Pardons And Sanctuary Cities Were Meant For Compassion, Not Cruelty
The last 3 years have felt so dark, but the last week in particular has felt especially bleak. It feels as if our country has taken several gigantic steps further into autocracy, and the only likely remedy is more and more dramatic. Trump is telling officers meant to enforce the law to break it, promising to use the military for his own dangerous political whims, and mocking its built-in restraints. He's claiming in not-too-thinly-veiled terms that he plans to harm people who disagree with him by releasing people he considers disease-ridden and criminal (they aren't) into cities that vote for Democrats. Nicolle Wallace asked Chuck Rosenberg about the events of this week, aptly describing them as "lurches towards authoritarianism, towards extrajudicial mentality."
ROSENBERG: I don't know precisely what's going on, but I can tell you this, Nicolle. At least historically, pardons were an act of presidential compassion and mercy. Certainly how they were designed and intended. We have been talking for the last 22 months about pardons as an act of obstruction of justice and evidence of intent. Now it seems, according to the Times reporting, and I can't wait to read it, that pardons are also a projection of presidential power in a policy-making role. And that's just hard for me to comprehend. It just doesn't fit with anything I ever knew about presidential authority or how presidents use pardons, as I said, for mercy and compassion. Can I make one other point about sanctuary cities?
WALLACE: Please.