{"id":93,"date":"2026-05-26T19:38:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T19:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=93"},"modified":"2026-05-26T19:38:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T19:38:23","slug":"todd-blanches-effort-to-grant-trump-and-his-family-forever-immunity-hides-a-greater-danger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=93","title":{"rendered":"Todd Blanche\u2019s Effort to Grant Trump and His Family \u201cForever Immunity\u201d Hides a Greater Danger"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sign up for\u00a0<\/em>Executive Dysfunction<\/em>, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story each week about how Trump is changing the law\u2014or how the law is pushing back. You\u2019ll also receive updates on the latest from Slate\u2019s Jurisprudence team.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s Attacks on the Lawyer Who Argued Birthright Citizenship Give the Game Away<\/a><\/p>\n

In a weirdly uncaptioned document, it was revealed last week that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has birthed a tangled word salad that purports to \u201cFOREVER\u201d (twice and in all caps) prevent any part of the federal government from ever investigating \u201cany matters\u201d involving the Trump family and their corporate alter egos. Be it tax evasion, the corruption of foreign officials, or even hiring undocumented workers, Blanche would have us believe nothing can later be done by the law.<\/p>\n

In the understandable rush to condemn the self-dealing inherent in the anti-weaponization fund, however, we may be missing another, hidden concern\u2014the troubling claim to have general power to switch off law. It is more important to resist this claim than to heed the objections that have already been aired to Blanche\u2019s declaration of civil immunity focused on a federal statute barring political interference with the IRS. For accepting Blanche\u2019s claim of exceptional power would mean adding a new and destabilizing tool to the arsenal of presidents\u2014one that not only lacks constitutional credentials, but will predictably be abused dramatically by executives of both parties.<\/p>\n

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Trump\u2019s civil \u201cpardon\u201d is a legal nullity for a simple reason: Neither the executive branch nor the president have any constitutional power to bind future officials in this way. Since the government under Trump wasn\u2019t about to investigate the president, Blanche\u2019s order leaves things exactly where they were a week ago.<\/p>\n

It is a basic principle of constitutional law that a government cannot bind its future self. The idea runs back at least to the influential 18th<\/sup>-century English jurist William Blackstone, who instructed that \u201cActs of parliament derogatory from the power of subsequent parliaments bind not.\u201d The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that this is true for our Congress. One Congress, the court said in 1932, cannot \u201cimpose itself upon those to follow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pause for a moment and think about the very fact of our Constitution, and this no-entrenchment principle becomes self-evident. It is the sovereign people alone who can craft entrenched rules. They do so by enacting new constitutional text via Article 5. Even then, the people can reverse themselves (as happened with the amendments on Prohibition). If one Congress (or president) could create new rules that cannot be displaced by statute, it would steal that sovereign power from the people. Nothing in the Constitution gives elected actors this exceptional power.<\/p>\n

To be sure, Congress can create new private property or contract rights that cannot be undone later because they are shielded by other parts of the Constitution. If you buy land from the government, for instance, officials cannot simply seize it back without violating the Takings Clause. But Blanche\u2019s words created no property interest and forged no contract.<\/p>\n

If Congress has no power to bind its successors, where could the executive branch obtain such power? In creating the \u201canti-weaponization fund,\u201d Blanche claimed to be acting on the basis of federal statutes. Yet if Congress cannot bind future elected actors, it follows that Congress has no power to delegate that power to the executive branch.<\/p>\n

Read more The San Diego Mosque Killers Weren\u2019t Just Islamophobic. They Had Another Terrifying Motive.<\/a><\/p>\n

Here again there are exceptions, but these underscore the absence of constitutional authority for Blanche\u2019s action. To begin with, courts have long allowed plea deals with criminal defendants, when offered as \u201cinducement or consideration\u201d by prosecutors. Once a deal is struck, however, it is binding if accepted by a court. Only then, the court has explained, \u201csuch promise must be fulfilled.\u201d Plea bargains, that is, are compounded into a court\u2019s judgments. And it is black-letter constitutional law that the executive cannot undo such judgments.<\/p>\n

This leaves the president\u2019s power to grant pardons. No one doubts that pardons are indeed irreversible. Yet the pardon power is circumscribed: It applies only to criminal \u201coffenses,\u201d excluding impeachments. And it can be exercised only by the president in person. This was the basis for the Justice Department\u2019s 1974 (never repudiated) conclusion that a self-pardon is impermissible because no one can be the judge in their own case. Trump himself recognized the personal quality of the pardon power when he ordered investigations into President Joe Biden\u2019s use of an autopen for clemency decisions. Also, critically, pardons cannot be offered for future offenses.<\/p>\n

The care the Framers took in delineating this irreversible presidential power\u2014requiring the president\u2019s personal involvement, and limiting it to certain federal criminal matters\u2014is telling. It suggests that no other irreversible power to immunize lurks in the Constitution\u2019s silences.<\/p>\n

No doubt, Blanche was careful to avoid the language of pardons for fear of political backlash. His care in working around that power, though, makes plain that he was claiming a new and distinct power lacking roots in the constitutional text or tradition.<\/p>\n

Conceding the existence of an executive power to say that legislative commands do not apply, now or ever, to certain persons as a matter of ordinary civil law would be a terrible mistake. Just imagine how it might be used\u2014by either a Republican or a Democratic administration. At the close of his term, Trump might declare permanent amnesty for everyone who\u2019s violated the Clean Air Act or the securities laws. Next, a President Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro could do the same for the immigration statutes. And since the power that Blanche has seized has no basis in the Constitution, it lacks limiting principles in the text. So perhaps it could be used to simply strike statutes from the books permanently.<\/p>\n

There is, no doubt, good cause to call out the deep and extensive corruption of this administration, exemplified in Blanche\u2019s civil pardon. But it is better to recognize, and reject, that deeper, more destabilizing attack on the very idea of law lurking beneath.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more A Modest Proposal for How Democrats Can Improve the 2028 Primary<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blanche would have us believe nothing can later be done by the law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":92,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[24,10,11],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jurisprudence","tag-department-of-justice","tag-donald-trump","tag-jurisprudence"],"yoast_head":"\nTodd Blanche\u2019s Effort to Grant Trump and His Family \u201cForever Immunity\u201d Hides a Greater Danger - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=93\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Todd Blanche\u2019s Effort to Grant Trump and His Family \u201cForever Immunity\u201d Hides a Greater Danger - 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