Trump doesn't know what "pardon" means
Textualists need to take another look at the language
We face an absurd future. An insurrection-inciting former president charged with numerous felonies is likely to be the GOP’s presidential candidate once again. He might be convicted before the 2024 elections, but no matter. Should he be elected, Donald Trump proposes to issue himself a pardon.
It’s true the Constitution does not explicitly forbid self-pardons. But legal scholars Gary J. Schmitt and Jeffrey K. Tulis have a piece of advice for Trump and his textualist defenders: take a closer look at the language.
Also this week at Public Seminar: Mitchell Abidor visits the Met, where a new exhibition centered around American political culture in the 1930s suggests that while protest is a constant, its iconography is not.
Could Donald Trump Pardon Himself?
Gary J. Schmitt and Jeffrey K. Tulis
Constitutional textualists put a great deal of weight on the fact that there are only the two listed exceptions to the pardon power: not to be exercised in cases of impeachment, and only for federal crimes. There is much to be said for looking at the text initially for guidance. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “The text is the law, and it is the text that must be observed.”
Yet, remarkably, when citing the text as evidence that presidential self-pardons are not precluded, the meaning of the key word in that text—“pardons”—is regularly glossed over.
The Latin root of “pardon” is “donare”—to give, as in the word “donate.” One doesn’t donate to oneself: to give is to give something to another. The Constitution’s architects did not consider self-pardons for the simple reason that it would have made no sense to them.
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Hope and Despair in the American Socialist Movements of the 1930s
Mitchell Abidor
The most famous critique in the 1930s of the effects of machinery on man, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, is represented by a clip of Chaplin unable to stop performing his repetitive labor. Catastrophe, a painting by Doris Olds, takes the threat of modernity even further. Painted just a short while before the explosion of the Hindenburg zeppelin, it shows a blimp exploding over a New York reimagined as a Breughel painting, all frenzy and gigantic buildings, the passengers of the damaged blimp floating to earth on parachutes. Modernity is a hellscape. But modernity in the 1930s was also a promise of paradise. The exalted predictions of the 1933 and 1939 World Fairs are displayed. Sleek deco cocktail shakers and radios suggest a happier vision of everyday modern life. This is even clearer in the series of posters by Lester Beall for the Rural Electrification Administration. These stunning works, with their uncluttered design and bold color schemes, some subtly using just red, white, and blue, underline the ways electricity improves lives, through radio transmissions to homes, washing machines, electric light, running water, and the easing of the rigors of farm work.