Pardon myself?

As I have said a couple of times, I haven't found it too useful to enumerate every stupid thing the administration has done, we all know it is insane, we all know it is corrupt, and beating that horse just isn't helping. However sometimes things come up that are still worth talking about, and news that The Toddler has asked his lawyers to explore ways of hindering the Russia probe, including via pardons, both for those under investigation and even for himself, is perhaps something that should come up.

The link above is a good source for an overview of his potential options and I recommend you read it, but I want to talk about pardons specifically here.

Anyone with half a brain knows that if he starts pardoning people all willy nilly, even before charges are brought, it would be a political disaster for him, the question is would that be enough of a disaster for a Republican controlled congress to move to impeach or otherwise challenge the president, and if provoking that would still be better than letting the investigation move unhindered.

It's a tough question, now he does have the power to pardon whoever he wants for whatever he wants, even in the absence of charges, this is not challenged by constitutional scholars. Without charges a pardon is basically just a shield preventing prosecution if someone decided they wanted to. Of course you don't pardon unless you think or know there is a crime to pardon, so that would basically be an admission of guilt, what's more, those pardoned are not barred from testifying, in fact with a pardon in hand, they could be interviewed without worry of self incrimination, perhaps providing even more information than they might have normally.

What is more controversial is the idea that he might be able to pardon himself, again pre-emptively. The constitution doesn't specifically say he can't do so, and no president in our nations history has attempted it, because, again, doing so would be a bald faced attack on the rule of law in the USA. The Toddler might just try it though, so what would happen? Well he could certainly issue a pardon for himself, sign it, then see what happens. Remember though as a sitting president, he is unlikely to be prosecuted for anything unless impeached and removed from office first. So the pardon would only be challenged in two situations, the first being impeachment, the second being if whoever is president after him chose to pursue charges.

We'll talk about impeachment since that is rather more likely. We need to remember that at the level we are talking about here, the politics have a lot more to say about the situation than the law, if he issued himself a pardon, Congress could, in all likelihood, choose to ignore it and indeed use it as evidence that he did in fact commit a crime, otherwise why issue the pardon in the first place? I feel that if impeachment proceedings did seriously commence, then that is actually a pretty likely outcome, Congress running into the pardon issue means that they already had the votes to file articles of impeachment, which means his loyalists in government would be turning on him already, it is fair to say that they wold continue down that road rather than push for a failed movement opening them up to backlash from both sides of the aisle, and voters from all parties.

That is the main challenge really, for any of the GOP elected officials to grow a spine, they need to decide that it is worth pissing off the 35% of voters who stand with the president no matter what. He does still command the loyalty of the grass roots of the party, stupid and hateful as they are, and they are not a block to piss off lightly. They could still decide to do that though, we know that many so-called moderates are looking for even the slightest excuse to jump the aisle, as we have seen with many liberals changing their tune on people like James Comey or Kamala Harris, or even the Bush family. If the GOP thinks enough people are like that, then they might just jump at a chance to swing the party back to the corporate rather than social right.

Gonna be a ride either way, if he listens to his lawyers, he won't do any pardoning, if he doesn't, well, I think it is pretty likely, then we are gonna see some shit.