Subject: Re: The Problem With Polymarket
About that. How is dismissing cases against you even legal? Is this really a presidential power/prerogative? Ditto for a self-pardon. Would these actions survive a legal challenge all the way to the Supreme Court?

Dismissing the cases is pretty straightforward - there's a longstanding DOJ determination that the President can't be prosecuted while in office. It's a basic separation of powers issue. Prosecuting someone involves the Judiciary exercising power over the defendant. If the defendant is the President - the holder of the Executive power - then the Judiciary gets an enormous amount of power over the Executive, and can severely limit how (or even the ability of) the Executive to perform that function. That's not allowed, according to the DOJ's interpretations. It's somewhat supported by how the SCOTUS has analyzed legal cases against sitting Presidents. It's allowed them to move forward, but has taken pains to point out that the things being allowed (subpoenas of records in U.S. v. Nixon, participation in a civil trial in Jones v. Clinton) would not interfere with the President carrying out his duties.

So if Trump becomes President, he now has a Constitutional shield against the Judiciary. He's not above the law, but the law requires that the office he holds has independence from the Legislature and Judiciary to some extent.

So all the federal prosecutions would stop immediately. Trump would certainly make sure that his AG appointment regarded the existing DOJ interpretation as correct - that's going to be a threshold qualification question - and that he would make sure that the federal prosecutions would be withdrawn while Trump was in office. Jack Smith would certainly be relieved of his position. That would de facto end the prosecutions - sure, it's possible that a Democratic President's AG in 2029 might decide to spin those prosecutions up again, even perhaps re-naming Smith, but that seems very unlikely.

As for a self-pardon, the Pardon Power has absolutely no textual limitation or hedge. By its very nature, a pardon allows someone to escape the consequences of a violation of the law, a dispensation to which they have no legal entitlement to. It's based on the sovereign power of monarchs, who as the embodiment of the sovereign state had the unrestricted power to exempt someone from the consequences of a crime - assigning to the President one of the powers of kings.

Which makes it hard to figure out whether that power would extend to a self-pardon. The question doesn't even have meaning in the original context, because the King could never be convicted of a crime in the first place - sovereign immunity puts the King (as head of state) outside of the criminal justice system altogether. Since Kings rule for life, there would never be a situation where the King would have occasion to contemplate pardoning themselves.

Although we can debate whether the Constitutional version of the Pardon Power would have been intended to include or not include a self-pardon, if Trump did pardon himself it would create a legal issue that would certainly add a year or more of pre-trial legal wrangling into a criminal prosecution.

Plus, Trump can easily moot that question. Just schedule a colonscopy, make sure he's sedated, do a formal 25th Amendment notification that Vance will exercise the powers of the office while he's under, and have Vance pardon him as well. Easy peasy, and now there's a backstop that allows the Courts to avoid even reaching the question of whether self-pardons are valid.