Give it a few years. The US ceding its dominance by trying to re-follow its 1970s/80s playbook (now with less Volcker!) in a 2024+ world will go down as one of the biggest geopolitical own-goals of all time.
What do you think of this counterpoint from Balaji?
"CZ deserves his pardon.
His show trial of a prosecution was a combination of regulatory railroading and ethnic persecution for being Chinese-Canadian.
Imagine if Macron was held personally responsible for every crime committed by the 67M citizens of France, and you'll get the absurdity of holding CZ personally responsible for the actions of a few of the 250M+ Binance users.
Indeed, if the bureaucrats who went after CZ were similarly held accountable for every violent crime committed in their home states, they'd be in prison for eternity! But there was an insane double standard. In the physical world, the Biden admin gleefully abolished the police. Meanwhile, in the digital world they demanded that CEOs achieve impossible levels of probity.
The ethnic dimension to CZ's persecution was similarly execrable. In reality, he helped many millions of Chinese people get into Bitcoin and thereby get to freedom. And also helped millions of poor people from around the globe get out of failed currencies, and into cryptocurrency.
So he did more for practical human rights and civil liberties than most. CZ did nothing wrong, and did so many things right.
Of course, my friends at Coinbase and I were competitors of Binance. But I always respected CZ, and I congratulate him on his accomplishments, and I congratulate him on his pardon today. Well deserved."
Comparing gov’t officials to civilians is a stupid comparison.
Biden abolishing police is hyperbole.
CZ enabled a lot of dark shit. He is somehow simultaneously so powerful as to help millions of Chinese, but powerless to do anything about a few thousand of criminals and pedophiles?
Changpeng Zhao broke the law and got caught. Everyone agrees on that. What you present above is revisionist history about "political persecution," which is the favorite justification of the current administration for pardoning convicted felons, even in the total absence of any evidence supporting a conclusion of political persecution. See also George Santos, J6 rioters, etc.
I don't think it's really necessary to pretend that this pardon was deserved. The pardon happened because (a) Trump wants the support of crypto billionaires and (b) Trump received a large bribe. It's really not complicated.
Painting Trump as sympathetic to ethnic discrimination is really ridiculous. No one believes that, even people who cynically use that justification to support his lawlessness.
With these characters, from Trump on down, discourse is not the point.
He is flexing his power by showing he can make an obviously fatuous point and get away with it. Because there are no consequences, for someone like him.
The law says he should have prevented those bad apples from moving dirty money around, and he did not follow the law.
Do you have a rebuttal for coffeezillas assertion that 2 billion dollars of Abu Dhabi money was invested in Binance using the Trump family coin in order to buy a pardon?
The president is clearly pro crypto and doesn't think this dude did anything wrong, but he also wasn't gonna give a pardon away for free. It's a disgusting abuse of office he should be impeached over. Selling pardons, what a shit show.
The pardon power has been so abused these past few administrations that it's clear there should be constitutional changes in the pardon power, either congressional review, or strip it altogether.
The way this is going, the President won’t need using any pardon powers, because the judges will all ask the President what the judgement should be in advance.
Your forget to insert the part where the President asks the convicted defendant if they want to finance their pardon with Klarna or Affirm in the Presidential Library's checkout page
Yeah we already have judgments that the executive branch has gone well beyond it's allowed limits and the majority of SCOTUS stance has been:
"Yeah well let the legal process play out ... in the meantime our guy gets to do whatever he wants, and you're still fired / kicked out of the country / funding cut / an so on".
If it is at all inconvenient for the most powerful folks in the country, they get any limits on their actions protected by SCOTUS ... at the cost of the people.
This is by the way literally word for word official statements of the ruzzian officials. The conviction rates in ruzzian courts are above 99% every year and the official explanation is that the prosecutors and police are so amazing and great, that only real criminals make it to the court. :)
Which congress do you want doing that review? The past several congresses have been unqualified to do any sort of constitutional reviewing in my opinion.
The U.S. is running an outdated installation of democracy. The French approach of just rebooting and reinstalling the entire thing seems like a good idea at this point. Except the populace is already badly split into warring camps.
I feel like we'd have a better idea of what congress is qualified to do if they ever actually tried to do something but they seem to have broadened their role from "prevent executive overreach and govern" to "prevent govern". Congress is where you send something if you want to be sure it doesn't happen.
That being said, there's always the option of just getting rid of the president's ability to overrule the people on criminal matters. We could probably go after state governors as well, that's just as rife with abuse.
> Which congress do you want doing that review? The past several congresses have been unqualified to do any sort of constitutional reviewing in my opinion
States can reject dumb amendments. Congress proposes amendments, the states ratify them [1].
I remain amazed at how, again and again, no matter how specific and unique an abuse by the Trump administration is, it is always, invariably, Really Joe Biden's Fault. Like, the frame has been adopted by the MAGA base, but also the cranky left. The media does it too. Here on HN bothsidesism is a shibboleth that denotes "I'm a Serious Commenter and not a Partisan Hack".
But it leads to ridiculous whoppers like this, and ends up in practice excusing what amounts to the most corrupt regime in this country in over a century, if not ever.
No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
>But it leads to ridiculous whoppers like this, and ends up in practice excusing what amounts to the most corrupt regime in this country in over a century, if not ever.
Amen. Preach it, brother!
>No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
I don't know what the poster was referring to, but I AM mad at Biden for pardoning his family. It's a molehill of an issue compared to the current administration though.
> Here on HN bothsidesism is a shibboleth that denotes "I'm a Serious Commenter and not a Partisan Hack".
HN users don't necessarily do that because they want to. They might do it as a pre-emptive defense mechanism against the brigades of de-facto censors that roam the site.
Moderation via populism is an anti-feature on its face, but Hacker News has the worst possible version of that sort of feature by making downvoted/flagged comments completely hidden unless you are logged in and showdead.
It's a pretty horrendous system if you're interested in good faith and honest debate.
When Obama really increased the number of pardons, a lot of contemporary opinion writers said stuff along the lines of "this is a dangerous precedent and we're lucky that the pardons are fairly popular and sane." Now we're seeing unpopular, not sane pardons.
When democratic norms erode like pardons becoming more acceptable, it's like laying tinder and kindling for a fire. You still need a fire; a bad actor who is willing to light the material on fire. That bad actor is Trump. But the warnings from abusing these limitations from previous administrations was exactly for this moment. Nobody is saying Trump isn't the bad one, he is. But the conditions were laid for him. Now we need to survive him.
When we look back at Roman Senators and Emperors, it's often hard as modern people to point to one, single bad figure because we don't have a lot of contemporary thought or reading from the time. But when we look back we can see the seeds of "decline" in eras rather than single figures.
The power to pardon needs to be removed all together. All it does is show that the President overrides the department of justice. How anyone ever thought this should be a thing, I have no idea.
I think a congressional pardon power to allow national leniency on previously accepted sentences that are now viewed as unjust might be worth holding onto. It being such a casual presidential power has made it ripe for corruption for a long time but I would weigh that with civil rights era pardons for sham trials - I think we do still need a national sanity check relief valve for local injustices.
And the dysfunction of congress probably works in our favor here since pardons should be exceptional - not routine. A routine pardon is just a demonstration of the justice department failing at a systemic level.
I heard the intention was that sometimes it's against the public good to prosecute some people even though they have comitted crimes. Good examples of it being used as intended was pardoning the perpetrators of the whiskey rebellion, the confederate army, vietnam draft dodgers and more controversially, Nixon. I guess it's also intended in cases where obvious miscarriages of justice have been committed. It made sense in 1785 or whenever but along with lots of the rest of the constitution it's long obsolete and has been twisted, stretched and mangled into a hideous caricature of itself over the centuries.
> The power to pardon needs to be removed all together. All it does is show that the President overrides the department of justice.
The Department of Justice is subordinate to the President as part of the executive branch with or without the pardon power; if you want something other than "the President overrides the Department of Justice" as a matter of Constitutional law rather than an intermittently-observed convention of restraint (which Trump absolutely has not observed outside of the pardon power), you need a fundamental reformation of the Constitutional structure of government, far beyond the elimination of the pardon power.
Despite abuses of it, there are still too many reasons to need it, like when President Franklin Pierce pardoned an abolitionist for harboring fugitive slaves, or when George Washington pardoned Revolutionary War vets involved in the Whiskey Rebellion.
Better yet, there are a ton of cases since the 1980s prosecutors exploiting technicalities and mandatory minimum sentencing laws to get nonviolent drug offenders imprisoned for 10+ years on simple possession (not to to sell drugs, not PWID, just possession).
> pardon power has been so abused these past few administrations that it's clear there should be constitutional changes in the pardon power, either congressional review, or strip it altogether
Strip it. I also started on the line of Congressional review (or pardons only activating on the consent of the Senate). But I concluded the entire power is out of place.
If the courts overreach, address it through legislation. Congress can annul sentences through law, no special pardon power needed. If a law is unfair or being applied unfairly, moreover, it should be fixed comprehensively.
There isn’t a place for one-man pardons in a republic. Even the imperium-obsessed Romans didn’t give their dictators, much less consuls, automatic pardon power. Caesar had to get special legislation to overrule the law.
Biden abused pardon power. So has Trump. Both parties have good reason for passing an amendment through the Congress. This is probably in my top 3 Constitutional amendment we need in our time. (Multi-member Congressional seats, popular election of the President and changing “the executive Power shall be vested in a President” to “the President shall execute the laws of the United States.”)
honestly? I think between this and hunter biden you could probably drum up some bipartisan support as long as you don't let either side find out that they accidentally agree with the other. I'm of a mind that the power of the pardon is one of many (many, many, many) ways that the so-called "egalitarian" founding fathers made sure to preserve the power of the aristocracy over that of the people. After all, a conviction has to come from a jury, and that means that a pardon is by definition the powerful elite overruling the people.
The Hunter Biden pardon was necessary because it was clear that despite his admission of guilt, he was not going to receive a fair punishment. The Republican party leadership was very open in expressing their intentions for him, and had _already_ circumvented the judicial system to give him cruel and unusual punishment.
Would be nice if Trump only pardoned people who the incoming administration explicitly said they would target, after years of constant harassment and misinformation.
I think I would support those pardons even though I think Trump and his family and his cronies are acting the way really bad people act.
Taking the above scenario as license to sell pardons for person gain is such a stretch it looks like bad faith to me.
IDK, I think Carter's pardon of draft dodgers was a pretty good use of the pardon power.
The problem seems to be that we have unjust laws and punishments. We should have some way to apply mercy in that case. For example, I (hope to) see a future where people jailed for MJ related crimes get a mass pardon.
Chelsea Manning. Prosecuting her and other whistleblowers instead of the officials they blew the whistle on was a mockery of justice. Though that wasn't the stated reason for the commutation, it was long overdue.
I mean there are lots of people arrested on effectively political charges, and it's good to be able to reflect on it years later and get them out of jail. I'm not convinced Changpeng Zhao's charges would have ever been brought against him if the Biden admin didn't go so hard against crypto, I'm happy to see him pardoned. Hopefully next Trump can get whistle blowers like John Kiriachou
That might be true, but CZ is a good candidate for a pardon. Did you know before Gensler went after him at the SEC he asked CZ for a job and was rejected?
No, government is the greatest threat to liberty. If the guy in charge of prosecuting feels the need to not just not prosecute, but actively protect someone from the state, then we really really don’t want (who? his unelected subordinates?) prosecuting people. It’s supposed to be an “err on the side of” failing to prosecute criminals. The whole point is yes… sometimes we want criminals to get away with crime, because it’s better than the alternatives.
What is the alternative? One of them is the public vote for a leader, the state destroys that leader (or his allies, etc) and then what? Do we think the public just says “Oh, well, I guess we didn’t pick the right guy?”
There should be a limit on the number of pardons a president can do during their tenure so that they have to at least think a bit before using it. It is a very powerful tool that actually allows a last resort. But this kind of egregious abuse of it's power means it needs to be kept in check.
Right, the ability to pardon is a diplomatic tool. Sad that it's being used as a get your buddies out of jail free
card or a way to collect donations.
I think at this point whatever policy differences between us are probably secondary to just putting people in power, literally anyone, who aren't so
corrupt it would be called too heavy handed in fiction.
The Indian constitution too gives the President the power to pardon someone convicted. However, the Supreme Court has since clarified that this power is not absolute, and the court can subject it to a judicial review. ( https://compass.rauias.com/current-affairs/pardoning-powers-... ).
How would that help? They'll reserve the pardons only for corruption and leave the regular folks, eg with fake convictions , without justice. You're not checking any power without addressing the cause
There is, and the Constitution says the limit is impeachment and removal from office by Congress. That won't happen unless we fix how we talk about the ones responsible, to wit:
The Republican Party pardoned these criminals.
The Republican Party is snatching Americans off the streets.
The Republican Party is using the military to murder people on boats.
The Republican Party is demolishing down the White House. The Republican Party is deporting people over free speech.
The Republican Party has imposed the biggest tax increase in living memory with tariffs/import-taxes.
The Republican Party is going pay itself your tax dollars in "lawsuit settlements".
There were 4 years of his first term and now 10 months of... all this. Today there is zero possibility of an oversight or mistake, any legislator who won't impeach and convict is choosing to support these things.
Nothing will improve while those legislators believe the blame will sail past them and stick solely to Trump.
I don’t think the majority of voting Americans have problems with any of those acts though. Think Joe you pass in Walmart cares about what happens to the White House ballroom?
- Bill Clinton: 459
- George W. Bush: 200
- Barack Obama: 1,927
- Donald Trump (first term): 237
- Joe Biden: 4,245
- Donald Trump (second term): 1,600
If one leaves all integrity and morals the president of the richest country in the world can really amass a ton of wealth. I actually suspect that the shares the “US” government s getting from intel and other companies actually goes to trump somehow. Everything is up for sale with this administration. Just sad, the high moral ground the country occupied is just wiped out and it’s now just like any other corrupt Asian country
> and it’s now just like any other corrupt Asian country
Seems like we are getting the worst aspects of countries like China (anti-democratic 1 party rule, state directed oligarchy, targeting of ethnic minority groups) with none of the best aspects of China: strong investment in education, research, and modern infrastructure like high speed trains and zero carbon electricity production.
Maybe mimicking authoritarianism isn't the answer to our problems.
It's bizarre to me, an Australian, how the pardon power is used in the US. Our federal, state and territory executive governments all have a pardon power, inherited from English law, that is, formally, unlimited (like the US federally and indeed it's less restrictive than many US states for state crimes).
It is a power used very sparingly, even though legally it is unlimited - the state of New South Wales is, as far as I know, the only one which publishes details about uses of the pardon power; in an average year there are 0 successful pardon/commutation applicants, and it's an exceptionally merciful year if they grant 2 or more. Other states and the federal government may or may not be a bit more generous, but we're talking very small numbers. Most pardons are for reasons of unsafe convictions where for whatever reason no remaining avenues of appeal are available (rare, these days, because each state has introduced laws to enable post-conviction reviews).
Historically, particularly in the 19th century convict era, the pardon power was much more important, and was indeed abused for political reasons on a number of occasions, but it seems that for the most part it quietly exists in the background and only gets significant public attention once every blue moon for a high-profile murder case or similar.
What explains the difference? Is it the requirement for sign-off by the King's viceroys that prevents abuse? Collective Cabinet governance that is accountable to Parliament? Maybe our political culture means politicians' friends tend to end up in prison less often and thus there's less opportunity for the abuse of pardons specifically? It's not particularly clear to me - if anyone's got some good comparative studies send me links!
As an Australian? Dude, your country is the most authoritarian of the current English speaking "western" countries.
The parliamentary countries like Australia just have made it so that they forever encroach in civil liberties and hide it all in bureocracy and pretend things work as intended and that democracy is working but when it was covid time they utterly crashed dissent. Same with most cases of effective opposition to power. The first in line to try and control the internet, speech and more from its citizens who don't even notice it that much because it's so ingrained in the culture of self censorship.
Having said that, yes, the pardon powers are ridiculous and they're being used more and more in ridiculous ways like this one from trump or the "pardon for everything just in case, for future and past" from Biden.
Readit News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4
"CZ deserves his pardon.
His show trial of a prosecution was a combination of regulatory railroading and ethnic persecution for being Chinese-Canadian.
Imagine if Macron was held personally responsible for every crime committed by the 67M citizens of France, and you'll get the absurdity of holding CZ personally responsible for the actions of a few of the 250M+ Binance users.
Indeed, if the bureaucrats who went after CZ were similarly held accountable for every violent crime committed in their home states, they'd be in prison for eternity! But there was an insane double standard. In the physical world, the Biden admin gleefully abolished the police. Meanwhile, in the digital world they demanded that CEOs achieve impossible levels of probity.
The ethnic dimension to CZ's persecution was similarly execrable. In reality, he helped many millions of Chinese people get into Bitcoin and thereby get to freedom. And also helped millions of poor people from around the globe get out of failed currencies, and into cryptocurrency.
So he did more for practical human rights and civil liberties than most. CZ did nothing wrong, and did so many things right.
Of course, my friends at Coinbase and I were competitors of Binance. But I always respected CZ, and I congratulate him on his accomplishments, and I congratulate him on his pardon today. Well deserved."
https://x.com/balajis/status/1981423831572238856
Biden abolishing police is hyperbole.
CZ enabled a lot of dark shit. He is somehow simultaneously so powerful as to help millions of Chinese, but powerless to do anything about a few thousand of criminals and pedophiles?
This is not a serious take.
I don't think it's really necessary to pretend that this pardon was deserved. The pardon happened because (a) Trump wants the support of crypto billionaires and (b) Trump received a large bribe. It's really not complicated.
Painting Trump as sympathetic to ethnic discrimination is really ridiculous. No one believes that, even people who cynically use that justification to support his lawlessness.
With these characters, from Trump on down, discourse is not the point.
He is flexing his power by showing he can make an obviously fatuous point and get away with it. Because there are no consequences, for someone like him.
Do you have a rebuttal for coffeezillas assertion that 2 billion dollars of Abu Dhabi money was invested in Binance using the Trump family coin in order to buy a pardon?
The president is clearly pro crypto and doesn't think this dude did anything wrong, but he also wasn't gonna give a pardon away for free. It's a disgusting abuse of office he should be impeached over. Selling pardons, what a shit show.
When did this happen?
And the prosecutors will ask who to prosecute.
Finally only fair justice!
"Yeah well let the legal process play out ... in the meantime our guy gets to do whatever he wants, and you're still fired / kicked out of the country / funding cut / an so on".
If it is at all inconvenient for the most powerful folks in the country, they get any limits on their actions protected by SCOTUS ... at the cost of the people.
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Hopefully we get to try from scratch a third time if that happens but I worry that collapse will be too tempting for Russia or China to not step in.
Maybe we can be lucky and get conquered by Canada first in that case? What a weird thing to think...
That being said, there's always the option of just getting rid of the president's ability to overrule the people on criminal matters. We could probably go after state governors as well, that's just as rife with abuse.
States can reject dumb amendments. Congress proposes amendments, the states ratify them [1].
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-5/
I remain amazed at how, again and again, no matter how specific and unique an abuse by the Trump administration is, it is always, invariably, Really Joe Biden's Fault. Like, the frame has been adopted by the MAGA base, but also the cranky left. The media does it too. Here on HN bothsidesism is a shibboleth that denotes "I'm a Serious Commenter and not a Partisan Hack".
But it leads to ridiculous whoppers like this, and ends up in practice excusing what amounts to the most corrupt regime in this country in over a century, if not ever.
No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
Amen. Preach it, brother!
>No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
I don't know what the poster was referring to, but I AM mad at Biden for pardoning his family. It's a molehill of an issue compared to the current administration though.
HN users don't necessarily do that because they want to. They might do it as a pre-emptive defense mechanism against the brigades of de-facto censors that roam the site.
Moderation via populism is an anti-feature on its face, but Hacker News has the worst possible version of that sort of feature by making downvoted/flagged comments completely hidden unless you are logged in and showdead.
It's a pretty horrendous system if you're interested in good faith and honest debate.
When democratic norms erode like pardons becoming more acceptable, it's like laying tinder and kindling for a fire. You still need a fire; a bad actor who is willing to light the material on fire. That bad actor is Trump. But the warnings from abusing these limitations from previous administrations was exactly for this moment. Nobody is saying Trump isn't the bad one, he is. But the conditions were laid for him. Now we need to survive him.
When we look back at Roman Senators and Emperors, it's often hard as modern people to point to one, single bad figure because we don't have a lot of contemporary thought or reading from the time. But when we look back we can see the seeds of "decline" in eras rather than single figures.
And the dysfunction of congress probably works in our favor here since pardons should be exceptional - not routine. A routine pardon is just a demonstration of the justice department failing at a systemic level.
The Department of Justice is subordinate to the President as part of the executive branch with or without the pardon power; if you want something other than "the President overrides the Department of Justice" as a matter of Constitutional law rather than an intermittently-observed convention of restraint (which Trump absolutely has not observed outside of the pardon power), you need a fundamental reformation of the Constitutional structure of government, far beyond the elimination of the pardon power.
Better yet, there are a ton of cases since the 1980s prosecutors exploiting technicalities and mandatory minimum sentencing laws to get nonviolent drug offenders imprisoned for 10+ years on simple possession (not to to sell drugs, not PWID, just possession).
Past few?
How about Ford pardoning Nixon? Or George H.W. Bush pardoning a bunch of Iran-Contra conspirators, thus covering his own ass?
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Strip it. I also started on the line of Congressional review (or pardons only activating on the consent of the Senate). But I concluded the entire power is out of place.
If the courts overreach, address it through legislation. Congress can annul sentences through law, no special pardon power needed. If a law is unfair or being applied unfairly, moreover, it should be fixed comprehensively.
There isn’t a place for one-man pardons in a republic. Even the imperium-obsessed Romans didn’t give their dictators, much less consuls, automatic pardon power. Caesar had to get special legislation to overrule the law.
Biden abused pardon power. So has Trump. Both parties have good reason for passing an amendment through the Congress. This is probably in my top 3 Constitutional amendment we need in our time. (Multi-member Congressional seats, popular election of the President and changing “the executive Power shall be vested in a President” to “the President shall execute the laws of the United States.”)
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Sounds reasonable. This is ok for Trump to do because of Hunter Biden.
I think I would support those pardons even though I think Trump and his family and his cronies are acting the way really bad people act.
Taking the above scenario as license to sell pardons for person gain is such a stretch it looks like bad faith to me.
The problem seems to be that we have unjust laws and punishments. We should have some way to apply mercy in that case. For example, I (hope to) see a future where people jailed for MJ related crimes get a mass pardon.
If anything, it's better he was rejected for the job, as getting it would have provided an incentive to bury the prosecution.
What is the alternative? One of them is the public vote for a leader, the state destroys that leader (or his allies, etc) and then what? Do we think the public just says “Oh, well, I guess we didn’t pick the right guy?”
I think at this point whatever policy differences between us are probably secondary to just putting people in power, literally anyone, who aren't so corrupt it would be called too heavy handed in fiction.
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There is, and the Constitution says the limit is impeachment and removal from office by Congress. That won't happen unless we fix how we talk about the ones responsible, to wit:
The Republican Party pardoned these criminals. The Republican Party is snatching Americans off the streets. The Republican Party is using the military to murder people on boats. The Republican Party is demolishing down the White House. The Republican Party is deporting people over free speech. The Republican Party has imposed the biggest tax increase in living memory with tariffs/import-taxes. The Republican Party is going pay itself your tax dollars in "lawsuit settlements".
There were 4 years of his first term and now 10 months of... all this. Today there is zero possibility of an oversight or mistake, any legislator who won't impeach and convict is choosing to support these things.
Nothing will improve while those legislators believe the blame will sail past them and stick solely to Trump.
Why do you think most US presidents wait until the end of their term to pardon people?
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"he is seeking to undo “disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today under current law, policy, and practice.”
Rich drug dealers: Freedom.
Be a rich drug dealer.
Poor criminal: jail/death penalty/etc.
Rich criminal: freedom
QZ: <https://qz.com/trump-pardon-binance-changpeng-zhao>
Reuters: <https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-convicted-bin...>
The Guardian: <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/23/binance-t...>
Seems like we are getting the worst aspects of countries like China (anti-democratic 1 party rule, state directed oligarchy, targeting of ethnic minority groups) with none of the best aspects of China: strong investment in education, research, and modern infrastructure like high speed trains and zero carbon electricity production.
Maybe mimicking authoritarianism isn't the answer to our problems.
It is a power used very sparingly, even though legally it is unlimited - the state of New South Wales is, as far as I know, the only one which publishes details about uses of the pardon power; in an average year there are 0 successful pardon/commutation applicants, and it's an exceptionally merciful year if they grant 2 or more. Other states and the federal government may or may not be a bit more generous, but we're talking very small numbers. Most pardons are for reasons of unsafe convictions where for whatever reason no remaining avenues of appeal are available (rare, these days, because each state has introduced laws to enable post-conviction reviews).
Historically, particularly in the 19th century convict era, the pardon power was much more important, and was indeed abused for political reasons on a number of occasions, but it seems that for the most part it quietly exists in the background and only gets significant public attention once every blue moon for a high-profile murder case or similar.
What explains the difference? Is it the requirement for sign-off by the King's viceroys that prevents abuse? Collective Cabinet governance that is accountable to Parliament? Maybe our political culture means politicians' friends tend to end up in prison less often and thus there's less opportunity for the abuse of pardons specifically? It's not particularly clear to me - if anyone's got some good comparative studies send me links!
The parliamentary countries like Australia just have made it so that they forever encroach in civil liberties and hide it all in bureocracy and pretend things work as intended and that democracy is working but when it was covid time they utterly crashed dissent. Same with most cases of effective opposition to power. The first in line to try and control the internet, speech and more from its citizens who don't even notice it that much because it's so ingrained in the culture of self censorship.
Having said that, yes, the pardon powers are ridiculous and they're being used more and more in ridiculous ways like this one from trump or the "pardon for everything just in case, for future and past" from Biden.