Supreme Court blogger Amy Howe takes a look at a topic that's been coming up a lot recently, that being the President's power to pardon. She looks at it from the prospective of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court and the president’s pardon power
The article addresses the topic of whether the President can pardon himself, as he can pardon others for crimes they're not actually convicted of. My feeling is that he cannot, although as noted, it's an undecided legal issue.
Going out from there and into the controversial, the only existing Presidential pardon of a former President, Gerald Ford's pardon of President Nixon, is in my view one of the great American blunders of the 20th Century, or perhaps in our entire history. Nixon should have been tried and convicted for his role in covering up the Watergate break-in. His conviction and sentencing would have stood as an example that Presidents aren't above the law, which Nixon famously stated in an interview that they were. HIs pardoning suggested that in fact they were, no matter what Ford's intent was.
To go to the really controversial, I feel the same way about figures from the Confederacy who would have been logically subject to criminal charges for their role in rebelling against the United States. By this I'm not suggesting that they should have tried men down to the enlisted ranks, or even all of the officers. But they should have tried the principal political figures like Jefferson Davis. They should also have tried U.S. Army officers who abandoned their commissions to serve in the Confederate forces.
That's a harsh, Radical Republican (in the terms of the day) view, but that would have chastised a South that was ready to cooperate with the Federal government and it would have kept the Southern aristocracy from regaining control of the region. It would have put us decades ahead in achieving a more equitable society as well. It was an opportunity lost.
Indeed, both acts of mercy were opportunities lost, with the merciful forgetting that there really are no "chapters in history". It's one long book.
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