Since returning to office, Donald Trump has issued more than 1,800 pardons – to financial fraudsters, drug kingpins, January 6 insurrectionists and others. Unfortunately, Trump’s pardons don’t begin to conform with Alexander Hamilton’s high-minded vision of how presidents would use pardons.

When the US constitution was being written in 1787, Hamilton, a delegate to the constitutional convention, pushed to give presidents a broad pardoning power, saying presidents would use it with “scrupulousness and caution”. But Trump’s use of that power has been anything but scrupulous and cautious.

Trump has repeatedly granted pardons that either undermine our democracy or involve flagrant conflicts of interest, sometimes pardoning family members of people who gave him big donations. Because Trump has issued many pardons that the authors of the constitution would never have countenanced, the supreme court – for the sake of preserving our democracy and basic rules of ethics – needs to step up and place some limits on Trump’s unchecked and unprincipled use of the pardon power.

This is all the more important since the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Trump has repeatedly promised top administration officials pardons before he leaves office. “I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval,” the Journal quoted him as saying, in what the White House maintained was a joke.

I realize that White House officials and many legal scholars say a president’s power to pardon is absolute and can’t be limited. But something urgently needs to be done to curb Trump’s often dangerous, often unethical use of that power. Take Trump’s pardon of more than 1,500 January 6 rioters – those pardons were an out-and-out assault against our constitution. Those insurrectionists were convicted or charged with mounting an assault against Congress not only to prevent duly elected Joe Biden from taking office but to bulldoze over the constitution’s requirements for an orderly transition of power. Of those pardoned, 175 were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. This was definitely not how the constitution’s framers envisioned the pardon power being used.

Many of Trump’s pardons are just plain tawdry. After Paul Walczak’s mother........

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