Just replying to this whole discussion, not exactly this post….
The dissonance seems to be, “Isn’t the pardon power being stretched way out of what is historical or what seems right as far as interference in the judiciary, or what the founders intended?”
The problem is, now, that the average citizen cannot be expected—especially in certain venues—to honor their oaths as jurors above their political motivations. That is, for almost all of these kinds of defendants—whether Trump, Biden, Fauci, Capitol trespassers, Alex Jones, abortion protesters, etc—we can no longer expect them to get fair trials. So the pardon power has expanded without that much opposition to counter the modern reality that juries no longer check their politics at the door, when the defendant is known to them through the political process as an “enemy.”
