a bonobo humanity?

Today I heard the American legal expert and editor of Lawfare, Ben Wittes, assuring a cable news host that the President had an absolute right, or ‘ability’, to pardon anyone he wishes. This came up in a discussion of the Roger Stone guilty verdict recently handed down.

Of course I noted that there was no sign of shame or embarrassment in Wittes’ pronouncement, which I will take on trust to be true. Nor did I expect to observe such a sign. I’ve become ‘Americanised’ to a certain degree in the past couple of years. But I also feel a need to resist this.

As has been noted by many people, Stone has been a close personal friend and associate of Trump for many decades. So, will he pardon Stone?

To be asked to enter the mind of the current US President, on this or any other matter, would be the ultimate ‘hardship assignment’, but still it’s interesting to speculate why he may hesitate to pardon Stone. First, Stone is no longer of any use to him – and that is generally Trump’s foremost consideration. Second, Trump is conscious, however vaguely, of going ‘too far’ in certain directions, though he sometimes errs on this front. Third, he appears to be a creature of the ‘eternal present’, in which case his failure to pardon Stone would be due to indifference rather than hesitation. His new ‘buddies’ are – or possibly were – the three amigos, and so it goes.

But to return to the Presidential pardoning powers – it seems to take an outsider to note how totally outrageous and immoral they are. A pardoning power, granted, is an important power for a government to have, but within very strict limitations. In Australia the power is vested in the Governor-General, the Queen’s representative, but of course he or she is instructed by the government of the day, through the principal law officer, the Attorney-General, in consultation with the rest of government. It’s a rarely used power in Westminster-style governments, as it should be. A notable recent example of its use is the so-called ‘Alan Turing Law’, which pardoned thousands of gay men, living and dead, who have been prosecuted over decades for behaviour now deemed legal. However, in the US the Presidential pardoning power has often been abused, as in the case of Richard Nixon (not sufficiently condemned), and more recently by Donald Trump’s pardoning of Libby and Arpaio. The general US population has been troublingly insouciant about this power. To have it vested in one person (there is an ‘Office of the Pardon Attorney’ but I doubt that Trump recognises or has even heard of it) is of course typical of that superhero-worshipping nation, but it’s another failure of a system that Trump will surely be seeking to exploit in his battle to secure ultimate dictatorship.

Meanwhile, there are always new developments in the runaway trainride of this current presidency. A new name, David Holmes, may have entered the lists of history, in a small way. Of course all of these names – the names of people who actually work hard for their nation and for positive international relations – deserve to remembered better than the current US President, but life never was fair.