Mark Benjamin writes in Salon that Dubya might issue a blanket pardon for anyone in his administration involved in torture. Meanwhile, advisors to Barack Obama are pushing for a nonpartisan commission to investigate torture in the Bush Administration.

It is said (nothing is official) that the plan is to do painstaking investigation of torture before coming to any conclusions about prosecution. As much as we’d all like to see Dick and Dubya in stocks asap, that’s probably sensible.

But then there’s the blanket pardon thing. Benjamin writes,

Constitutional scholars say a pardon of this kind would be an unprecedented move — the prospective pardon of not just individuals but entire categories of people, perhaps numbering in the thousands, for carrying out the president’s orders , which the White House has argued all along were legal.

Those scholars agree, however, that Article II of the Constitution gives Bush much latitude: There is no authority that can stop the president from doing so if he wishes, and there is no outside check or balance to revisit such a decision, however controversial it may be. “The president can do with pardoning power whatever he wants,” explained University of Wisconsin Law School professor Stanley Kutler. “It is complete and plenary unto itself.”

To complicate matters further, Charlie Savage writes for the New York Times that there is precedent for former presidents to continue to keep matters in their administrations secret. The precedent was set by Harry Truman —

When a Congressional committee subpoenaed Harry S. Truman in 1953, nearly a year after he left office, he made a startling claim: Even though he was no longer president, the Constitution still empowered him to block subpoenas.

“If the doctrine of separation of powers and the independence of the presidency is to have any validity at all, it must be equally applicable to a president after his term of office has expired,” Truman wrote to the committee.

Congress backed down, establishing a precedent suggesting that former presidents wield lingering powers to keep matters from their administration secret. Now, as Congressional Democrats prepare to move forward with investigations of the Bush administration, they wonder whether that claim may be invoked again.

In the years that followed, the precedent has been cited twice — by presidents Nixon and Reagan.

Savage again:

Topics of open investigations include the harsh interrogation of detainees, the prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama, secret legal memorandums from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and the role of the former White House aides Karl Rove and Harriet E. Miers in the firing of federal prosecutors.

This could take some time.

Speaking of pardons — the Dems seem to be moving toward pardoning Joe Lieberman for his reprehensible behavior during the recent election. I suspect the primary reason for this is mathematics — without a 60-vote majority, the Dems need every possible warm body in Congress on their side. I understand this, even though I don’t especially like it.

I just wish Tweety and the other bobbleheads would stop saying that Lieberman campaigned for McCain on “principle.” There was nothing “principled” about helping the Right spread poison. I don’t know what Lieberman’s problem is, beyond harboring the Godzilla of egos, but an excess of principle doesn’t seem to be holding him back much.

That said, I pretty much agree with Glenn Greenwald when he says —

It is worth remembering that the Democrats who are going to exert dominant political control are the same ones who have provoked so much scorn — rightfully so — over the last several years, and particularly since 2006. This is the same Democratic Party leadership which funded the Iraq War without conditions (and voted to authorize it in the first place); massively expanded the President’s warrantless eavesdropping powers; immunized lawbreaking telecoms; enacted the Patriot Act and then renewed it with virtually no changes; didn’t even bother to mount a filibuster to stop the Military Commissions Act; refrained from pursuing any meaningful investigations of Bush lawbreaking; confirmed every last extremist Bush nominee, from Michael McConnell to Michael Mukasey; acquiesced to even the worst and most lawless Bush policies when they were briefed on them; and on and on and on. None of that has changed. That is still who they are.

It is who they are, which is why we have to stay active and keep pushing for change, or there will be no change.

At the same time, keep in mind that anyone who claims to know what President Obama will or won’t do once he is in office is an idiot. We’ve had one such person in the comments already, and of course Obama haters who pose as liberals — you know who they are — are already writing off his administration.

It’s fair to say that anything one hears in the news now about what the Obama Administration will or will not do on any issue is speculation, including the investigations mentioned at the top of this post. People who are in a position to actually know anything aren’t talking — well, except maybe for Rahm Emanuel. This is standard behavior for a presidential transition. The President-elect should not be running a shadow government while someone else still is president, whether we like him or not.

Reporters are picking up hints and clues and speculation and writing about them as if they were official pronouncements from the President-Elect’s office, and the usual jerks are using these speculations to bash Obama before he’s even taken office. Oh, and if you tell them to get a grip on reality, you must be part of a cult.

I’m all in favor of criticizing Obama or any other politician when criticism is due. However, relentless bashing of anyone for something he hasn’t done and may not even be thinking of doing says more about the basher than the bashee.

Update: While I’m at it, Dear Lambert —

Obama’s fans labored so hard to elect somebody when they didn’t know what he was going to do. The real reason they have to wait, I hazard, is that since they established no policy standards for him in their own minds, they have nothing to hold him accountable for.

Lambert, dear, electing “somebody when they didn’t know what he was going to do” is what Americans have done for every single presidential campaign since Washington. One never really knows what they will do until they do it. This would have been equally true if Hillary Clinton were the president-elect and not Obama. One of the reasons some of us were skeptical of Hillary Clinton during the primaries is that her actual record of accomplishment doesn’t exactly match her claims and promises.

The Obama campaign had exhaustive policy proposals on the campaign web site, so it’s not as if we didn’t know what he proposed. And if he betrays our trust, especially on matters like health care and Iraq, many of us will be bitterly disappointed and will criticize him copiously. However, bashing Obama for things he hasn’t yet done, hasn’t had a chance to do, and has not expressed any intention of doing (see above about what’s appearing in the news), is what we call “pathological.” Get help.