The Presidential Pardon - Book Review of a MAGA-inspired book

 

A few years ago, my next door neighbor David Levine, and I were talking. We’ve been next door neighbors for umpteen years, maybe 40 or so, so we know each other pretty well. When he goes out his kitchen door and I go out our kitchen door, we each confront our trash cans. So I say we engage in a lot of trash talk.

So on this particular day I told him I had been thinking about the presidential power of the pardon, which Trump was busy abusing. I wondered if it would be a safeguard if the power were altered to require a second signature. I thought maybe it could be the Speaker of the House. It wouldn’t be perfect – today, Mike Johnson’s signature would be automatic, but back then, Nancy Pelosi’s wouldn’t have been.

So one thing led to another, I wrote the idea up for a blog post – all my major writings have for years gone to David for editing and suggestions before publishing – and then the two of us collaborated to turn it into an official legal publication. It takes a professor of law to do that! He labored mightily. The resultant paper was well received and well reviewed. https://buddshenkin.blogspot.com/2019/12/presidential-pardon-long-article-and.html.

We even got a short article in The Hill out of it. https://buddshenkin.blogspot.com/2021/01/revising-pardon-hill-article.html. Then we were contacted to do a book review on a complex and interesting book on the power of the pardon through history and literature from a professor of English and Law at Stanford, Barnadette Meyler – https://buddshenkin.blogspot.com/2021/06/theaters-of-pardonning.html. That was a really fun assignment, hard to do, but worth it.

And then, a few months ago, we were contacted again by the Society for US Intellectual History for another book review. This one was an attempt to write a primer on the power of the pardon by a law professor at the University of Virginia. The first couple of chapters were fine, but then it deteriorated terribly into MAGA-speak – and I mean horribly. The author, Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, graduated from Stanford and Yale Law. But then he clerked for very conservative Laurence Silberman on the DC Court of Appeals as a Reagan appointee, and then Clarence Thomas on SCOTUS. Mystery solved.

We enjoyed the challenge! My tendency to call a spade a spade fought against David’s more circumspect and polite commentaries. We’re both very happy with the result. It’s pretty amazing to live in these times when MAGA-speak can show its intellectually corrupt face and hope for a judgeship, perhaps, instead of intellectual shunning, which is deserved.

It’s 1,500 words exactly. I hope you like the taste of it. Piquant.

Our editor, Audrey Clark, professor of history at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, loved it:

Dear David and Budd,

Please find your excellent book review published and featured on the Society for US Intellectual History’s website:

https://s-usih.org/https://s-usih.org/

I will go ahead and send your review to Harvard University Press. Thank you for your terrific work for S-USIH. I hope you will write for us again soon!

All my best,

Audrey

Here it is:

https://s-usih.org/2026/03/david-i-levine-and-budd-n-shenkin-on-saikrishna-bangalore-prakashs-the-presidential-pardon-the-short-clause-with-a-long-troubled-history/.

Budd Shenkin