What happened
AlterNet reports that political correspondent James Rosen argues President Donald Trump’s use of the pardon power fulfills George Mason’s 1787 warning that a president could use clemency to protect people involved in crimes the president had encouraged. Rosen points to Trump’s first-day mass pardon of January 6 participants and recent reports alleging that friends or relatives of people seeking clemency have offered millions of dollars for access to pardons.
Mason urged the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to restrict presidential clemency, including for treason. The delegates rejected those limits. James Madison maintained that impeachment and removal could restrain an abusive president, but Rosen argues that safeguard is ineffective when Congress is controlled by lawmakers unwilling to confront the president.
The power belongs to the president
The central fact is not that the Constitution contains an unfortunate ambiguity. It gives the president sweeping authority to pardon federal offenses. Trump exercises that authority; people seeking clemency do not.
That distinction matters because talk of a “pardons market” can misdirect attention toward intermediaries and applicants. The reported offers of payment are serious allegations, not established proof that Trump sold pardons. But even if brokers and relatives are doing the soliciting, they possess no constitutional power to erase federal criminal liability. The valuable commodity exists because one officeholder controls the decision.
Congress is the failed restraint
Mason identified the structural danger: a president might pardon people whose conduct could expose his own responsibility. Madison’s answer was political accountability through impeachment and removal.
That answer depends on Congress choosing institutional duty over partisan obedience. Rosen’s argument is that an overwhelmingly deferential Republican Congress has made removal implausible. If lawmakers refuse to use the check Madison cited, the defect is no longer merely eighteenth-century constitutional design. It is a present decision by legislators to leave presidential power effectively unrestrained.
Clemency became factional protection
The January 6 pardons were not an abstract dispute over mercy. According to AlterNet, Trump issued them en masse on his first day back in office. The decision used public power to relieve participants in an attack tied to his effort to remain in power after the 2020 election.
That does not establish that every recipient acted at Trump’s direction, nor does a pardon amount to a declaration of innocence. It does establish the political consequence: participation in January 6 ceased to carry federal punishment for those covered. Presidential clemency became protection for a political faction whose actions benefited the president who pardoned them.
The framing lets enablers disappear
Calling Trump the “result” of a warning ignored by the Founders is historically evocative but politically incomplete. The Constitution created the vulnerability; it did not compel Trump to grant these pardons, Congress to tolerate them, or political allies to defend them.
The Founders are safely dead and cannot be held accountable now. Trump made the clemency decisions described in the report. Republican lawmakers retain powers of investigation, impeachment and removal but, in Rosen’s account, have chosen deference. Blaming constitutional architects alone converts active enabling into inherited misfortune.
A system is only as binding as its enforcers
The larger pattern is institutional power converting partisan loyalty into impunity. An expansive pardon authority becomes especially dangerous when the president can protect allies while legislators treat accountability as betrayal of their coalition.
Mason’s warning survived because it described more than a drafting error. It described how executive power can obstruct discovery and punishment when other institutions surrender their own agency. The constitutional gap is real. The people exploiting it—and the lawmakers declining to close or confront it—are making choices in the present.