Posted on 11/22/2008 9:23:58 PM PST by paltz
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-New York and chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, has authored a resolution demanding that President Bush refrain from issuing “pre-emptive pardons of senior officials in his administration during the final 90 days of office.”
The resolution, Nadler says, is in response to Bush’s “widespread abuses of power and potentially criminal transgressions against our Constitution.”
The goal, he says, is to prevent “undeserved pardons of officials who may have been co-conspirators in the president’s unconstitutional policies, such as torture, illegal surveillance and curtailing of due process for defendants.”
“This resolution declares that we will not tolerate a last minute attempt by President Bush to shelter his cronies - cronies who may well be guilty of serious criminal offenses - from the full force of the law,” says Nadler
I am not at all confident that Bush will issue any pardons to people in his administration.
There’s something going on with Bush. For eight years Bush sat there like a punching bag, never having the guts to stand up and defend himself as lie after lie from the Democrats and their newsrooms went unanswered. Bush’s unwillingness to stand up and spit in their faces was an eight-year slap in the face to his bewildered supporters, including me. Maybe a psychiatrist could figure it out.
Who knows? Maybe Dubya gets some kind of perverse thrill out of being a punching bag for the Democrats. If that’s the case, then he may not want it to end on January 20th. Sure, it would be sick for him to leave his loyal admistration colleagues twisting in the wind like that, but there’s a history: The Haditha Marines and their families fought a rogue prosecution by an America-hating JAG contingent for two years(!), and although one-by-one they have been completely exonerated, two Marines are STILL twisting.
Bush could have ended that disgraceful fiasco with a phone call long ago, but instead let the nightmare go on for those heroic combat veterans and their families.
So I guess we’ll see if he does the decent thing and assures that his people can go home with some peace of mind on January 20th by ordering “pre-emptive” pardons for all of them, or if he would rather just throw them under the Democrat bus, just for kicks.
My feeling, exactly. It seemed that he was very reluctant to pardon Libby and then the pardon was as minimal as possible.
The worst part is that Nadler will be able tell his voters, "See what I did. I stopped Bush from making pardons."
Not true. Ford pardoned Nixon for unindicted crimes.
Libby was not pardoned - it was a commutation of sentence, which leaves the (unjust) felony conviction standing. Kept Libby out of jail but a felony conviction on one’s record is not exactly a free ride......
Pres. Bush needs to come out with all barrels blazing before Jan. 20 — he needs to give a major speech which thoroughly refutes the many vicious slanders that have been directed toward him, VP Cheney, and many others in his admin.
Then he needs to announce that due to the unparalleled viciousness and dishonesty in the media, the Congress, and the Democrap Party, he will issue pre-emptive pardons to everyone in his admin. Then he needs to tell the Mediascum and Demagogues to go F### themselves.
I would be happy if he did this on Jan. 19 and allowed the media fury to erupt, but then they would have to control themselves if they want to enjoy their celebration of the Obamanation on Jan. 20.
Of course, I have no confidence that Pres. Bush will finally stand up for himself and his admin. colleagues like this, but that is what he should do if he doesn’t want Democrap “investigations” and threats of prosecution to hang over hundreds of people who loyally served him and the country in the WOT, etc.
I couldn’t agree more.
Where was he when Pres. Clinton pardoned Mark Rich???
SOmebody tell me how “pre-emptive” pardons work. How can you be pardoned for a crime you were never charged with? You can be given immunity for such a thing, but Bush can’t ensure immunity to people if he’s not in charge any more, I’d think. Those deals get rescinded all the time.
“Justice Stephen Field wrote in Ex parte Garland (1867), “If granted before conviction, it prevents any of the penalties and disabilities consequent upon conviction from attaching [thereto]; if granted after conviction, it removes the penalties and disabilities, and restores him to all his civil rights; it makes him, as it were, a new man, and gives him a new credit and capacity…. A pardon reaches both the punishment prescribed for the offence and the guilt of the offender…so that in the eye of the law the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offence.”
I’m sorry, but this makes absolutely no sense to me. How does Bush issue a pardon when he doesn’t know what his people will be charged with? Your excerpt says, “in the eye of the law the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offence.” My question is, what offence? I don’t think you can issue a pardon for “every crime conceivable.”
As dim as some prosecutors can be, one thing they’re good at is coming up with charges. They tried as hard as they could to get Scooter Libby, going so far as to try him for lying to investigators without an underlying crime to lie about. How hard will it be to come up with something to charge Cheney, Rummy, and Condy with?
“Tell that to Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon”
I get that Ford pardoned Nixon without any charges pending, but in that case everyone knew what Nixon would have been charged with, i.e. obstruction of justice. There was no stoping prosecutors from coming up with wacky charges unrelated to Watergate, for instance something to do with the “illegal” war in Cambodia.
In today’s climate, it seems some people are willing to charge members of the Bush administration with anything and everything from the whole eight years. How do you anticipate what the charges could be, and against whom?
Yes,and we (our leadership) just won’t take them seriously and call them on it somehow, though I realise the difficulty when the media is complicit with the left. Our side hasn’t learned still, that all these things mount up when they consider it “beneath them” to respond and defend. The left is unrelenting in attack and unremitting in defending themselves, they are loud, shrill, non-stop, and widespread in always have a voice in the media to make their ridiculous cases. We have got to find a way to respond to this, going over the media, or making it impossible somehow for them to ignore us. We have got to have more aggressive spokespeople, just as obnoxious as the left, in defense. I hate it, I prefer being the dignified honorable ones, but politics is a shark-eat-shark world now thanks to the tactics of the left and their media, and we’re already starting from a disadvantage, because the media is a division of the left.
Yes, there was. Ford pardoned Nixon for all offenses during a period of time. The text:
“Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.”
Don’t be surprised if our illustrious President invites all of these ‘Rat scumbags into his Office to inform them that he will of course, in the interest of “changing the tone” in Washington, abide by their requests.
Hey, he hasn’t pardoned Agents Ramos and Compean, why would the ‘Rats be worried about him pardoning anybody else?
I don't have a huge problem with that. If laws were broken, punish the lawbreakers.
Bush should have told Congress to pound sand on that one. Part of the reason that became a "scandal" was because Bush made it look like one. Had he continually insisted it was his constitutional power as president to fire any US attorney for any reason, and cited other examples of other presidents doing the same, the story would not have grown legs.
Why do these people hate the document that made us great so much?
Maybe for the same reason they hate the USA? I don't know.
After Chairman Baraq (peace be upon him) gets done with Bush, he will surely investigate Clinton’s pardons.
The 700 pound human pustule.
We have met the enemy and it is us- or rather those imbeciles aka irreparably defective products of our high schools who keep electing and re-electing the likes of this fat jackass and the Boxers, Feinsteins, Durbins. Dodds, Murthas, Pelosis, and Barney Fags.
LLS
“After Chairman Baraq (peace be upon him)”
pi$$ NOT peace!
LLS
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