Thinking of pardoning Ted Stevens? Dick Cheney? Tom Delay? John Yoo? Yourself? Well on behalf of the winners of yesterday's election, I can promise there will be consequences.
First, your library.
Presidential libraries no longer get much federal funding. However your silly personal monument at Southern Methodist University will not get a penny of federal money. It also will not get any of your presidential papers, which are the property of the US Government. Instead they will be stored in some random warehouse in Washington.
Second, your ability to withhold documents from the public goes. This Presidential Records FAQfrom the National Archives is informative.
The act gives the President and Vice President the ability to place up to six Presidential restriction categories on their records. Records falling within one of these restriction categories may be withheld from release to the general public for up to twelve years after the end of a Presidential administration.
This provision is eliminated. You get to withhold nothing from the public under this provision.
The act also makes Presidential records subject to eight of the nine Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemptions.
This has to be looked at too. Obviously some records will need to be withheld for national security purposes. But we'll make sure the Archives gets plenty of money to quickly review all FOIA requests. A website with an OCR of all your documents too.
Five years after the end of an administration, Presidential records become available to FOIA requests.
Nope, no five year delay for you.
Second, there will be well-funded special prosecutors. Better make sure the wording of each and every one of your pardons is airtight. If they aren't, they will be challanged. Hope you and any potential pardonees have plenty of personal funds to cover this.
Third, your pardon power does extend to future acts. Before you went into politics, you were a bad businessman who somehow kept making money even as your companies went bankrupt. If you are thinking of going into business again, we will be watching you very closely. In a way that will turn off a lot potential investors. Though they'd probably be turned off anyway by all the documents we will rush to make public.
Fourth, your pardon power does does not extend outside of the jurisdiction of the United States. Remember what happened to Pinochet. I guess this isn't such a big deal for you since you don't like to travel that much. But in the past ex-presidents made a lot of money on the international business speaking circuit.
Fifth, is it even possible to pardon an organization? I'm thinking the RNC has violated a lot of laws. But in particular, violations relating to your use of RNC e-mail addresses for official business, and the subsequent destruction of many of these e-mails.
Right now we are in a happy, not vengeful mood. Most of us will be content to just do our best to help fix the problems you caused. But a series of abusive high-level pardons will have serious consequences.