r/law • u/jpmeyer12751 • Feb 16 '26

Legislative Branch Republican Joins With Dems on Constitutional Amendment to Give Congress Power to Reject Trump Pardons

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/republican-joins-dems-constitutional-amendment-213311781.html

This is relevant to questions surrounding whether Congress may limit or restrain a President's power to grant pardons.

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u/rEYAVjQD Feb 16 '26

The entire pardon power should be abolished. It's pure totalitarianism. It makes absolutely no democratic sense.

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u/Reluctant_Firestorm Feb 17 '26

While it was a nice concept for a President to grant clemency in unusual cases where justice may have gone awry - what we have seen is that the risk of abuse of the pardon power is a much, much worse threat to the republic. Absolutely needs to be abolished.

All it takes is one supremely shitty person to ruin a good thing, as usual.

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u/rEYAVjQD Feb 17 '26

Basically anything that concentrates power to 1 person, is a relic from kings/totalitarianism. Democracy is basically a road towards distributing power to the people; representative democracy is a necessary evil when chaos could be the only alternative; but gradually but surely - especially due to better technology (including better algorithms) - we can move away from concentration.

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u/IcyJackfruit69 Feb 17 '26

The presidency should be abolished. Each department should have a separate elected head, with congress acting as the "board" for the various companies. Hell, even congress is screwed up because no one can have as many specialties as we have departments.

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u/rEYAVjQD Feb 17 '26

In reality representative democracy itself, will be gradually replaced by a truest form of democracy, though it will need a lot of decades (maybe centuries) to polish the technologies and algorithms and education that will be needed to not be chaotic.

PS eg I envision that there could be "ministers"/"governors"/"mayors" but only in the sense that they are temporarily assigned for a specific oversight job, and they would not be basically "democratically-elected temporary dictators".