pardons every criminal in the US…what would happen? Don’t worry so much about the massive population increase/jobs/food/housing/etc I am more curious about politically. Would that be enough to declare him “unfit” and remove him? Could the order be blocked?
Why is this in GQ? Hypotheticals belong in IMHO.
IMHO, of course.
Something like this has never happened and there is no factual answer because there is no precedent.
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Congress decides what exactly the “high crimes and misdeameanors” are in the impeachment and trial of a president.
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Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution: “The President shall. . . have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” A president could only pardon people of federal crimes.
Something as far-fetched as this can’t be answered factually. Off to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Can the order be blocked ?
Far fetched as the scenario may be, it is certainly possible. You do this intriguing and excellent question a great disservice by suggesting that there are no coherent and instructive arguments as to how the country may react to such a dilemna.
The question calls for more than mere opinions. It calls for serious argument as to how to deal with a possible constitutional crisis.
It should be in Great Debates.
For federal prisoners, no. The president’s power to pardon is constitutional, nonrevokable, unappealable, and absolute.
First, let’s note the exact number of prisoners who could be released. The President can only free federal prisoners, not state ones. The number of federal prisoners as of 12/31/09 was 208,118, while the number of state prisoners was 1,405,538:
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/py09ac.pdf
The U.S. population was 309,162,581 in the 2010 census, which was taken on 04/01/10:
So the freed prisoners would be less than .07% of the population. Even if such an absurdly improbable thing could occur, a lot of the federal prisoners aren’t American citizens and would be promptly deported, so the number that would walking around would be significantly less.
Can the supreme court issue a stay on a presidential pardon if the president is subsequently impeached ?
Wasn’t there a governor a few years ago who granted an inordinate number of pardons? It was much talked about at the time, but I can’t remember who it was and Google isn’t helping. Anyway, if the pardon-granting orgy happened in the final days of his administration an impeachment would be moot.
If you mean impeached, sure. Congress can theoretically impeach him for any reason they choose. If you mean psychologically unfit, probably not; in this scenario he’s just freeing prisoners, not invading Canada because his dog told him it’s secretly controlled by Martians.
I remember now - it was Huckabee - but the pardons weren’t all at once, there were about 1000 of them.
Carter’s pardon of the Vietnam draft dodgers was a mass pardon of a large group of people. So I’d say there’s enough precedent.
As others have said, a President can theoretically be impeached for almost any grounds. But I think the Senate would have a hard time on this - Obama would only be using a power that the Constitution clearly gives him.
I don’t think the Senate would have a hard time impeaching Obama at all, he’d instantly become the most unpopular President in American history. Remember Willie Horton? There’s 50,000+ Willie Hortons in Federal prisons. This would also get people like Bernard Madoff, Unabomber, and various other super-notorious persons out of prison.
Basically it would be an act so universally condemned and so universally inexplicable that I think it highly likely a vast majority in both houses of congress would consider Obama unfit for office. That is all it takes for them to remove him, impeachment is a political process with some legal trappings–however in the end it is just a vote like any other. With the sort of reaction such a mass pardon would bring, Obama would be out of office within a few weeks.
Most likely the vast majority of the people who are being held in Federal prisons could be handled in the following ways:
- Deportation (lot of foreign drug smugglers and such in Federal pen)
- Arrest by state authorities (it’s rare a person commits a Federal crime and there isn’t some state offense under which they could be prosecuted)
- Civil commitment to psychiatric facilities
But yeah, once Obama issued the pardons I don’t believe there is any constitutional remedy on that regard. The pardons would still be valid, but we’d have other ways of containing them.
There’s no reason why the President’s pardon would have to be carried out. He is not going to physically travel to each prison, subdue the guards, then let all the prisoners go free all by himself; someone has to actually carry out those pardons. If the President were to unilaterally decide to pardon all federal prisoners, the order would likely not be taken seriously by anyone else and it would be difficult to even get it out of the White House. If he were to create an official document authorizing the pardon without any other member of the staff realizing its contents, call a press conference ostensibly for some other purpose, and announce what he was doing, I still don’t think anyone would follow those orders. There’s loyalty to one’s superiors, but there’s at least in general some inkling of why that superior wants it to be done. If it’s a very specific pardon you might rationalize it as being about something you know nothing about, but a general pardon is quite clearly the product of a deranged mind. If he were to try to pardon people individually, he probably wouldn’t get very far (more than 1? even 1?) until people started seriously questioning what was going on.
The President may be in theory the leader of the executive branch and command personal loyalty from his immediate staff, but I suspect very very few people would follow an order as ludicrous as the one suggested.
There’s a very good reason. He’s the President and is exercizing a constitutionally allowed power. Political fallout aside, he has the right to do it, and if anyone stops him, they’re the ones acting in violation of the law.
I agree with glowacks that officials across the board would be loathe to execute the pardons. I don’t doubt they would try to hold up the release of the inmates or outright block them.
What would of course happen is a massive series of lawsuits, because the inmates would be suing to be released. It would go to the SCOTUS and based on my understanding of the pardon power (which has been affirmed in court cases as being essentially absolute aside from cases of impeachment, and not subject to review or restriction or limitation) the SCOTUS would have to find in favor of the pardon being valid. After that the inmates would have to be released in whatever time frame is typical for a pardon (although considering the large number involved there might be a bit longer administrative / technical lag time in actually processing it–even when you’re pardoned they don’t just open the door and let you out, there are a plethora of forms and such that have to go through the system.)
Now, is it possible the SCOTUS, desiring to not have 200,000+ Federal inmates released en masse, would issue some convoluted ruling that invalidated the pardons? Maybe, it wouldn’t be the first time the SCOTUS invented constitutional principles or legislated from the bench. However speculating about something like that is of course just idle speculation.
Is this all part of Obama’s scheme to break The Batman?
Part of the ridiculousness of this hypothetical situation is that Obama hasn’t pardoned a single person since taking office.
Well, Congress and the state legislatures could pass a Constitutional amendment that retro-actively revokes the pardons (hopefully including a clause noting this is a one-time exception to the no ex post facto laws rule.)
My own knowledge of the US Constitution albeit limited says that legally no.
Practically, as noted, Apex Courts have a lot of power in interpreting the law, no matter how convulted it is. They can theoretically say that the 27th Amendment to the US Constitution requires the President to sing “dancing queen” every morning in the White House Lawn while dressed in drag and well thats the law of the land (until they are impeached en banc by Congress anyway). In this scenario I suppose that they could rule that the President was no longer in control of his faculties and thus the pardons were never issued.