Will Bush pardon Libby?

Long record of controversial pardons
As Clinton noted in 2001, his pardon of Rich had been “extremely controversial,” but, he argued, so had previous president’s pardons and clemencies.

Some examples:

• President Grover Cleveland’s pardoning of Mormon settlers in Utah to protect from polygamy prosecutions.
• President Harding’s Christmas 1921 pardon of socialist leader Eugene Debs, who was in federal prison for impeding the war effort in World War I. ("I want him to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife," Harding explained.)
• President Ford’s pardon of ex-president Richard Nixon in 1974 for his role in blocking the investigation of the Watergate burglary.
• The first President Bush’s 1992 pardon of six officials convicted in the Iran-contra affair, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger.

“I believe my pardon decision was in the best interests of justice,” Clinton said of his pardon of Rich.

So, too, Ford argued in 1974, in the face of a storm of protest. Then-Sen. Walter Mondale, D-Minn., who along with Jimmy Carter would defeat Ford and his running mate Bob Dole in 1976 — due in part to the pardon furor — was moved to propose an amendment to the Constitution that would have allowed a pardon to be over-ridden by a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate.

At the time Clinton, then a young Arkansas politician running for Congress, denounced Ford’s pardon of Nixon, saying it “is yet another blow to that vast body of law-abiding Americans, whose faith in equal justice under law has been shaken.”

But 25 years later, as president, Clinton awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Ford and said at the White House ceremony that he’d changed his mind about the Nixon pardon.

“You didn't get caught up in the moment and you were right,” Clinton told Ford. “You were right for the controversial decisions you made the keep the country together and I thank you for that.”

Near-absolute power
The Constitution grants near-absolute pardon power to the president, saying “he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

At the constitutional convention in 1787, North Carolina delegate James Iredell (who later served on the Supreme Court) said the only restraint on the abuse of the pardon power by a president was the risk of “damnation of his fame to all future ages….”

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field wrote in a landmark 1867 decision that a pardon “blots out of existence the guilt, so that in the eye of the law, the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offense.” And that's precisely what Libby's critics do not want.

In the wake of the Rich pardon, the Senate held hearings in February of 2001 to debate whether Congress ought to pass the Mondale constitutional amendment or some other limit on the pardon power.

But the storm over Rich soon quieted and by September of 2001 the political focus had shifted to terrorism and the potential for Saddam Hussein to have weapons of mass destruction. And that’s just about where Libby re-entered the drama.

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