StarfishSaver
StarfishSaver's JournalA president CAN pardon people who are involved in crimes that lead to his impeachment
There is a mistaken assumption, on this board and elsewhere on the internet, that a president's pardon power doesn't extend to the ability to pardon people for crimes related to activity for which he is being or has been impeached. That's a misreading of the Constitution.
The only connection between impeachment and pardons is that a president cannot pardon an impeachment - - i.e., he can't wipe away an impeachment the way he can wipe away a federal felony. But otherwise, there is no limitation on his ability to pardon an individual for specific crimes committed in connection with any act related to his or anyone else's impeachment.
This is not speculation and it's not a matter of "unsettled law." It's an undisputed and undisputable fact.
Here's an interesting analysis of the presidential pardon power:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/01/17/presidential-pardons-settled-law-unsettled-issues-and-a-downside-for-trump/
Anyone who still believes in white supremacy needs to watch the New Yorker video of the insurrection
You will immediately be disabused of that notion.
WaPo: The NSA is 'moving forward' to install GOP operative as career general counsel
But I don't think they can get away with this.
Not only is this, as previous reports have noted, so obviously "irregular," that Biden should be able to undo it, but there's another catch. If he's going in as a Senior Executive Service level civil servant, Which I believe he is, he's on probation for some time and can be fired at any time. And on top of that, even after his probationary period, The administration is free to move him about and transfer him wherever they want. If they can't fire him, they can put him on janitor duty in East Podunk.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/the-nsa-is-moving-forward-to-install-michael-ellis-a-former-gop-operative-as-its-top-lawyer-the-agency-said-sunday/2021/01/17/b8430e8c-58e2-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_story.html
Awww, shish is about to get real now
https://twitter.com/GarrettHaake/status/1350121922370166784"An insurrection of upper-middle class white people...ready to die for the cause of white privilege"
They flew from their affluent suburbs to the U.S. Capitol, ready to die for the cause of white privilege
The stunning pro-President-Trump insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol less than a week ago must have been a carnival for one’s olfactory bulb, as the stinging aroma of tear gas blended with the pungent odors of the occasional joint, or maybe the piles of dung that some of the cruder mob members left in the hallways once graced by icons like Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and LBJ. The only thing that wasn’t in the air on Wednesday was the smell of what so many have falsely tied to Trump’s authoritarian movement — any whiff of “economic anxiety.”
When fascism finally came to America in the form of an attempted coup to halt our presidential election, it came from lush-green suburbs all across this land, flying business class on Delta or United and staying in four-star hotels with three-martini lobby bars — the better to keep warm after a long day of taking selfies with friendly cops or pummeling the unfriendly ones, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and generally standing athwart democracy yelling “Halt!”
...
Yes, many of the 74 million citizens who voted for the guy who then incited an attempted coup do fit the stereotype of struggling or laid-off blue-collar worker in a rusted-out rural community. But those folks aren’t the ones who can take a Wednesday off and fly hundreds of miles, let alone plunk down hundreds of dollars, to get to the nation’s hub. While the Capitol mob was bulked up with other Trumpists — including an alarming number of off-duty police officers, as well as some neo-Nazi or KKK types who’ve been around forever — it was the 401(k) crowd that formed the front line of America’s first real putsch.
If that surprises you, then you weren’t really paying attention. For the last four years, political scientists have been trying to wrap their brains around Trump’s shocking 2016 victory in the Electoral College while trying to tell us that the 45th president’s true base is a lot of things — but it’s not poor. In fact, polling guru Nate Silver noted during 2016?s primaries that the average Trump voter had a median household income of $72,000, which was both higher than the national average and also higher than the numbers that year for supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
...
The main reason that so many reasonably well-off folks tried to shut down American democracy wasn’t because they feared losing their paycheck, but because they feared losing their white privilege. Donald Trump had promised that “I alone can fix it” — that he’d protect them from a society where Black and brown essential workers could expect help from their government during a pandemic or ask the police to stop killing them, a world that where just being white no longer guaranteed the status they were promised as kids. They truly believed that Biden, Kamala Harris, and the 82 million were going to end their white power, and they saw Jan. 6 as their last chance to save it. The Capitol still stands, but the rest of us are going to be spending decades cleaning up their mess.
https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/capitol-breach-trump-insurrection-impeachment-white-privilege-20210112.html
I'm hoping we're done with the "We need to reach out to the Trump voters"
Anyone who is still a Trump voter after last week doesn't need to be anywhere near us. Period.
Thank you for your attention. You may now go back to what you were doing.
Thank you, Tom Perez
I know some people love to hate you. But you did good.
https://twitter.com/DavidPepper/status/1349901580921933824
Before jumping to conclusions and criticizing the Capitol Police for not shooting into the mob ...
please consider that there are very good reasons they didn't engage in a shoot-em-up. First, it wouldn't have been effective. And, more important, it would have resulted in even worse disaster. In mob situations like this, where they were in virtual hand-to-hand combat, trying to shoot into the crowds would have been the worst things they can do.
I'm reposting this comment I wrote in another thread about the videos we've seen of the lead up to Ashli Babbitt being shot:
If you watch the video from different angles, the officers were blocking the door as officers on the inside were moving Members of Congress from the chamber to safety. They couldn't shoot because drawing a weapon in a close confrontation with a mob like that where the officers are so outnumbered would only have resulted in the gun being taken away and probably used to shoot the officers before they could even use it. All they could do at that point was try to shield the door with their bodies, even if that would only slow them down.
Then, partway through, you see that tactical officers arrived and one of them drew a high powered weapon from behind pillar and aimed it at the rioters. At that point, the officers on the door slowly moved out of the way. They were no longer needed to hold the door because there was firepower on the other side and they needed to get out of the way so the tactical officers had a clear shot. And the minute one of the rioters breached the door by climbing through the window, she was taken out. And because the shots came from far away and the officers firing couldn't easily be overtaken and disarmed by the rioters, the rioters stopped surging and backed off.
I know it looked bad and I also initially thought those officers were derelict or complicit. But several friends in law enforcement and Secret Service explained to me that this was actually textbook and those officers at the door did exactly what they were supposed to do, did it perfectly and likely saved who knows how many lives by doing it that way.
That doesn't mean that other officers weren't complicit. But that wasn't the case here.
The same thing goes for other situations we've seen in which police focused on containing, pushing and corralling the mobs, leading people to ask, "Why didn't they just shoot them?" There are good reasons they didn't do that. The Capitol Police leadership really let their troops down. But most of the officers performed admirably and heroically and did a a hell of a job protecting the Capitol. They deserve our thanks, not criticism - especially if we don't understand the practices and procedures they were employing.
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Member since: Mon Apr 22, 2019, 03:26 PMNumber of posts: 18,486
