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Amid relentless scrutiny over possible ties between his presidential campaign and Russia, an extraordinary suggestion has emerged - that Donald Trump could pardon himself or his family.
Source: BBC News
US President Donald Trump has insisted he has the "complete power" to pardon people, amid reports he is considering presidential pardons for family members, aides and even himself.
A Democratic Party spokesman has called the reports "extremely disturbing".
The US authorities are probing possible collusion between the Trump team and Russia. Intelligence agencies think Russia tried to help Mr Trump to power.
Russia denies this, and the president says there was no collusion.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Mr Trump and his team were looking at ways to pardon people close to him.
Source: BBC News
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @06:29PM (1 child)
Impeachment of the president is something more for clickbait than reality. Clinton was impeached under two counts - lying under oath and impeding an investigation. He undeniably and with 100% certainty was guilty of lying under oath - multiple times. Even he admitted as much in later testimony. Regardless of this literally not a single democrat senator voted guilty on the charge of lying under oath. And conviction in the senate doesn't require just a majority, but a supermajority.
You need to get every single democrat, every single independent, and then a good chunk of all republicans to vote guilty in order to have an impeachment that does not result in immediate acquittal in the senate. That's simply not happening. That'd not only blow a large amount of 'political capital' for no real gain for the individual politicians who'd have to turn coat, but it'd also arguably destroy the party in question. For instance today among like voters, 27% [rasmussenreports.com] of people strongly approve of the job Trump is doing and a total of 46% approve overall. That's extremely close to a party line roll call. Turn-coating to impeach somebody who a huge chunk of your electorate supports is basically the same as signing your own death warrant. Clinton lost in large part due to losing the support of many Bernie supporters. In spite of a ~15 [wikipedia.org] million man increase in voting age population from 2012 to 2016 (presumably an increase heavily weighted towards democrat friendly demographics), Clinton actually managed to get fewer votes in total than Obama did in 2012 (as well as 2008). This collapse would be dwarfed by the fallout of impeaching Trump. It won't happen in a million years. For that matter, I think it's unlikely any US president will ever be impeached (so long as we have a two party system) for similar reasons.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 25 2017, @11:52AM
>I think it's unlikely any US president will ever be impeached (so long as we have a two party system) for similar reasons.
Or, for the paranoid, perhaps we have a two party system, in part, for this very reason.
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