WASHINGTON — By granting last-minute pardons and
reprieves in what appears to have been a private
auction for family, friends and donors, former
President Clinton abused his constitutional power. But
members of Congress let him by failing to exercise
theirs.
That’s right, U.S. senators share the blame for
Pardongate.
They failed to remove Clinton from office in 1999
after their steelier House colleagues indicted him for
perjury and other crimes, allowing Clinton the chance
to free terrorists and drug kingpins and clear
fugitive traitors.
Democratic senators, who argued to let Clinton serve
out his term on the notion that a lame-duck president
could do little harm, are now shocked, shocked, at his
wake of corruption.
But it should surprise no one. Who better than a
criminal to pardon a bunch of criminals?
It didn’t have to be this way, under the system of
checks and balances set up by the Constitution’s
framers.
Yes, they placed the awesome power to pardon in the
president’s hands, as opposed to sharing it with
legislators. They reasoned that a “single man of
prudence and good sense” would be less likely to
succumb to mob pressures in judging sensitive cases
such as treason.
“It is not to be doubted that a single man of prudence
and good sense, is better fitted, in delicate
conjunctures, to balance the motives, which may plead
for and against the remission of the punishment, than
any numerous body whatever,” wrote Alexander Hamilton
in The Federalist No. 74.
And yes, the framers clearly did not have in mind a
fiend the likes of Bill Clinton when they vested the
power to pardon in the president.
But he’s no reason to re-write Article II, which
authorizes presidential powers.
The framers also assumed that if a president were not
“prudent,” but in fact venal, the impeachment
clause in Article I would then become the relevant
portion of the Constitution, and not the pardon
clause.
The House’s power to impeach a crooked rube was
intended as a check against presidential abuses of
power. The Senate’s power to remove him ensured abuses
would not be repeated.
Senators heard evidence in 1999 that Clinton abused
his power in trying to fix a sexual-harassment case
against him. He did this long before anyone accused
him of selling pardons.
So this throws the whole pardon stink right back on
the Senate, which failed to carry out its
constitutional duties listed in Article I.
By in effect abusing their own pardon power by not
convicting Clinton for making false statements under
oath — something he now admits he did — senators let
him survive to abuse his pardon power. They might as
well have co-signed the pardon for Marc Rich and all
the others Clinton ordered over the objection of
prosecutors.
The buried secret of the U.S. Senate
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