Hopefully the axiom of "dangerously close" only counting in horseshoes, hand grenades and atom bombs holds true.

So... I'm going to use an extreme (and... sort of fun, in a very fatalistic sense) thought experiment that immediately struck me as an example that highlighted some of the problems with the pardon power. What if the president said, "I'm pardoning every single person from my political party for any crimes they might commit while I'm in office..." I'm not sure exactly what would happen next, but... off the top of my head, I can think of at least 4 ways that society would breakdown within months (or sooner).

I think there are a number of institutions and rules that rely on people fundamentally behaving in good faith and following established norms, and—if the last 4 years has taught me anything—it's that I would be pretty foolish to count on the US electorate to select someone who was willing to act in good faith and respect norms. At this point, my tendency is to assume that any power that can't be given guardrails to prevent it from being abused in a way that causes massive societal harm is too great a power to be allocated to any individual.

How does this sound? Were we in fact burdened with a "competent " Trump, then the perceived dangers to our democracy would have been felt far more acutely by both sides, and action to relieve of us from the actual danger would have been taken. Because all saw his bumbling BS to be just that, some said this too shall pass with good riddances offered with hopes of little and recoverable damage.

We have until 21 Jan to keep our fingers crossed that he doesn't gain competence.

In your fatalistic scenario above would any sitting senator and congress person not see that as an impeachable offense and remove him from office?

Yes, it may be foolish to think the electorate would not again elect one fools tool as president. But would the electorate also elect 435 and 100 like-fools too?

Constitution (established norm) holds tight guys. Our sky may have lowered but it will not fall because of good faith in decent people.

So... based on the responses I saw in January, I'm not even being a little sarcastic when I say that a massive number of them would try to either a) distract from those impeachment proceedings or b) maybe find procedural ways to ignore them or c)... Do something else that's pretty morally gross...

But if we're strapping on our shitty-action-novelist hats to guess at how this would play out... Murder of a government official is a federal crime (https://www.shouselaw.com/...-7-ways-it-can-be/#1), which a certain political party will be uniformly pardoned for in this scenario! So... all I'm saying is... If the members of the LR want to write the worst, half-baked, ill-informed action novel in history, this premise might be how we'll give Dan Brown a run for his money.

(Apologies to anyone who enjoys Dan Brown... mostly, I'm sorry that you've never had the chance to read a good book, but I'm still genuinely contrite.)

I can not equate your original fatalistic scenario to the Jan impeachment. January event aside, would not your scenario muster up enough backbone in the senate to impeach? If your answer is no, then I agree with some here about the amount of kimshee our country is in.