But don’t you remember, BrainGlutton, that this is exactly what Dubya promised?
''If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if that person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of."
– George W. Bush, October 2003
Except for the headline, the above is the entire text of Steve Young’s column at
But either way, it might backfire! Anything the Democrats do might backfire! After all, practically everything the Bush Admin. has done has backfired!
Or just give Congress the power to overide presidential pardons by a 2/3 bote in each chamber and within a certain time limit like 3-6 months.
Summertime, and the living’s easy.
Congress doesn’t have the votes or balls to do anything about Iraq.
Immigration reform is a non-starter.
You’ll be able to buy beach front property in Lincoln, NE before Congress gets around to addressing climate change in any meaningful way.
No Supreme Court nominees to haggle over.
They’re stuck in Washington in July with nothing to do. Might as well make some political hay while the sunshines.
This isn’t necessarily a bad idea. I think the reason we haven’t gone that route is because the pardon/reprieve authority of the President has always been viewed as a “last, emergency resort” when someone has possibly gone through all the institutional channels available and is still being wronged. There are of course several cases of persons being pardoned by Governors who failed to get their appeals through the court system, people who were most probably innocent (or at the very least shouldn’t have been found guilty.) The question is, if you put in a Board of Pardons and Reprieves how different is it from the same institutional authorities that will presumably already have been exhausted by the time someone is pardoned or granted a commuted sentence?
Aside from being viewed as an exceptional last resort, I think it’s also viewed as an actual policy tool. Many would argue that Carter’s blanket amnesty for draft dodgers, or Madison and Lincoln’s pardons for deserters all served an important purpose–and those pardons most certainly wouldn’t have been approved by a standard pardon/reprieve board.
Which one?
Fred Thompson was Marie Ragghianti’s attorney - she was the chairwoman of the Tennessee Parole Board who was fired under suspicious circumstances. Thompson proved in court that she was fired because she refused to release prisoners who had bribed aides of Governor Ray Blanton. She was reinstated with back pay, and the resulting scandal drove Blanton from office.
Blanton even tried to push through bad pardons while a lame duck, causing outraged politicians from both parties to support the early swearing-in of his successor. Tennessee law at the time permitted this, and the State Police secured the Capitol Complex to prevent Blanton’s entrance to any offices there.
I would say that reflects well on Thompson’s civic conscience – if he had not served as a mole for Nixon.
Be that as it may, the fact is that Hillary Clinton has been slammed by several commentators in the past few days for speaking out on the Libby commutation matter - and a lot of these critics are not her usual ones in the conservative camp.
[shrug] When the pot calls the kettle black . . . the kettle is black.
At the state level, Massachusetts is once again well ahead of the rest of the country on that. The elected Governor’s Council does just that, along with judicial nominations. It’s no guarantee of Good Government, though - they had a pardon-selling scandal in the 70’s that at one point would have allowed the Council to reach a quorum in prison.
Very little chance of that. The case went through a full trial. The only way I could see a case being made for obstruction would be if there was clear evidence of a prior agreement with Libby that he would be pardoned in exchange for what he said in court.
This dog won’t hunt (except among the crowd who believes Bill and Hillary are Satan reborn). Unlike Libby, none of the people mentioned who were pardoned by Clinton were convicted of crimes allegedly perpetrated on Clinton’s behalf. And Clinton was never foolish enough to publically promise to punish anyone he later planned on pardoning or commuting.
Wasn’t mentioned in the article, but Susan McDougal and Christopher Wade were granted pardons, and both of them were ass-deep in the Whitewater scandal.
I doubt there’s enough votes to convict. At least not now. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt to let the House set up a special committee to determine whether impeachment is warranted.
It would be much, much harder for the Bush Whitehouse to stonewall subpeonas that are pursuant to an impeachment investigation with “Executive Privilege.”
A few weeks of hearings on the countless nasty things that this administration has done (the stuff that’s gone public is horrific enough, I shudder to think what misdeeds they’ve still managed to keep under wraps) and the public might, just might, get behind impeachment.
I absolutely nothing wrong with the House trying to build a case for impeachment. If they can’t dig up any dirt that will sufficiently outrage the public, they can just let it die in committee.
It’s a longshot, but it’s not impossible. We’ll never know unless we try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
News Breaking Hijack
You will be vastly underwhelmed to learn - if you haven’t already noticed - that your namesake (Mr. Moto) made it in yesterday’s NY Times crossword puzzle.
Also, MacDougal’s only crime, IIRC, was not telling Ken Starr what he wanted to hear, so she was being subjected to the pre-Bush Administration equivalent of torture by Starr. Very mild stuff compared to the real thing, but that was obviously what Starr was up to. Pardoning MacDougal was the right thing to do, ethically and morally speaking.
It turns up a lot these days.
All that shows is that Clinton was too cowardly to take the political heat and pardon them before he was walking out of the door of the WH. There was nothing magical about the date he pardoned them other than it was his last as president.