2023-08-03 13:11:05
The stage that opens before the imputation by one president of the USA accused of trying to manipulate the electoral results that, at the same time, wants to run again in the elections to return to the White House with real possibilities of achieving it is so extraordinary that breaks all the molds. Republican Donald Trump is preparing to put the system’s seams to the test again because its judicial and political situation raises futures where, today, there are few certainties y thousands of questions. The lack of precedents, a breeding ground for speculation, lends itself to fueling experts, with opinions not always on the same line. Among these futures, it is worth highlighting one that is already on the lips of US analysts: “Can Trump run for election and pardon himself if he wins?
The answer to the first part of the question falls into the category of certainties. Yes, Trump can run in the elections despite being accused in three court cases -the last one of trying to manipulate the electoral result favorable to Joe Biden-. According to US lawnothing prevents a person from running for election if they are faced with criminal chargesor even if he is convicted and is in the jail. A different matter is whether voters would support a candidate with this profile. In the case of Trump, the first two judicial accusations have not seemed to take their toll on him in his attempt to become the Republican candidate. It is still too early to calculate the impact of his recent and most serious accusation.
There are two previous, very distant, imprisoned candidates for the US presidency. The first, the socialist Eugene Debs in 1920, convicted of an anti-war speech in 1918; and the conspiracionista Lyndon LaRoucheconvicted of fraud, one of whose eight 1992 presidential runs came from a federal prison in Minnesota. In no case did they achieve their objective, but not because they could not present themselves, but because of the lack of favor of the electorate.
uncharted ground
Regarding the second part of the question about whether Trump could pardon himself if he wins, there are no precedents and, therefore, you enter unexplored territory and, ultimately, open to the last word of the judges. Pardoning oneself would mean an extraordinary attribution of presidential power and the Supreme Court would be the final arbiter on the constitutionality of his forgiveness.
“We are so far from anything that has happened,” he sums up the newspaper ‘The New York Times’ Erwin Chemerinsky, an expert in constitutional law at the University of California at Berkeley. “This is just conjecture and the election of a jailed president would create a legal crisis that would almost certainly have to be resolved by the courts,” he adds.
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As for the possibility that Trump was elected president while he was in prison, the expert assures that it could be stripped of his authority under the 25th Amendment, which establishes a process for transferring authority to the vice president if the president is “incapable of discharging the powers and duties of his office.” But that would require the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare Trump unable to carry out his duties, a remote prospect since these would be Trump’s own appointed loyalists.
It is also likely, according to the expert, that Trump could demand his release claiming that his imprisonment prevents him from fulfilling his constitutional obligations as president. Such a case would squarely impinge on the separation of powers, and Trump’s lawyers would argue that keeping a duly elected president in prison would be interference by the government. power of attorney in the operations of the executive power.
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