No pardon, no way

IT’S NOT THAT I care if “Scooter” Libby gets pardoned. Sure, he obstructed justice, but putting someone named Scooter in jail seems a little harsh. Putting someone named Scooter in elementary school seems a little harsh.

I object to the idea of the pardon itself. I may have dropped my political science major, but I know that giving one person the right to let people out of jail without any reason might lead to abuse of power. This is why we don’t give one person the right to put people in jail without any reason.

I know the pardon leads to corruption because if I were President Bush, I’d pardon the hell out of Libby. If a guy working for me got arrested for essentially protecting my No. 1 employee, and I had an unlimited stack of get-out-of-jail-free cards, I’d slip him one for sure. But first I’d make him agree to go on “Dancing With the Stars.” With just a little power, I turn into a jerk.

The pardon, which had been the right of the monarch since Henry VIII, was put into Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution by Alexander Hamilton, who argued in the Federalist Papers that without it, “justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.” Hamilton did not realize that in the future, judges would cry about Anna Nicole Smith. He also didn’t realize that challenging Aaron Burr to a duel might kill him. So maybe we shouldn’t be taking advice from the guy.

It turns out that despite Hamilton’s expectations, not many poor people without political connections get spared the cruelty of justice. In fact, almost all presidential pardoning has been bad policy. The first one was used by George Washington to forgive members of the Whiskey Rebellion. I don’t know all that much about the Whiskey Rebellion, but I’m guessing from the words “whiskey” and “rebellion” that these may not be the first guys you’d want to let out of San Quentin. Unless the only other people there were members of the Meth Rape Bunch.

To unite the country, Andrew Johnson kept pardoning Southerners for fighting in the Civil War, thus emboldening that culture so much that we got Confederate flag decorations, Stone Mountain and the Iraq war. Jimmy Carter forgave Vietnam draft dodgers, which took away all their edge, leading directly to yuppiedom, David E. Kelley shows and the Iraq war.

Most other pardons went to powerful friends of the president: Richard Nixon pardoned longtime supporter Jimmy Hoffa; Gerald R. Ford pardoned Nixon; Carter, in the most ‘70s pardon possible, granted one to Peter Yarrow from Peter, Paul and Mary for taking off his clothes and hitting on two teenage sisters. Ronald Reagan, in the most ‘80s pardon possible, let campaign contributor George Steinbrenner off the hook. George H. W. Bush let Nixon campaign donor Armand Hammer and all his fellow Iran-Contra friends go; Bill Clinton handed pardons out to anyone who told him he was pretty.

Pardoning subverts justice, snubbing the democratic concept of being judged by your peers. If Nixon had stood trial, the truth would have healed the country far more than trying to ignore Watergate, and the presidency might have been taken down a peg. If Caspar Weinberger had gone to jail, perhaps future presidents -- and their henchmen -- might have tread more carefully on our laws. If Steinbrenner had gotten time in the slammer, Chuck Knoblauch might still be playing.

The only way to fix this is a constitutional amendment. It’s not like those should only be reserved for super-important things such as flag burning and keeping men from marrying each other. The last amendment, passed in 1992, had to do with congressional pay raises. The next amendment, if not about pardoning, may well involve our right to party.

Not only would removing the pardon be fair, it would save money by eliminating the job of Pardon Attorney, which, outside of Guantanamo Bay, is the easiest prosecutorial job in the world. And even more important, it would finally put an end to the “pardoning the Thanksgiving turkey” crap.

Even that part of the pardon has been corrupted: Since 1995, in the strangest cross-promotional deal ever, the turkeys are sent to live every day of the rest of their lives at Disneyland. How you get a pardon from that fate, I don’t know. But I’m all for it.

jstein@latimescolumnists.com