When You Take The Fact That Presidential Impeachment Is A Constitutional Myth And Add The Pardon Power And Put The Unitary Executive Into The Mix You Get Fascism

I WON'T GO INTO THE HISTORY of presidential pardons to compare many of those given by other presidents going back but will stick to fairly recent history because those, alone, prove that the brevity of the Constitutional granting of the power to do that by presidents is too dangerous to leave it unaddressed.  

Pretending that we're still living under the previous status quo is a delusional and dangerous and cowardly waste of time.  Everything changed with Trump v USA.  It is the Dred Scott decision of our time, one which we either destroy or it will destroy us. 

Trump's pardoning of his insurrectionists is of an entirely different character than the pardons issued by the first three presidents to insurrectionists AGAINST THEIR OWN ADMINISTRATIONS and not to keep them in power illegally and unconstitutionally.  I am unaware of anything like it in the history of the presidency,  except the blanket pardon issued to those who mounted the Confederacy and instigated the Civil War.  And even that one was arguably issued to those who fought against the administration of the president who issued it. 

Trump's pardons, the ones we have every reason to believe he was paid for - and which is remarkably little discussed in the press considering how much they made of Clinton's pardoning of only one, Marc Rich - and those who have committed crimes especially against minority groups, those who promote his own fascist rule, the ones I would bet he has or will soon issue to his own family members donors, campaign,  make the previously controversial and corrupt pardons issued under the Constitution's maddeningly stupid and dangerous blanket pardon powers by previous presidents look penny ante. 

Compared to those issued by Trump's fellow criminal president, Nixon, Nixon's look fairly normal.   The pardons of presidents after him have gone from controversial to blatantly corrupt and dangerous.  George H. W. Bush pardoning himself out of an investigation for his role in Iran Contra and other crimes he was up to his neck in should have forced the question of Constitutional amendments to prevent presidents from pardoning as part of a criminal conspiracy.  But typically, when it's a matter of protecting us from inadequate and dangerous passages in the Constitution, that was not done.  As mentioned before this morning, it is taboo.  The media and Republicans made much more about the alleged corruption of William Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich - after his wife gave a large contribution to his campaign - and the controversial though, I say, understandable and reluctant pardons issued by Joe Biden for his son and a myriad of others he knew would be subjected to the corrupt investigation and prosecution by Trump II's "justice" department and the Republican-fascists in Congress.   And I would certainly include at least extremely strict rules and the ability to challenge such pardons, certainly of those with a financial relationship with a president who issues a pardon.   

Though I agree with and approve of the pardoning of Hunter Biden by his father, of those members of the Justice Department and others who were certain to be the targets for persecution by the Trump II regime - they said they intended to imprison and destroy them - I think we need to revise the constitutional power of the pardon drastically as a matter of our own protection from the combination of corruption the Roberts Court cemented into place.   They have made it a tool of autocracy, of fascist rule as much as any rule in any country which fell to fascism in the past.  

How far it should go, I don't know.   As I said, I fully support Joe Biden granting a pardon to his son because of the use the Republican-fascists made of Hunter Biden.  I support him giving one to those who were the known targets of Republican-fascist intentions.   

But since the administrators of the law will overlook such distinctions in favor of putting unlike under the same category, the pardons Trump will give his crime family and his gang of criminals has to be prevented from becoming typical of America whenever a fascist AND I DO MEAN A REPUBLICAN is president and the Roberts unitary executive distortion of the Constitution remains in place.   

The corruption we have been brought to has been through the corruption of The People by lies in the media and appeals made to the worst in us by the same.   Though I would never overlook the character of The People at the time the Constitution was written and adopted, favoring or largely not opposed to the enslavement of Black People, the slaughter of Indians and stealing their land, the subjugation of Women,  various and sundry other bigotries and corruptions common enough to become the law in the various states,  I don't think they'd have tolerated the level of corruption that this just concluded election was a rebellion against.   And the worst of that was by design, from corrupt law faculties such as members of those at Harvard and the other Ivys,  that cooked up in stink tanks like The Heritage Foundation and corrupt lobbying efforts like The Federalist Society and Leonard Leo's other shell outfits.  Pretty much anything that billionaires and millionaires fund.   And the media, never, ever underestimate the role the free press has played in it.  And their appeal to the worst in us. 

We cannot avoid drastic Constitutional reform and the removal of the Supreme Court 's self-created power to nullify the reform to it.  Changing the pardon power is certainly one of the most obvious of the things that have to be changed largely on the basis of what corrupt presidents like Bush I and Trump have done with it.  It is as sure a means of corruption as the unitary executive and the fact that presidential impeachment and conviction of even the most blatantly criminal presidents will never happen. 

We can't go on like this.  We can't'.  No matter how nervous it makes some magazine scribblers when you talk about Constitutional change. 

The Idiocy Of Believing Lawyers Are The Only Ones Whose Opinions About The Law And, Especially The Constitution Count

 "ARE YOU A LAWYER?" is a question I get asked a lot, to which I say, obviously not because if I were the chances are enormously high that it would never even occur to me to ask the questions I do and find the answers about things like the Constitution and the law and the alleged form of our government.  Only I'd put it in terms of thank God I'm not one, for that and for other reasons. 

The pretense of a lot, though not all, scholars of such things as law and government is that the topics they study can rise above what their subject matter lends itself to being, lore.   And here I use the definition of "lore" as given by Merriam Webster

1 : a particular body of knowledge or tradition
the lore of baseball heroes [Most supreme Court reportage and theatrical representation fall into that category.]
2 : something that is learned:
a : traditional knowledge or belief
tribal lore [What an education in "the law" is. Only often not as helpful and far more dangerous. And never as honest.]
b: knowledge gained through study or experience
the lore of religious architecture

There is nothing about human made law which matches the laws of mathematics or physics or chemistry or the observable discoveries of biology.  

That is due to the vastly different character of what human laws and governments are.   Human laws, human governments are, 100%, human constructions, like the rules of a board game.  And they're not even like that other area of human scholarship, the history of humanity which studies what humans have done and made in the past,  the study of such subjects are far more like the study of human philosophies or ideologies.   As I said here the other day, among the subjects of history, many are things which can be established with a factuality that is as certain as anything that math or physics can establish.   There is nothing about the law that does that and, as the Supreme Court has shown with increasing frequency and dangerousness, there is nothing that inhibits judges with no authority above them to reign in their desired tendencies, to be honest about it.  The Supreme Court will trend to ever more dismiss evidence and facts to achieve their desired outcomes.   It is one of the idiocies of our law, that such arbitrary and frequently corrupt judges are called by exactly what they are not required to have anything to do with, "justice."   

If there is something that is clear after the likes of Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Goresuch, Kvanaugh, Coney Barret, Scalia, O'Connor, . . .  Taney, Story, Marshall, etc. going back to the first in that line of those in that office who produced outrageous injustice and assertions of constitutionality based in lies to achieve their desired results, we should abolish that lying title for the office they have held.  

There have been few lawyers to my knowledge who would make such observations or even look for the facts and conduct the analysis of those to support such a conclusion.  But observing the increasing disaster from the time of Nixon to the time of Trump II,  seeing the struggles from the Civil Rights struggles of my time, the great Civil Rights movement to overturn the work of the Waite, Fuller and later courts which abolished the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws passed and sighed after the Civil War and established the neo-slavery that Black People, other People of Color, the unaddressed injustice sagainst Women, workers, LGBTQ+ etc. have struggled against,  and looking for the legal and governmental sources AND SUPPORTS FOR that oppression,  the source of those lies most directly and absolutely with the Supreme Court, those "justices" who have most consistently, almost entirely, in favor of the wealthy, the oligarchic, the anti-democratic, the racist, misoyinistic,  the successors of the slavers who the idolized Marshall twisted and bent the law and claims of justice to support over those they enslaved.

The Congess and presidents have a mighty checkered history but since it is the laws to give justice that some Congresses,  House AND, more rarely Senates and some Presidents have created which have been overturned by the Taney Court, by the Waite and Fuller Courts, actions which the Roberts Court has gone farther than even the Taney Court in overturning,  you cannot claim that in general the Congress and even the presidency has been as uniformly opposed to equal justice under law as the lawyers of the Supreme Court have been.   The foolish habit of the lawyers, especially that dubiously respected specialty of "civil liberties" lawyering, to expect the Supreme Court to uphold equal justice under law may be largely due to them being kept in naive ignorance of the real history of that body - you would expect that, by now, they would have cottoned on to the motives and practices of it after the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts but they're still acting as if that most atypical of Courts, the one staffed by presidents FDR, Truman and Eisenhower, are still sitting there and the outcomes they desired the ones that will be most often handed down by those put on it by Bush I, Bush II and Trump.  

You would have thought the most obviously and stunningly corrupt ruling by that Court before Roberts and Alito lied their ways on to it, Bush v Gore would have clued the lawyers in but even after the ruling that rivals the corruption of Rehnquist and those five who decided a presidential election by fiat, and surpasses it,  Trump v USA which made the American president a king with immunity from the law, what I've been pointing out is unspeakably controversial even though it's clear that is what the Supreme Court is - it was always so for Black People, Women and others such as those in the list I gave above.   The brotherhood of the lawyers, dominated by affluent white males appointed by other affluent white males, many of them lawyers,  and those who are willing to play by the rules and tell the same lies as those in the club may be a reason that lawyers are unwilling to make these criticisms.   You would think that the ones who are in Congress and don't ever plan on being practicing lawyers ever again would feel free to at least think such thoughts and maybe some of them do.   But if they do, they don't do anything about it. 

The idea that only lawyers have a say or a "right" to say anything about these topics is a basic contradiction of egalitarian democracy.   And that's according to the founding document of the American government, the Declaration of Independence and the theory of majoritiarian rule which are said by it and, oddly enough, the Constitution that the ultimate authority and means of establishing the legitimacy of any government or law resides in those who, by an enormously large majority, are not lawyers and whose idea of "the law" can be anything from entirely informed to pig ignorant.    I say that to be entirely informed about the law means that you have studied as complete a history of how the law actually impacts on People and how the laws are made and imposed on us.    Most of the academic lore of the law is dishonest about all of that,  it is most often cloyingly idolizing and romantically stupid as to the reality of it.   Like most of the Supreme Court reportage you get from establishment media.   Well, I don't do that.  Nor am I going to stop it as requested because there aren't many People telling the truth about these things.   It's no great achievement, it only took refusing to lie about these things and being more afraid of the consequences of not facing the terrible truth of this matter than the consequences of breaking the laws of polite, cowardly, college-credentialed blather about them.   Few if any lawyers will tell you that but I have been telling you that terrible truth for years, now.   I don't think politeness and gentility are called for when dealing with these thugs in black robes sitting in their fascist-marble palace and taking graft like the pettiest of corrupt municipal officials.   I'm not going to put it in smarmy legalese.