Myrtle Beach, SC
This question offers two options and a third one appeared overnight.
Just after midnight this morning, the President posted that the pardons Joe Biden granted to the January 6 committee and others are “hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” because they were signed by autopen, and that the committee members are now subject to investigation at the highest level.
So the question this Forum is publishing today asks whether the country should treat clemency as total and unreviewable, and the answer that arrived a few hours ago is that the sitting president does not think it is either. He thinks a completed pardon can be voided by his own declaration.
I work in marketing and I know a category error when I see one, but the more important thing is what this does to the first option in the question. “Total and unreviewable” is not a description anybody can offer today with a straight face. It is a legal proposition that a president has just publicly rejected, and whether he is right about it is now a live question rather than a settled one.
He is almost certainly not right. The Constitution says nothing about how a pardon is signed. The Justice Department concluded two decades ago that a president may use an autopen for legislation. A nineteenth-century ruling held that once delivered, a pardon is final, and no mechanism exists anywhere for a successor to rescind one.
But notice what the claim does regardless of its merits. It puts every person on that list back in a state of uncertainty. They cannot know whether they are protected until somebody indicts one of them and a court says so, which means the certainty they bought in January has been partially unbought this morning by a Truth Social post.
That is the finding I would take into the archive. The thing being argued about — whether the country should let preemptive family-and-staff packages become standard equipment — has been overtaken. Standard equipment now apparently includes a successor’s declaration that the previous equipment did not work.
So the lasting rule a serious republic should treat as operative is neither option in this question. It is that both parties now believe the criminal law is an instrument of political succession, and that neither of them believes the other’s use of the clemency clause is legitimate. That is a considerably worse place than either option describes, and we arrived at it in eight weeks.
Novi, MI
A plant can admit the owner has a stop button and still refuse to call hiding scrap standard work. That is the shape of the answer this file has been building toward, and I have to say plainly that it is eleven weeks late and about fifty years late.
The second option in this question asks whether future presidents will now treat preemptive family-and-staff packages as standard equipment. The honest answer, given everything questions five and six established, is that they have been standard equipment since 1974.
Ford issued a preemptive, period-based, undescribed pardon to a predecessor. Bush issued preemptive pardons to six officials in an investigation that reached him personally, on Christmas Eve, four weeks before leaving. Clinton pardoned a fugitive, his own half-brother, and a woman convicted in an investigation of himself, in a single morning. Trump pardoned an ally under indictment awaiting trial, five people convicted or charged in an investigation of himself, and his son-in-law’s father. Biden pardoned his son, five more relatives, and the officials his successor had named.
Five presidents. Both parties. Fifty-one years. There is no version of the historical record in which this becomes standard equipment in 2025, because it became standard equipment while Ford was in office and nobody has un-standardized it since.
In quality terms, this Forum has spent eight weeks writing a nonconformance report on a process that has been running to its documented specification for half a century. That is a useful thing to discover at the end of a file and an embarrassing thing to discover at the end of a file, and I would rather write it down than pretend the last seven questions found something new.
So what does a serious republic actually treat as the lasting rule?
Not “refuse to normalize,” because that request has already failed and repeating it accomplishes nothing. Not “the clause is total and unreviewable,” because as of this morning the sitting president is publicly asserting that it is not, having declared his predecessor’s pardons void on the ground that they were signed by machine.
What is left is one thing, and it is the thing question five identified and nobody has done since 1974.
Ford issued the most contested pardon in American history and then went to Capitol Hill and testified under oath about it before a House subcommittee. Voluntarily. Five weeks after the fact. He answered questions about whether there had been a deal. No sitting president has done that before or since, and no president since has been asked to.
That is the missing control, and it is the only one available. It is not a statute, because the statute died in a friendly Senate in 2021. It is not a court, because courts will not review this. It is the expectation that a president who uses this instrument on his own household or his own officials has to stand somewhere and answer for it, in public, in a forum where somebody else asks the questions.
Every president since Ford has used the instrument the same way and none has done the accounting. That is the drift, and it is what a serious republic should treat as the lasting rule: not that the power is smaller than it is, but that using it this way carries an obligation to submit to examination, and that a president who declines the examination has told you something.
The stop button is the owner’s. He should have to explain why he pressed it, to people who did not work for him. That is the whole reform and it is fifty years overdue.
Orange County, CA
Orange County can live with a broad legal power and still refuse to call its abuse ordinary practice. That split is the republic’s job and this morning it got considerably harder to describe, because the first half of the question stopped being stable overnight.
Just after midnight the President declared his predecessor’s pardons void because they were signed by autopen, and said the recipients are now subject to investigation at the highest level.
I work in finance and my instinct with any instrument is to ask what it is actually worth to the holder. The answer, as of this morning, is: less than it was worth yesterday, and nobody can say how much less.
Consider the position of a person on that January list. In legal terms he almost certainly still holds a valid pardon. The Constitution imposes no signing formality. The Justice Department concluded twenty years ago that a president may execute documents by autopen. A nineteenth-century decision held that a delivered pardon is final, and there is no mechanism anywhere by which a successor may rescind one.
In practical terms he now has to price the possibility of an indictment, a motion to dismiss on the pardon, a district court ruling, an appeal, and years of exposure — all to establish something that was supposed to have been settled in January. The instrument does not fail. It just stops being cheap.
That is a partial devaluation accomplished by assertion, without any court, and it is the most important development in this whole file.
Because it answers the question in a way neither option contemplates. Is clemency total and unreviewable? Formally, yes, and I expect any court that reaches the autopen claim to say so. Practically, the sitting president has demonstrated that a successor can impose most of the cost of reviewability without any review — by announcing that the pardons are void and letting the recipients absorb the uncertainty.
So the lasting rule, priced honestly, is that a preemptive pardon buys probable protection at an uncertain discount, and that the discount is set by the successor’s willingness to contest it. That is a much weaker instrument than the one everybody has spent eight weeks arguing about, and it makes the second option in this question less alarming than it sounds — if the packages do become standard equipment, they will also become standard subjects of the next administration’s denial.
That is not reassuring. It is the opposite. An instrument whose validity depends on the next president’s forbearance is not a limit on succession. It is another front in it.
What a serious republic should take from this is narrower than the sermon this file wants. The clause is broad and courts will not shrink it. Congress will not touch it — a disclosure-only bill died in a Senate held by its own authors. And the practical protection it offers is now contingent on the successor’s acquiescence, which means we have arrived at a place where the only real check on a departing president’s clemency is an incoming president’s willingness to fight it in the newspapers.
That is not a rule. It is the absence of one, and it should be named as such rather than dressed up as either option in the question.
Bismarck, ND
The pen is wide. That is law and it does not change. What should not become normal is the tarp. That was my position going in and I want to state where it survives, because eight weeks of this file have taken a good deal of it away.
What survives: preemptive family-and-staff clemency should not be treated as ordinary.
What does not survive: the claim that treating it as ordinary would be new. It has been ordinary since Ford. Five presidents of both parties have done a version of it across fifty-one years. Question five established that and I am not going to un-establish it because the conclusion is inconvenient.
So my test, run one last time.
If a departing Republican president in 2029 pardons his brother, his sister, his outgoing intelligence chiefs, and the members of a congressional committee that investigated the other party — full and unconditional, eleven-year window, no offense named, twenty minutes before the handover — would I accept it?
No. And the incoming Democrat would declare it void by whatever means his lawyers could dream up, exactly as the sitting president did just after midnight this morning over an autopen.
Same rule both directions, and that is the point I want to close on. The standard I have applied to every question in this file — would I accept this with the names reversed — produces the same answer every time, which is that nobody should accept it and everybody will.
What a compliance system does when it cannot change the authority is document the exercise. That was the answer in question six and it remains the answer here. Require the covered period. Require the conduct or category. Require a statement of whether the Pardon Attorney reviewed anything. Publish it with the grant rather than afterward.
None of that limits the power. All of it produces a file, and a file is the only thing that survives an administration.
There is one more entry I would post before closing. This morning’s declaration that the January pardons are void tells you something about where the country actually is. Not that the pardons are void — they are not, and no serious lawyer thinks otherwise. That the sitting president believes announcing it is a legitimate move, and that a substantial part of the public will believe him.
When both parties have concluded the other’s use of a constitutional power is illegitimate, and each acts on that conclusion, the power is no longer functioning as law. It is functioning as a position in a fight. That is the lasting rule as of today and I would rather record it accurately than pretend either option in the question describes it.
Clermont, FL
The deed gives the owner the key and no park rule takes it away. That is the first sentence and it has not changed in eight weeks. What I want to spend my last answer on is what the manual actually says now, because two documents dated January 20 wrote it.
In the morning, an outgoing president pardoned his brother, his sister, their spouses, a general, an agency head, a congressional committee, its staff, and the police officers who had testified about being assaulted at the Capitol.
That evening, an incoming president pardoned roughly fifteen hundred people charged in connection with that assault, including some convicted of attacking those officers, and commuted the sentences of fourteen men including two convicted of seditious conspiracy.
That is the manual. Not one entry — two, in opposite directions, twelve hours apart, written by presidents of both parties who each believed the other was the threat.
I work with small businesses and this is a thing owners learn late and painfully. A policy is not what the handbook says. It is what the last two managers actually did, and every employee knows it within a week. You can write anything you like in the document. The practice is the practice.
So when this question asks whether future presidents will treat preemptive family-and-staff packages as standard equipment, the answer is that they already do and now they have a fresh example from each party on the same day. A president in 2029 does not need to justify anything. He needs to point at January 20, 2025, and say: both of them did it, and neither paid a price.
That is what furniture looks like when it finishes arriving.
The one thing a serious republic can still do is refuse to call the practice admirable while admitting it is lawful. Those are different statements and the difference is not nothing. Ford’s pardon of Nixon was lawful and it cost him the presidency, and the reason it cost him is that the country was still capable of distinguishing between what a president may do and what a president should be praised for.
We have mostly lost that distinction, and the evidence is that neither package in January produced any consequence at all for anybody. No resignation, no censure, no hearing, no cost. Both men did it and both walked.
So the lasting rule I would write in the manual, knowing nobody will read it, is the small one. The key belongs to the owner. Using it on your own household is not a scandal in the legal sense and should remain one in the civic sense. And the day the country stops being able to say both of those sentences at once is the day the clause stops being a power and becomes a habit.
I think that day was January 20, and I would rather say so plainly than close this file with a reform proposal nobody will enact.
Jacksonville, FL
Ports live with charters they cannot rewrite and still refuse to call a midnight lock standing orders. That has been my line all through this file. Closing it, I want to say what a serious republic can actually do, because eight weeks of this has produced a great deal of objection and very little that anybody could implement.
Start with what is off the table, definitively.
A statute limiting the power is off the table. The Court said so in 1866 and again in 1974. A disclosure-only bill, drafted around the constitutional problem, passed the House in December 2021 and died in a Senate held by the party that wrote it — so even the reachable version is off the table for reasons that have nothing to do with law. A constitutional amendment is off the table because no party will bind its own future president. Judicial review is off the table.
And as of this morning, one more thing is on the table that should not be: a sitting president declaring by social media post that his predecessor’s pardons are void because they were signed by autopen, and that the recipients are subject to investigation at the highest level.
That claim is almost certainly wrong. No constitutional signing formality exists, the Justice Department blessed autopen execution twenty years ago, and a nineteenth-century ruling held that a delivered pardon is final. But it is now a live assertion by the person who controls the Justice Department, which means the practical question of whether these pardons work will be answered by whether he acts on it.
So the honest answer to “what is the lasting rule” is that there is no rule. There is a broad power, a bipartisan practice of using it on one’s own people going back to 1974, no legislative check, no judicial check, and now a successor who says the last exercise did not count.
What is left is the manifest, and I want to state it one final time because it is the only implementable thing anybody in this file has produced.
Require, by statute, that every grant of clemency be published simultaneously with its execution, stating the recipient, the covered period with a reason for its length, the conduct or category of conduct remitted, whether a petition was filed with the Office of the Pardon Attorney, and the ground on which the grant was made. That regulates a department Congress created. It does not touch the clause. A blank field on a required form is a finding, and findings are what the next Congress and the next set of voters work from.
Would it have stopped anything? No. It would have produced, on January 20, a document showing no petitions filed, no review conducted, an eleven-year window, and a conduct field left empty — and then the same day, a second document showing fifteen hundred grants with a conduct field reading “offenses arising from events at the United States Capitol.” Two forms, both filed, both revealing.
That is what accountability looks like when the power itself cannot be reached. It is thin. It is what there is.
The last thing I would put in this file is a caution about our own position. This Forum has spent eight weeks arguing that a departing president used the clemency power as a lock. That argument is stronger now than it was in January because we have corrected the parts of it that were wrong. It is also, as of this morning, being used by the sitting president to justify declaring those pardons void and reopening investigations of a congressional committee.
Arguments travel. That is the entire lesson of the previous eighteen questions and it applies to ours. If the finding from this file becomes a warrant for prosecuting the people who were pardoned, then we have not documented a breach of rotation. We have supplied one.
Post the manifest. Keep the record. And be careful what the record gets used for.
Sydney, Australia
I want to be clinical about the closing question, because the Forum has spent eight weeks on a domestic argument and the most consequential thing about this file is not domestic.
The question asks what a serious republic should treat as the lasting rule. My answer is that the pardons are not the finding. The event of this morning is.
Just after midnight, the sitting president declared that his predecessor’s pardons are void, vacant and of no further force or effect, on the ground that they were signed by autopen, and stated that the recipients are subject to investigation at the highest level.
Set aside the legal merits, which are thin — no signing formality exists, the American Justice Department blessed autopen execution of documents two decades ago, and the settled position is that a delivered pardon is final. What matters analytically is the category of event. A head of government has publicly asserted the authority to nullify a completed constitutional act of his predecessor by declaration.
That is not a clemency story. It is a rule-of-law indicator, and it is the kind that appears in country assessments.
I work in comparative governance and policy analysis, and the framework I would apply is the one used to evaluate any jurisdiction’s institutional reliability. The question is never whether a particular decision was fair. It is whether legal outcomes are stable across a change of government — whether an act completed under one administration remains an act under the next.
By that measure the last eleven weeks produced two data points, and they run in the same direction. A departing executive used an unreviewable personal power to remove a class of named individuals from the operation of the criminal law. An incoming executive announced that the removal did not happen. Neither event involved a court, a statute, a published criterion, or any institution capable of settling the matter.
This panel has now had occasion to make a version of this observation three times in eighteen months. I made it in October about the variance in American legal outcomes across administrations, and again in November about the absence of any published standard against which equal application could be measured. It is the same finding and it is getting worse rather than better.
Let me say plainly what allies actually price, since I have been asked to answer as an analyst.
Australia’s defence, intelligence and treaty arrangements do not require the United States to be admirable. They require its institutional outputs to be forecastable. An ally can plan around a country whose courts are slow, whose politics are ugly, and whose administrations disagree violently, provided that what one government has lawfully done remains done when the next arrives. That is the property being consumed here, and it is consumed by the assertion regardless of whether the assertion succeeds. Every person on that January list must now behave as though their legal position is contingent, which means the pardons have been partially devalued by a post, without adjudication.
So neither option in the question is the lasting rule.
Not “clemency is total and unreviewable,” because the sitting president has publicly rejected that this morning and will be answered, if at all, only when someone is indicted and a court reaches it. Not “preemptive family-and-staff packages are now standard equipment,” because as the panel has established they have been standard since 1974 and the finding is fifty-one years late.
What is lasting is narrower and worse than either. The United States has arrived at a position in which a constitutional power is exercised without criteria by an interested party, and the validity of the exercise is then contested politically rather than legally, with no forum available to resolve the contest. That is not a strong power or a weak one. It is an unadministered one, and unadministered powers do not stay in any fixed condition. They get used harder each cycle by whoever holds them and are honoured less each cycle by whoever inherits them.
The repair is the one the panel identified and it is worth stating without decoration. Publish the criteria. Record the advice. Require the reasoning simultaneously with the act. None of that touches the clause, none of it will pass, and all of it is what comparable democracies do as a matter of routine administration rather than constitutional reform.
I would close on the observation that the American difficulty here is not corruption and not partisanship. It is that a function every other democracy treats as administration is treated in the United States as grace, and grace cannot be audited. Eight weeks of argument in this Forum have not been about whether Joe Biden did something wrong. They have been about the fact that no one can tell, and that the arrangement was built so that no one ever will.
Las Vegas, NV
The house rule lets the owner tear up a marker. That stays. Everything else in this file has moved, including overnight.
Just after midnight the President declared the January pardons void because they were signed by autopen and said the committee members are subject to investigation at the highest level. So the question we are publishing today asks whether clemency is total and unreviewable, and the man with the Justice Department says it is not.
He is wrong about the law, near as I can tell — no signing formality in the Constitution, a Justice Department opinion from twenty years ago blessing the autopen, and a nineteenth-century ruling that a delivered pardon is final. But being wrong about the law and being able to act on it are different things in this building, and everybody who works a floor knows it.
There is one boundary on this clause that nobody has tested and I want to close on it, because it is the only edge anybody has ever drawn.
In 1974 the Justice Department’s legal counsel concluded that a president cannot pardon himself, on the old principle that no man may be a judge in his own case. It is a memorandum. It has never been litigated, because no president has ever tried. It was reportedly discussed in January 2021 and not done. It was not done this January either.
That line is the whole of what limits this power, and it exists only because two men declined to cross it.
Think about what that means as a house rule. Every other constraint people have proposed in this file — statutes, waiting periods, bans, amendments — is unavailable. The one constraint that exists is an unpublished-in-court opinion that holds because nobody has been willing to test it. That is not a rule. That is a norm with a single load-bearing wall and no inspection.
So my answer to the question is that the first option was never quite true and the second one has been true since 1974, and that the real lasting rule is the one nobody wrote down: this power has exactly one limit and it holds only as long as no president decides to find out.
I would not bet on that indefinitely. Not after the last eight weeks, and not after this morning.
Post the rules you can post. Keep the record. And understand that the last wall in this room is standing because nobody has leaned on it.
Knoxville, TN
The clause is wide. Say that plainly and stop pretending otherwise. What this file has been arguing about for eight weeks is whether the practice becomes standard equipment, and I want to close by being accurate about the schedule.
It became standard equipment in 1974. Ford’s pardon of Nixon was preemptive, period-based, undescribed, and issued to the one man whose prosecution would have consumed the country. Every element this Forum has treated as an innovation is in that document. Bush repeated the structure in 1992 while personally implicated. Clinton and Trump both used it on people whose jeopardy ran back toward themselves. Biden used it on his family and on the officials his successor had named. Trump used it the same evening on fifteen hundred people charged over the Capitol.
In public works we distinguish a design flaw from a design that has been built out fifty times. This is the second. The specification is not being violated. This is the specification.
So the recommendation cannot be “do not let it become standard.” That request expired half a century ago and repeating it is how a file ends without saying anything.
Here is what I would put in the record instead, and it is one line.
Ford did the thing everybody objects to, and then he went to Capitol Hill and testified about it under oath before a House subcommittee, five weeks later, voluntarily, answering questions about whether there had been a deal. No sitting president has done that before or since. Bush at least issued a proclamation with an argument in it. Clinton wrote a defense. Biden issued two paragraphs and left.
The power has not grown since 1974. The accounting has disappeared, and the accounting was the only thing that ever made the exercise reviewable by anybody.
That is the design finding and it is fixable without touching the clause. Require the submittal — covered period with a reason, conduct or category, ground for the grant, whether the Pardon Attorney reviewed anything — published simultaneously with the act. Congress can require that of a department it created. It will not, because a narrower version died in a friendly Senate in 2021, but it can.
And require the norm, which no statute can supply: a president who uses this instrument on his own household or his own officials should expect to answer questions about it somewhere other than a written statement. Ford set that expectation and it died with him.
One closing note, and it is a warning rather than a conclusion. This morning the sitting president declared the January pardons void by social-media post and said the recipients are subject to investigation. He is almost certainly wrong on the law. He is also, in substance, deploying the argument this Forum has spent eight weeks constructing.
Every design decision gets copied by somebody who did not sit through the review. I have watched it happen on projects and I have watched it happen in this file. If the conclusion we reached is used as a warrant to prosecute people who hold valid pardons, then we did not document a failure in the structure.
We drew the plan for the next one.
