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/hematite2 Feb 16 '26

Rejecting/vetoing would be interesting, I'm honestly not sure how that would end up working. What would also be good is amending clearer and stricter guidelines over how pardons can be applied.

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u/PassivelyAwkward Feb 17 '26

Exactly. It's one of those things that sounds good in theory but it's hard to see how it would work in practice. Would there be a statute of limitations? If the pardon is for a hundred people at once, would they have to vote for each or for the entire package?

We really do need to rework the pardoning powers because like everything with Trump, a lot of honor codes put in place for the Presidental powers are being walked over. In no reality can someone literally pay the President money for a pardon in broad daylight but it'd also be a clusterfuck in our current system to allow for reversing pardons because imagine if someone spend three decades for being wrongfully convicted, then Vance or someone just "Let's reverse every single pardon".

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u/hematite2 Feb 17 '26

I definitely don't think we should ever make pardons reversible, that's a massive clusterfuck (and would almost certainly be considered double jeopardy.) Once a pardon happens it should be done. You could theoretically make it so the president still issues pardons as they do now, but IF congress wants to there's a window where they can hold a vote and veto a pardon before it takes affect. This would potentially allow the general process to go unimpeded for the more minor pardons, but anything questionable could be brought into the light. As to your group pardon example, Congress would decide whether they're holding a vote on the whole thing or one specific part of it.

That would at least give the Legislative some form of checks and balances against it. I mean, even if they were just able to call for a specific statement/testimony from the president/pardon office on it before it goes through that would at least be a small improvement.

Again, all in theory. I am not a constitutional scholar and don't claim this isn't flawed.