like sitting back as the Capitol is ransacked after your efforts to steal an election fail. Then again, Trump was already impeached for that, and the Senate refused to convict him.
And that’s the problem. Hyperpartisanship has nullified the impeachment power. If Jan. 6 wasn’t enough, what’s the point of trying again?
There are only two relevant replies to that question: If impeachment is in the political interests of the opposition party, and if it’s the right thing to do whether or not it’s in their interest.
I can come up with several more candidates for reasons to impeach Trump because it’s the right thing to do. Whether it would be in the political interest of the Democrats is a much tougher question to answer. It depends in part on the specific abuses and on the evidence. But it’s not obvious to me that any evidence would be compelling enough to get roughly half the GOP Senate caucus to convict, and that’s assuming the Senate would even take up the impeachment in the first place. That would depend on whether Democrats take the Senate.
Some argue that merely impeaching the president without conviction is good enough, because that alone is a form of censure. Maybe, but would putting the country through a failed exercise redound to the political benefit of the Democrats? I don’t know and neither does anyone else.
But I do think there is something Democrats could do that would be both beneficial for them and for the country: Start serious hearings on legislative measures, and even constitutional amendments, that would make it more difficult for future presidents to exploit the baleful precedents being set by this one.
For starters, we must amend the pardon power. As I have argued before, so long as impeachment isn’t a viable option, the pardon power is too distorting of the constitutional order for a president to wield unilaterally. A simple Senate veto of all presidential pardons would be a sufficient check.
Also, we need legislation that puts criminal penalties or other safeguards on the withholding or distribution of federal money — like disaster relief — for political purposes. Democrat-controlled states are twice as likely to have their FEMA requests denied as are Republican ones. On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly vowed to punish states that don’t elect Republicans. “If we don’t win, there’s no money; if we do win, you’re getting it,” he said at a North Carolina rally. And of course there’s that offer of a $5,000 bribe to every American for a Republican victory.
Again, the founders would have considered this abuse of the public trust to be impeachable. But the least Congress can do is make this sort of thing more difficult. Holding hearings that use the manifest evidence of Trump’s misfeasance and malfeasance would have a similar teaching effect as impeachment. It might also attract GOP support for two reasons. First, many Republicans are rightly terrified of a future Democrat borrowing from Trump’s playbook. Second, because even though they are equally terrified of saying so publicly, they are appalled by what Trump is doing.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
