President Trump’s essentially unlimited pardon power, explained

it'd save you from the legal process. it's one of the checks and balances. there are downsides. if you argue that it's an admission of guilt then you're forcing people who are unjustly convicted to admit guilt to be pardoned. if you can pardon someone without an admission of guilt then you're letting people "off the hook." that's the whole argument here. each interpretation has a downside. pardons have multiple reasons. one would be if someone is guilty but the sentence was too harsh. another would be to save the public from having to go through a trial even if they're guilty (like how Ford pardoned Nixon). the problem is that in order to justify it to himself he said that the pardon comes with an admission of guilt. that made himself feel better for the pardon. but that interpretation, if legally valid, would screw over innocent people unjustly convicted. the whole point of arguing against Ford's interpretation is to preserve that aspect of pardons. again, I'm not pro-Trump. I'm not trying to defend him here. I'd like to see him gone as much as anyone else here even if I don't necessarily lean left. that doesn't mean I'm going to screw over pardons just to try to get him. to me, it's not worth it to preserve one of the "good" aspects of pardons just to get him. we'll get him. he screws up enough that we should go after him with our strongest arguments. the nature of pardons being able to be used both on people not even charged, or to pardon people who were unjustly convicted, to me is a weakness in this particular argument against Trump. I'm not going to sit here and try to convince myself of something when rationally I can see how the legal debate on this is over. I'd rather preserve the nature of pardons so that in the future it can be properly used on those who are unjustly convicted instead of "corrupting" pardons just to take down Trump. that's where I'm coming from here.

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