Daily Herald opinion: Promises on Jan. 6 cases further expose need for limits on presidential pardon powers
This editorial is a consensus opinion of the Daily Herald Editorial Board.
Playing out for us in real time in the Republican primary campaign for U.S. president is a narrative that is hard to imagine the nation's Founders could ever have foreseen.
Two leaders for their party's nomination are all but promising pardons for some, if not all, individuals convicted of felonies for their actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
We have been arguing for many years for stronger limits on the nearly unlimited pardon powers allotted to the president in the Constitution. The provision has made for, among other embarrassments, a routine spectacle in which outgoing presidents produce a litany of often controversial pardons that would have dire political consequences if the pardoner weren't already leaving office. The practice makes a mockery of our justice system and exposes a degree of personal influence over all the institutions of government that the Founders would never have supported - and that we today certainly should oppose.
This, as the practice stakes out a prominent place in the vernacular of campaign politics.
At his CNN town hall appearance earlier this month, former President Donald Trump promised that if he is elected, he will pardon nearly all the more than 600, and counting, participants in the Jan. 6 effort to stop the counting of electoral ballots from the November 2020 presidential election.
Not to be outdone, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, fresh from an announcement of his own candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, promised that he will begin considering pardons "on Day 1" of his administration.
Set aside for a moment the circumstance central to all of the legal cases stemming from the Jan. 6 riot - the storming of the seat of government in an effort to disrupt an official act. That notion alone finds two presidential candidates all but unilaterally dismissing, on purely political grounds, countless hours of investigation and trial before carefully selected neutral jurors in settings mirroring those of thousands of trials conducted across the country every day.
The word "weaponization" has become a favorite among people who don't like the results of the 2020 presidential election, and DeSantis raised it in his explanation.
"I would say any example of disfavored treatment based on politics or weaponization would be included in that review, no matter how small or how big," he added.
Never mind, of course, that there is a fitting place for the word "weaponized" any time a political decision overrules the judgment of a strictly monitored and strictly governed court of law.
And so, we find two leading political candidates shouldering their way to the front of a certain political line that translates to votes from people who are willing to sell their political allegiance, their vote, to the candidate most likely to share their view of an event, rather than the view of a duly constituted jury.
It takes little imagination to see how such political opportunism could be turned to advantage by any candidate from any party, and those who rush to applaud candidates vowing to release convicted rioters from accountability should be careful what they wish for.
The dueling promises of Jan. 6 pardons are not forecasts of justice to come. They are examples in real time of presidential pardon powers that are too broad and need to be curtailed before they become an even more overt source of abuse.