Living through the Trump era is reminiscent in some ways of living through the Nixon/Watergate era. In both cases, we see problems exposed that need to be addressed. Except in the case of Watergate, it seems that people were serious about addressing the issues that have been exposed, whereas now all the focus is on bringing the presidential criminal to justice without making much use of what Trump’s crimes have exposed about necessary reforms.
After Watergate, a great many changes were made — re the autonomy of the Justice Department, for example, and reforms regarding the CIA.
What do we have this time around?
It’s true that there’s been talk about changing the Electoral College Act (or whatever it is called) so there will be no chance of ambiguity about what the Vice President can and cannot do. But there wasn’t all that much ambiguity anyway, as Pence found out when he consulted Judge Michael Luttig and former Vice President Dan Quayle.
Meanwhile, I’ve been surprised not to have heard talk about what kind of reforms are needed in view of the corrupt way that Trump used the Pardon Power.
Never before had any President used the Pardon Power as Trump did, again and again: almost without exception, to advance the interests of himself and his allies like Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona. And then, eventually, Trump acted like a Mafia Crime Boss using the Pardon Power to reward his own accomplices in crime — like Stone and Manafort — for keeping their mouths shut about the Boss, rather than testifying against him, having kept protected the Boss by not testifying against him.
(And Trump is even being out front, now, with his impulse to pardon all those people sent behind bars over their Insurrection to overturn the 2020 Election. A criminal President threatening again to use the Presidential Pardon Power to free his accomplices in Crime.)
How many times, during Trump’s presidency, have we heard commentators — watching Trump abuse that Pardon Power— tell us that this is the one power that the Constitution grants the President with now other branch of government having anay check or balance?
So it is no secret that Trump has revealed a defect in our system, for it can hardly be OK for the President — the chief executive who takes an oath to see that the laws are faithfully executed — to use that power to defeat the Rule of Law.
Before Trump, I would bet, no one even imagined a President acting in this way. But of all the blatant ways that Trump’s conduct has been unprecedented among American Presidents, this is one of the most blatant, making clear the need to beef up our legal and constitutional guardrails.
When Nixon’s Watergate scandals exposed defects, the system spent a couple of years making changes to address them. Why isn’t the system — apparently — working on this problem of the President’s wholly unchecked pardon power?