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Colby Cosh: Democrats' attempt to limit the presidential pardon power is futile

Like previous attempts, this bill is bound to get nowhere at all

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On Wednesday morning, a group of Democrats in the U.S. Senate released a proposal for legislative reforms to the much-abused presidential pardon power found in Article II of the constitution. I’m preoccupied with the issue of pardons, as it manifests in the U.S., because it seems to represent an unfixable but slightly mysterious leak in the constitution itself. As I’ve sometimes had occasion to remark, I’m a small-R republican for Americans but a monarchist for my own country. I think this is the only sensible attitude for Canadians; I think we can recognize that the U.S. Constitution is a brilliant product of the human political imagination, quite worthy of the public veneration that secures it. If it still does.

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But when it comes to presidential pardons they’ve got a real obvious problem without any equally obvious solution. Most countries’ constitutions have some sort of broad last-resort executive power to absolve persons of crimes in cases where the law or the judiciary might be seen to have gone awry.........

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