cab67
cab67's JournalWe should call "it just sends it to the states" what it is -
An attempt by (mostly) men who helped put these ignorant Federalist Society knobs to absolve themselves from their own responsibility for having caused millions of women to lose a big part of their health care.
It’s like a prosecutor blaming the jury for a wrongful conviction based on the prosecutor’s misconduct. “I didn’t convict that person - the jury did. All I did was present my case.”
“I didn’t ban abortion. Your state’s legislature did that. All I did was vote for the senators and presidents who stacked the Supreme Court with the foolish, dishonest ideologues who allowed your state legislature to do so. See? Not my fault.”
Do you know who's utimately responsible for our current situation?
Gerald Ford.
Yup.
He pardoned Nixon. That opened the door for nearly every really serious scandal to hit the Executive Branch that came after his administration.
Iran-Contra? Invasion of Iraq? Worse than Watergate. Thousands died because of them. And neither might have happened had those in charge thought real consequences were a possibility. Rather than learn from the scorn Nixon faced after his resignation, they learned to hide their tracks better, and they learned that even if caught, they could blame underlings and knew no one would really hold them accountable because it would "divide the country."
As much as I loved Barack Obama as president, I will never forgive him for his decision to "look forward" and not hold the higher-ups in the Jr Administration accountable for the invasion of Iraq, for its grotesque mismanagement, and for decisions that allowed men and women in US uniform to torture people. He really dropped the ball on that.
But perhaps he listened to the faux historians who claimed Ford "healed the nation" by pardoning Nixon.
Ford did not heal the nation. He gave us a placebo. He didn't lance the boil; he merely put a smiley-face bandage on it. It festered. It went septic. It was fed by the self-sustaining bacterial feedback loop of right-wing talk radio, right-wing hyperpartisan Republicans, evangelicals, and the centrality that ignoring physical reality was taking among conservatives. Hundreds of thousands died in Nicaragua, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world because of this.
For extended periods, people in other countries could only shake their heads in disbelief as a country that gave the world so much - the Apollo landings, jazz, rock, the ice cream cone, the Jedi knight - elected people who gave every appearance of being illiterate to head its government. The disbelief I encountered while travelling abroad during the GWB administration became downright disdain when TFG came to office. Many expressed sympathy, but many more just stayed away from me, as though I carried something contagious from the red-hatters who simply would not see reality.
I don't know that the prosecution of Richard Nixon would have solved all of our problems, but I am nonetheless firm in my opinion that we would have avoided many of the scandals that brought dishonor to this country.
we need a constitutional amendment curtailing the presidential pardon
I highly doubt the framers of the constitution considered the possibility that someone might ask for a pre-emptive pardon, much less the possibility that we'd have such an appalling president who might actually consider issuing them.
Presidents should not be allowed to pardon members of their own families or their own administrations. Future presidents may be enabled to do this, but sitting presidents should be blocked from issuing pardons if there's any sort of conflict of interest.
That presidents shouldn't be allowed to pardon themselves should go without saying, but the fact that some Republicans were talking about it as if it might not only be possible, but a good idea, means we have to formalize it in the Constitution.
Presidents should also not be allowed to issue pardons if the crime would have benefitted the president's own administration or the president as an individual. Ford's pardon of Nixon was an abomination that gave the illusion of healing the nation while enabling future scandal-minded presidents to commit crimes with no accountability. It also benefitted Ford himself, as he was a member of the Nixon administration. Killing the process before it really got underway allowed Ford to minimize the the impact of Watergate during the 1976 election.
(In fact, I go back and forth in my head whether sitting presidents should even be allowed to pardon their immediate predecessor - or if they can, it should involve additional steps to make it harder. I have no problem with a president pardoning the person he or she replaced for a minor offense committed as a juvenile, but not something done to subvert democracy.)
Iran-Contra? The invasion of Iraq? Pretty much everything the hairy orange organism living on TFG's head tried to pull? All of which were, in my opinion, worse than Watergate? They might not have happened - or they'd have been much harder to pull off, anyway - if Nixon had been held accountable.
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