Should/Will Edward Snowden ever be pardoned by the United States?
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The State has overplayed its hand. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was going to answer that he should be, but wouldn't be. But the backlash against the extreme conservatism in this country is growing. Oligarchs and their friends in government have overplayed their hand. They could have paid higher wages, guaranteed health care coverage, and made sure everyone had a place to sleep and food to eat. They still would have been ungodly wealthy. But instead they screwed over most workers, and overplayed their hand. Between austerity, the pandemic, the rise of the US police state and Trump going bonkers, it is a perfect storm. When things subside, which could take some time, people like Snowden and Assange will be treated in the same way Daniel Ellsberg is now. No way to tell how long it is going to take, but the sequence is underway.
Re:The State has overplayed its hand. [Solution?] (Score:4, Interesting)
Just concurrence and for similar reasons. Why say it? So maybe you won't feel so lonely if the hot topic starts raining trolls? Or just to congratulate you for an FP well played?
However, I always want to find solutions. Part of the problem in this case is perversion of the justice system, so I'm going to throw in my current solution approach. I'm not convinced this is the best or only solution approach to fixing the American courts. Actually, I'm pretty sure there must be some huge flaw in the overly simple idea, but so far no one has pointed it out. Even worse, no one has offered a better solution. But here it is, such as it is:
Definition 1: A nonpartisan Justice is one who was confirmed by a majority of both parties. Any other Justice is partisan.
Rule 1: Any nonpartisan Justice may ask a partisan Justice to be recused from any matter brought before the Court.
Sure, a president can pick any nominee he likes, but it won't work well. To affect the partisan decisions, you need nonpartisan Justices.
Historical notes: If you look at the history, you might be surprised to discover that the norm used to be for nonpartisan Justices. It has completely changed during my own lifetime. Did you know that three of Reagan's nominees were perfectly nonpartisan, without a single negative note in the Senate? Or that the Notorious RBG was the last surviving nonpartisan Justice? (But if she was truly a friend of Scalia (as many reports have said), would she have exercised Rule 1 against him?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I'll go ahead and iron out two obvious wrinkles. (1) The current Justices would have to be grandfathered as nonpartisan, even though none of them are. (2) One party could refuse to vote for a highly qualified Justice merely to keep that Justice from qualifying as nonpartisan. I think that is a political problem and needs to be addressed with political solutions, which also means the solutions will have to evolve over time. However the obvious starting point in the game is for the other party to retaliate in kind, which would be too dangerous a game to play. No one knows the future, but your side could lose too badly if the last surviving nonpartisan Justice wound up favoring the other party. I'm not sure if it's safe to apply reason to American politics these days, but the obvious reasoned approach is for the parties to find and agree upon Justices they both like. (Yeah, I'm basically ignoring their verbal claims about wanting impartial justice.)
So what's wrong with the idea? Or what's your better solution?
Re: The State has overplayed its hand. [Solution?] (Score:2, Insightful)
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Government institutions used to work to their own agnedas and sought to maintain their own power structures. Now they have been supplanted by the parties, who use the institutions as arms of their power structure. Thus, the Senate no longer has an interest in controlling the other two branches. It only has to serve the majority party that controls it and be used as a weapon against them (if they are controlled by the other party).
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two
Re: The State has overplayed its hand. [Solution? (Score:1)
Re: The State has overplayed its hand. [Solution?] (Score:3, Informative)
Re: The State has overplayed its hand. [Solution? (Score:2, Flamebait)
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The troll is just lying and you are wasting your time feeding him. My theory is that he cannot be so sincerely stupid or proudly ignorant. The kindest view is that he's a professional and paid to fake it.
But I'll go ahead an post a link to the actual data. You can see that nonpartisan confirmations ended with Bill Chinton's two nominations, and RBG was the last survivor of those days. Even Reagan made three perfectly nonpartisan nominations without a single negative vote. However Reagan also began getting h
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I think you're some sort of troll or you are profoundly ignorant of the historical records of the American government, especially the history of the Supreme Court itself. Before "investing" additional keystrokes, I'll invite you to persuade me otherwise. Many approaches, but I'll go ahead and suggest you start with something relatively easy, say Marbury v Madison.
By the way, I dismiss abortion as a fake issue with great appeal for ignorant people. Usually extremely ignorant. If you want to persuade me you r
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*sigh*
And I just had my eyeglasses repaired, too.
s/you rare informed/you are informed/
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No basis for discussion in spite of minor areas of possible agreement. I regard the "discussion" as terminated.
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Good point. Once SCOTUS nominees started including people like Bork, bipartisanship started to become increasingly unlikely (despite the unanimous confirmation of Kennedy). Makes you wonder what Reagan was thinking; it's not like he didn't know that so many Americans still remembered Watergate and thought it was a bad thing, as opposed to the modern take (not nearly as popular back in 1987) that Watergate was a virtuous use of government power. Once that happened, it was on and nowdays I don't really expect
Elect the supreme court judges as well (Score:1)
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Yes, however you should probably look up the process for amending the constitution, as the campaign you suggest has a rather high barrier to success.
Re: The State has overplayed its hand. [Solution?] (Score:1)
Scope of the Constitution? (Score:1)
There is no need for a Constitutional amendment to change the rules of recusal. There is a question whether the Congress can do it or only recommend that the Court adopt such a rule. I can only think of one way for a Constitutional question to come up. I just checked that the Constitution does not mention recusal explicitly, but if it mentions the rules of the Supreme Court in a way that appears to allow Congress to specify recusal rules, then it is weirdly conceivable that the Court could try to rule that
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I was going to answer that he should be, but wouldn't be. But the backlash against the extreme conservatism in this country is growing.
That seems to be counterbalanced by the last four years' revelations that the extreme conservatism and racism and greed and bold-faced lying has zero consequence. More bigot sociopaths are being taught they can get away with - in some cases literal - murder.
Oligarchs and their friends in government have overplayed their hand. They could have paid higher wages, guaranteed health care coverage, and made sure everyone had a place to sleep and food to eat. They still would have been ungodly wealthy. But instead they screwed over most workers, and overplayed their hand. Between austerity, the pandemic, the rise of the US police state and Trump going bonkers, it is a perfect storm.
They could have done a lot of altruistic, caring, sensitive, socially-beneficial things. But they didn't. And the bar has been permanently lowered for the basement on civility. Precedent is set, and can't be reset.
America had this gun law written i
Re: The State has overplayed its hand. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: The State has overplayed its hand. (Score:4, Interesting)
> We did this in the UK to get Brexit
And how did it worked out for you?
Trump is pretty much American version of Brexit. He is not a republican politician. He's not a republican at all. In a sense he is 3rd party. He tricked people into voting for him by promising strong, independent US, going back to the good old days and sticking it to the establishment while in reality he was just thinking about personal profits.
Voting 3rd party does nothing when half of the population is stupid enough to buy cheap, populist slogans. Brexit and Trump are both perfect examples of that.
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As a non-American looking from the outside in, I can tell you that both political parties are stupid and so are their dedicated voters. Americans need to stop voting for the two main parties and accept the trade off that the worse of two evils might win as a result. Two terms of voting for an minority party across states would result in change. We did this in the UK to get Brexit after Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats all smugly told us what we should be voting for. A couple of large votes for UKIP nationally and the message was loud and clear.
This wont happen because dedicated voters are too stupid.. here is why:
No not really. The two parties have worked so hard to maintain control that it is basically impossible for additional parties to get on the ballot.
California has jungle primaries, which sound great as anyone can run in the primary, but only the top 2 finishers in the primary get on the main ballot. In most races, this means that Californians have their choice of democrat A or democrat B for every race on the ballot (yes, once in blue moon there is a republican on the ballot).
Texas requires 10% of the vo
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As a non-American looking from the outside in, I can tell you that both political parties are stupid and so are their dedicated voters.
The system is rigged so there will only ever be 2 parties. Voting 3rd party for president is literally throwing away your vote. A 3rd party would have to have a majority in Congress first, which will never happen. Worse still, the most extreme candidate wins the nomination for both parties. Then We the People get to pick between the two extremes. I wake up every morning and say, "OMG how did Trump end up president?!". And I voted for him! This time around we choose between Trump and a senile old man
Voting 3rd party...throwing away your vote (Score:1)
Pretty much true. Worse yet, it usually most benefits the candidate of the major party you utterly hate!
BUT, since they know this, and we know this, then throwing away your vote is a sign of how extremely dissatisfied you are. And it's a far far better option than not voting at all. So when enough people vote third party, then the major parties eventually wake up, and the one that wakes up first, will have the advantage that the third party voter can take some satisfaction in.
How much a thorn in the s
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If you think Joe Biden is representative of the "extreme left", you have lost all perspective.
Re: The State has overplayed its hand. (Score:3)
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That's a lie the democrats have been telling you.
Pre-Obamacare, let's say I had hemophilia and switched jobs. My condition would be immediately covered by the new policy because I had not experienced a break in coverage. If I didn't previously have health insurance, there would be a waiting period before a pre-existing condition would be covered. It was something like 6 months, if I remember. If you can buy insurance after you get sick, it's not insurance. That would be like buying car insurance after
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Re: ...Obama for not going far enough (Score:1)
Obama was afraid that going further might have been so hard as to lose the whole thing. And that was astute and correct. He also figured that it was only necessary to give voters a taste of government medical care, no matter how flawed, and it would be impossible to entirely roll back, and would eventually evolve into something more sensible. That was also astute and correct.
That Obamacare was, and is still quite imperfect, and is accordingly tough to defend. Hopefully now and in the long run, factions
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> A couple of large votes for
the most distrastrous fuckup in the UK since WW2, sponsored by Russia and racists?
Being proud of effecting change via civic process is good. Begin proud of this particular one, not so much.
It's rich that someone so ignorant of the realities of politics thinks they're in a position to lecture those in the USA about what they should do with their votes. Especially considering what the impact of voting for a non-existent "minority party" could be in the upcoming election.
(heh -
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excuse me for a moment.
ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Really, you got clusterf*ck that is Brexit and you think thats a good thing?
The UK is seen as a untrustworthy basketcase, where people that even voted for Brexit have now changed their mind because they've started to realise that it'll mean lorry's parked beside their houses in Kent, longer q's at your border with the EU and higher prices in the shop.
Not to mention you've already gone into a recession due to covid and the ex
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> ... it's very evident that there's a huge population of really nasty, ignorant people still around. They're busy breeding, and indoctrinating
Don't you mean "inbreeding and doctrinatin'" ? :)
Re:The State has overplayed its hand. (Score:4, Interesting)
Snowden's treason occurred during Obama's presidency. Obama and Secretary of State Clinton (Democrats, need I remind you) tried to get him extradited back to the United States for trial.
On the contrary, Trump (who really has no core values), has said positive things about Snowden and Assange because he felt it might help him politically. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0... [nytimes.com]
But please, continue telling us about the conservative conspiracy running the world...
Re: The State has overplayed its hand. (Score:2)
I hope you're right. I live in a red state where everyone loves Trump so I don't see it but I also realize my view is skewed.
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> hey could have paid higher wages, guaranteed health care coverage, and made sure everyone had a place to sleep and food to eat. They still would have been ungodly wealthy. But instead they screwed over most workers, and overplayed their hand.
C'mon, everyone here is an engineer. See the entire system!
The people at the top do no magically get money. They get money because people on the middle is allowed to steal/exploit a little for themselves. it's a factorial sum, where further from the top you approac
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Snowden and Assange are two very different types of people I think. Snowden seemed like he was trying to do something good. Assange has always been a paranoid, unstable narcissist with right-wing tendencies.
fairly safe bet (Score:3)
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If you include all definitions of "will be" it's a pretty safe bet, even if it's posthumously and 150 years from now
Yeah, either forgotten or pardoned. I assume they talked about in his own lifetime though.
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He is he not a traitor? (Score:4, Interesting)
His revelations about domestic spying is whistleblowing. If he only did this he would be a hero.
His revelations about what the NSA was doing overseas compromised legitimate, legal(to the US) NSA operations.
One does not offset the other.
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And what's your opinion on Trump, who by all accounts, was in constant communication with Putin's administration during his campaign?
Search for "Trump mystery server".
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Who has more influence on the US congress and senate: Russia or AIPAC?
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So AIPAC's influence on Congress means we shouldn't care that our current President was basically elected because of efforts by Putin-- who Trump may, or may not, be heavily in debt to.
Well, that certainly clears that up.
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It really pains me to say it, but this is spot on.
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Perfectly stated.
Nope, he is not. (Score:4, Insightful)
Treason is defined in the constitution: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
Snowden did not do this. He merely revealed that the US was spying on everybody in the whole damn world, including all US citizens. But if that does not bother you, then you obviously don't give a shit about the constitution anyway.
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How does leaking a ton of our classified information about our intelligence programs not aid our enemies? The fact that there illegal things done by the Obama administration could have been handled without burning our intelligence agencies and capabilities.
Federal law allows a whistleblower to go to any member of the Senate (not sure about house) and disclose what he found without repercussions. Surely at least one would have been right for him? He never tried going to any internal or political whistleblowe
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Blindly trusting a secret court overseen by a small handful of representatives from only a few states not to fuck us in the ass isn't the type of control I'm referring to. Separation of concerns and abstraction of implementation might work well in computer programming, but when you s
Forgiveness would be a show of strength (Score:2)
Governments, religions, and whatever that try to suppress dissent (whistleblowing, blasphemy) are showing they are weak. I am not actually sure if Snowden went too far, and did any real harm to his country. If he did do some harm, then I guess he should be punished for that. But it would be wrong to say that any exposure of state wrong-doing is going to be treated as high treason. That would be petty bullying on the part of the state. If folks get the idea that their government is using force to cover thing
He works for Putin! (Score:1)
The last time I heard the punishment for High Treason is getting put against a wall and shot.
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Fair trials are a illusion, they are never really fair if the legal representation you get depends on how much money you have. Also plea bargains undermine the whole system.
Missing option (Score:2)
"Ever" is a long time (Score:2)
Such a long time (Score:2)
Should and will... (Score:2)
Pardon is irrelevant (Score:2, Insightful)
First, you can't be pardoned until you've been convicted. That means a trial has to happen, and a conviction returned.
National security is one of those tricky areas-- you're not expected to be a whistleblower, which is what he technically is. Still, it's possible to break the law, and still be doing the Right Thing, so in my opinion, go ahead, try him, convict him, and issue a suspended sentence.
Then the idea of a pardon can be discussed.
Re:Pardon is irrelevant (Score:4, Informative)
First, you can't be pardoned until you've been convicted. That means a trial has to happen, and a conviction returned.
[Laughs in Richard Nixon]
Re:Pardon is irrelevant (Score:4, Informative)
First, you can't be pardoned until you've been convicted. That means a trial has to happen, and a conviction returned.
No. This is not how that works. You can receive a pardon from any crime, whether or not it's even been charged, let alone tried.
Pardon means you accept your guilty (Score:2)
As I understand it, when a person receives a pardon they are admitting they committed the crime and are not going to appeal at any time in the future.
This means that you can receive a pardon before you are charged or even being tried, but you are admitting guilt.
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Gerald Ford, in justifying his pardon of Richard
He will be (Score:2)
It may be posthumously, it may be in decades or even centuries, but it will happen.
Assuming, of course, that America exists in 2022.
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Yeah exactly like I'm thinking. He should be and will, but he might either be dead or say 80 with terminal heart failure before it happens. I just think at some point someone will bite the controversial bullet on this, because the controversy will get more distant and policies might go more towards open spying and banning secret plans on US citizens etc. Basically at some point it'll be long enough and a different enough time that someone will pardon him, whether it happens in his lifetime ...
Context Required (Score:4, Insightful)
The issue is that whilst a government might publicly say that they support whistleblowing, it simply isn't true. Ask Purple Heart recipient and retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman how he got on for following whistleblowing protocols to the letter. Ask Alexander's brother, Yevgeny, how well he did when he was hounded out of the White House for doing nothing other than being related to Alexander.
If you set aside the obvious malicious actions of the present administration when it comes to punishing perceived "enemies", what you're left with is a government that might publicly say that it supports the principle of whistle-blowing, but privately does everything in its considerable power to discourage potential whistle-blowers from stepping forward. The government does this because it dislikes the embarrassment caused.
So when people comment about Edward Snowden "disclosing" confidential information, the thing that really upset the government was that they now had to admit that they were actively and intrusively spying on friendly governments in allied countries. Go take a look at how Chancellor Angela Merkel reacted when she discovered that the US Government was tapping her personal cell phone. Hint: she was *really* pissed off.
The thing to bear in mind is that governments hostile to the US - China, Russia, North Korea, etc. would expect the US to try to spy on them. Friendly governments might have a pretty good idea that it goes on, but because the US is considered a "friendly power" a blind eye is turned. But when all this comes out in to the open and citizens realize what is being done in their name, they get angry. The issue the government had with Snowden wasn't to do with "secrets", but with making them look bad.
This is why he won't be pardoned. Because the government wants to send a message to anyone else contemplating blowing the whistle: if you do the same, you'll have to accept life on the run, until we catch you.
It's a slightly more subtle form of the same intimidation we condemn when others do it.
But its intimidation all the same.
Unfortunately a bit late (Score:4, Insightful)
Snowden should be treated like Assange (Score:1)
Cowboy Neal option (Score:2)
Not my place to opine any of the options. I don't know what the evidence is nor can I predict the future. Doubtful that we'll ever know the truth in any case. The media has some of the evidence but, I'm sure, not all of it. Treason is a tricky subject particularly with the new whistleblower exceptions and all.
Should, won't.. (Score:2)
Chances of Assange or Snowden getting a fair trial in the US - zero. Chances of either presidential candidate giving them a pardon because they acted in the public interest - about the same.
No. Maybe. But... (Score:1)
Time frame is the issue (Score:2)
he will eventually get pardoned. It might not even be in our lifetime, but he will get pardoned.
If Sheriff Arpaio can get pardoned, it is not inconceivable that a future president of the United States could pardon Snowden.
Whether that is the proper thing to do is up for debate, in both of those cases.
He... (Score:1)
Running Away Is Its Own Reward (Score:1)
While I do think Snowden's disclosures were ethically defensible (moreso than Manning's), I had to admit I found this logic pretty compelling. Clemency shouldn't even be a question for someone who has completely escaped responsibility for their actions, regardless of what those actions were.
Having exiled himself, Snowden chose the