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I’m so burned out and weird that my first thought was “I hope this means that they can’t become subjects of an endless media circus while evil things are being done behind the back of the press.”
Perhaps the signal to noise ratio will be slightly improved.
I still don't know what Fauci did to have so much anger for him for this long lol.
Uh he acknowledged facts and science above feeelings, duh.
Trump’s political game works by creating enemies. A virus is too abstract of an enemy, so instead he creates enemies of those adjacent. Fauci, China, WHO, governors of Democratic Party states etc.
I still don’t know what Fauci did to have so much anger for him for this long lol.
Conservatives hate science and scientists. Think about how much anger conservatives had towards Galileo and Darwin.
The current right wing wave we are experiencing in the world is decidedly and aggressively anti-intellectual and anti-establishment. Fauci represents both of these.
What a world we live in where we have to preemptively issue presidential pardons to people who have not only not committed any crimes but have served the public's interest for their entire lives
Literally made their lives 1000x harder just because they were honest, dedicated, and tried to do the right thing. Going after them is despicable.
It's un-be-lievable, quite honestly.
Welcome to donvict's Merica.
Pardon won't protect them from legal harassment
That was the entire point of the pardon. To spare them the cost of wasting their money on lawyers. None of them were in danger of going to jail because none of them did anything illegal.
I hope on his way out, Biden takes an old man taco shit in the private Oval Office washroom and doesn’t flush.
I'm sure idiots taking revenge on Fauci for, uh, following the science is going to really lower the costs of housing and groceries!
The fact that this is necessary is just mind blowing.
The fact that they recognize this is necessary, yet still just willingly handed over power...
That's how democracy works. You accept the results even if you don't like them. Otherwise, they'd be no better than the Jan 6 trash from this time 4 years ago.
I agree. Unless those results are fascism.
We have learned why it's important to have an exception for fascism.
Looks like South Korea understands that better than we do.
Paradox of Democracy:
If people democratically elected fascism. Is it anti-democratic to overthrow/coup against the democratically elected fascist?
🤔
South Korea acted swiftly. The US has been sitting on its ass for four whole years. They should have acted before the fascist was re-elected.
Funny how the other side just reverts to threats and intimidation when they don't get what they want.
Here's the thing. All things considered, I believe it was the right thing to do and probably the best option available given the circumstances, but a part of me still thinks that this just might end up making things worse.
I'm not even convinced that these things will hold. We have already learned that just because it says so in the Constitution doesn't mean this Supreme Court will abide by it, as they've already hand-waived away several Constitutional protections already and have essentially turned the Constitution into a very old piece of paper with guidelines that can be ignored when inconvenient.
Given this President and this Supreme Court, I could easily see the Supreme Court either spinning all new powers of "judicial review" when it comes to pardons all for itself out of thin air, or just saying that pre-emptive pardons aren't a thing and are therefore invalid. And when the precedent of Nixon's pardon is brought up, they could just say that it would have been struck down too had it been challenged. Or at least, they would have struck it down. Easy to say because Nixon's dead and it's moot one way or the other, so it's easy to twist it to their advantage.
And since accepting a pardon comes with the implication of guilt, the right wing conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day showing how this "proves" that Fauci, Milley, etc. are all guilty and should be prosecuted anyway. ("Even though the Biden pardons were all ruled invalid, the fact that these defendants had accepted them comes with the implication of guilt. That implication is not Constitutionally protected and therefore can be used against them in future prosecutions." -- This Supreme Court, probably, in the near future.) This will also lead to a groundswell of support from the rubes who will continue the march to dictatorship with thunderous applause as they start demanding that these people be prosecuted anyway, using their acceptance of the pardons in the first place as "proof" that they were right all along, these people were committing crimes, and they knew it.
Of course, if and when Trump writes his own pardon, the courts will gladly carve out an exception that applies only to Trump. His cronies may go to jail, but we all know what Trump thinks of his cronies once they stop being of use to him.
Watch him try and do it anyway, challenging the pardons in court saying pe-emptive pardons shouldn't count, only to backtrack when he realizes it means it will make the blanket pardon he wrote for himself invalid too.
Watch him try and do it anyway, challenging the pardons in court saying pe-emptive pardons shouldn’t count, only to backtrack when he realizes it means it will make the blanket pardon he wrote for himself invalid too.
That's not how this works if you've been paying attention to our legal system.
Don't get me wrong.....Trump absolutely will try to have these pardons challenged. But it's not like the courts are just going to remind him that it won't work for him either when he tries it. They'll just wait until he does, then carve out a special exemption that applies only to Trump. That's how the law works.
Jfc
I'm not looking forward to the next week, let alone 4 years.
Not sure what good that will do. Trump patently doesn’t give an F about law, only about how he thinks he’s being perceived. So if he can find a way to prosecute anyone, even of it’s just in the court of public opinion, in such a way that he thinks it makes him stronger and wrecks their lives he will do it.
Unfortunately, this move will give anti-vax conspiracy theorists massive amounts of fuel.
They have unlimited fuel because they are free to just make shit up.
Pretty scary that he thought this was necessary.