Just Maybe: We Should Probably Get Rid Of Pardons

I’m not 100% convinced on this yet.

But, really, we should probably get rid of the executive pardon power.

It can be a good thing, certainly.

Presidents and governors have used it to, retroactively, right wrongs caused by other parts of the legal system.

Usually they’ve waited till it’s too late to do any actual good, and so the positive uses of it have largely been symbolic; but that can be nice too?

But mostly, it just gets abused.

Trump, damn his name, used it to free his supporters from his first coup attempt; he’s also used it to free a bunch of his fellow con-men and grifters.

And Governor Polis is said to be considering using it to suck up to Trump, damn his name by freeing Tina Peters after she was convicted for her attempts to support the coup as well.

Every President has abused it to benefit their supporters, too. Wikipedia does not appear to have exactly that list, but this search will find a lot of them for you.

The executive pardon power is basically made for abuse.

And I can’t really think of any single thing we could do to secure it from being abused that way.

The only effective solution I can think of would be:

implement the “Shadow Government” suggestion
split the power between the President and Shadow President

This way, pardons could only be issued if the President and Shadow President agreed on them which, since they would come from different parties and have different political philosophies, would mean that almost no pardons would ever be issued.

It would, in essence, eliminate pardons without removing the power.

This is probably a distinction without a difference.

But it’s probably not possible to significantly reduce abuse of the pardon power without either making pardons so unlikely as to very rarely happen or eliminating the power completely.

I’m open to other approaches on this, but I haven’t thought of anything else that would work.