Time To Get Rid of the Presidential Pardon

[candycorn]

How about the president still give pardons, but the House can block pardons with a 60% vote?

It would be better than what we have now which is one person deciding that the thousands of man hours involved in prosecuting, defending, and incarcerating a person found guilty are erased by edict....

But I still prefer that legal scholars should weigh in on whether the prosecution was righteous and/or whether the punishment fit the crime; not elected representatives.

 

[basquebromance]

Peter Baker writes:

George W. Bush was sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, chewing gum, staring, and listening—in fact listening longer than usual. He did not like long discursive reports. But this one weighed on him.

“Do you think he did it?” Bush asked.

“Yeah,” the lawyer said, “I think he did it.”

The president had just days left in office, and the Decider, as he had memorably dubbed himself, was struggling with one final decision. His vice president, the man who had been at his side through every crisis for eight tumultuous years, was pressing him as never before. For two months, Dick Cheney had been lobbying for a pardon for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, who was known to all as Scooter and had been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a case that had its roots in the origins of the Iraq War. Cheney would not let it go. He brought it up again and again, to the point that the president did not want to talk with him about it anymore.

Bush’s gut told him no pardon, and he usually followed his gut. He had long bristled at the notion of people trading on connections to win executive clemency. The whole pardon process seemed corrupted to him, and now here was the ultimate insider seeking a special favor. Yet how could he tell Cheney no? How could he reject his partner of two terms on the one thing Cheney cared about most? For a man who valued loyalty above almost all else, it cut against the grain.

To help make a decision, Bush personally asked White House lawyers to reexamine the case to see if a pardon was justified. Fred Fielding, the White House counsel who had also served in the same role for Ronald Reagan, and William Burck, his deputy who had been a federal prosecutor in New York, pored over trial transcripts and studied evidence that Libby’s lawyers had raised. Now they were in the Oval Office to report back that the jury had ample reason to find Libby guilty.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there,” Burck was saying to Bush, tempering his “he did it” judgment just a bit. “But if I were on that jury, I would probably have agreed with them. You have to follow the law, and the law says if you say something that is untrue, knowingly, to a federal official in the context of a grand jury investigation and it is material to their investigation, that’s a crime.”


“All right, all right,” the president said finally, which his aides took to mean he would not grant the pardon. “So why do you think he did it? Do you think he was protecting the vice president?”

“I don’t think he was protecting the vice president,” Burck said.

“So why do you think he did it?” Bush asked.

Burck said he thought Libby assumed his account of events would never be contradicted because prosecutors would not force reporters to violate vows of confidentiality to their sources. “I think he thought that would never be broken, and I think also Libby was concerned because he took to heart what you said back then, which is that you would fire anybody that you knew was involved in this,” Burck said. “I just think he didn’t think it was worth falling on the sword.”

Bush took that in but did not seem convinced. “I think he still thinks he was protecting Cheney,” the president said. He did not say so, but it seemed that Bush believed that Cheney had a personal stake in this, that in effect it was a conflict of interest. Now the vice president was just one more supplicant trading on personal connections in the pardon process, in this case seeking forgiveness for the man who had sacrificed himself for Cheney.

Bush sighed. “Now I am going to have to have the talk with the vice president,” he said gloomily. That was the sort of unpleasant business that for eight years he had left to Cheney. It was the vice president who had delivered the bad news to people like Paul O’Neill and Donald Rumsfeld when they were fired.

Bolten spoke up. “I can do it,” he volunteered.

“Nah, nah, I can do it,” Bush said.

But he was dreading it.