Joseph Schwartz had a multistate nursing home empire. Through negligence and fraud, including deaths of patients in his facilities, it unraveled, leaving the families of the victims with nothing. And Schwartz responded by engaging in a massive payroll tax scheme, bilking his employees of $39 million. As ProPublica wrote, “He pleaded guilty last April to failure to pay the IRS taxes withheld from employees and failing to file a financial report for his employees’ benefit plan. A federal judge sentenced him to three years in prison.”
Three months into that sentence, in November of last year, Donald Trump pardoned Schwartz. Why? The New York Times reported recently on his extensive lobbying campaign: “Nearly a million dollars went to right-wing operatives who claimed to have worked with Laura Loomer, a social media provocateur who has the ear of Mr. Trump, to advocate for Mr. Schwartz’s release. Another $100,000 or more was paid to a lobbyist who had a different set of connections to Mr. Trump: pro-Israel evangelicals. Thousands more went to lawyers who had personal relationships with Alice Marie Johnson, Mr. Trump’s ‘pardon czar,’ and David Warrington, the White House counsel, according to four people familiar with the effort.”
Schwartz’s is only the latest of a series of pardons of fraudsters. Of all the corrupt actions taken in chapter 2 of the Trump presidency, none is more shocking than the misuse of the presidential pardon—not just for personal gain but to reward friends, enrich lobbyist buddies, and make clear that anyone who commits a crime to further Mr. Trump’s interests need not fear prosecution.
Our Constitution does not limit presidential pardons. The Framers debated bestowing this immense power upon one individual, yet ultimately believed that presidential integrity, and the possibility of impeachment, would shield it from corruption. Unfortunately, the Framers did not anticipate a president with no integrity—nor did they anticipate a Congress abandoning its Article 1 authority in service to an unprincipled executive.
As we prepare to celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary, we must safeguard our democracy and counteract Mr. Trump’s corruption. And we believe the only way to restore the presidential pardon power to its original, merciful purpose is through a constitutional amendment.
Origins of Mercy
The power to issue pardons and grant clemency is not unique to the United States. The concept—originated as the “royal prerogative of mercy” in seventh-century England—allowed British monarchs to commute death sentences and pardon convicted criminals. As the name implies, it was a tool intended for mercy; to alleviate pain, suffering, and injustice.
The power survived America’s colonial era and was eventually codified in the U.S. Constitution. Like their British predecessors, the Framers viewed the pardon power as a strong, necessary check against the judicial branch.
In The Federalist, Number 74, Alexander Hamilton argued that “a single person would be a more eligible dispenser of the mercy of the government than a body of men.” Imagining that congressional gridlock would render this power obsolete, the Framers made a calculated decision: Offering grace and mercy to the oppressed was worth the risk that some future president might abuse it (and after all, impeachment was always an option).
Presidential Perversion
Yet here we are. Mr. Trump has spent the last 14 months perverting the presidential pardon in every way imaginable to line his pockets, reward and protect those who commit or might commit crimes on his behalf, and assuage his fragile ego.
The Campaign Legal Center has defined three types of suspect pardons:
Reward pardons, which benefit donors and supporters who break the law on Trump’s behalf;
Corrupt pardons, which excuse public officials who abuse their office as long as they pledge loyalty to Trump and his political agenda; and
Brokered pardons, where deep-pocketed individuals hire well-connected lobbyists or political fixers to secure clemency.
On Trump’s first day back in office—January 20, 2025—he issued a blanket pardon to every one of the 1,500 people charged or convicted over the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
We are two people who love our precious democracy—one as a congressional scholar, and the other as a member of Congress who stood in the House Gallery on January 6 as we braced ourselves for the violence outside the door. We find Trump’s pardons of those who assaulted police officers and were convicted of seditious conspiracy to be the most chilling assault on our democracy.
But Trump was undeterred. He then pardoned Trevor Milton, who had been convicted of fraud having to do with his electric truck startup, Nikola. Milton had been sentenced by a federal judge to four years in prison and ordered to pay $675 million in restitution to those who had been bilked. Just before Milton went to prison, Trump pardoned him and wiped away the payments to the victims. Mr. Milton and his wife contributed $1.8 million to Trump’s political committees.
Paul Walczak was similarly sentenced to 18 months for stealing his Florida nursing home employees’ tax payments, and ordered to pay $4.4 million in restitution. He was pardoned, with payments wiped out, just weeks after his mother attended a $1 million-a-person fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago.
The New York Times noted, “Across both of his terms, Mr. Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 allies, donors, and others convicted in fraud cases. In his second term, Mr. Trump’s pace of pardoning those convicted of fraud has increased. In the first year of his second term, he handed out nearly three dozen pardons and commutations for people accused of fraud.”
Then there are the drug traffickers. Ross Ulbricht, founder of the dark site Silk Road, was convicted in 2015 on multiple charges, including distributing narcotics by means of the internet and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He was sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years without the possibility of parole, to be served concurrently. In 2023, according to The New Yorker, the head of the Libertarian Party guaranteed Trump the libertarian vote if he promised to free Ulbricht. Trump, for once, kept his promise: Ulbricht received a full and unconditional pardon in January 2025.
Juan Orlando Hernandez, former president of Honduras, took bribes from drug cartels to facilitate the transport of 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. and to protect violent cartel leaders from prison. He was sentenced to 45 years. But after Trump’s buddy Roger Stone contacted the president, Hernandez was pardoned in full.
Republican lobbyists have reveled in Trump’s open-for-business pardon shop, especially after he fired the Justice Department’s career pardon attorney, Liz Oyer, when she refused to recommend a pardon for convicted domestic violence offender Mel Gibson to enable him to get a gun.
Reward pardons? Corrupt pardons? Brokered pardons? The last 15 months of the Trump administration have been replete with these perverse pardons. In Trump’s Washington, there is no place for mercy. Corruption reigns supreme.
Constitutional Reform
Previous presidents have abused the pardon power. But compared to Trump, those were on the level of jaywalking on Fifth Avenue compared with murder. We the People need a constitutional amendment.
Two hundred fifty years later, it is time that we reconvene—perhaps in Philadelphia—a convention of scholars, legislators, lawyers, judges, and citizens to draft a constitutional amendment to reorient and reanchor the presidential pardon power to the qualities of mercy and grace. To find the best language and methods to invalidate pardons done for corrupt and malign purposes—and to make clear that a president cannot pardon himself.
While the path to a constitutional amendment is difficult—requiring passage by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, and ratification by three-fourths of the states—this one should be widely embraced in a bipartisan way.
We call on all members of Congress—Republicans and Democrats. Though we may practice different faiths, we share common values: love of country, belief in justice and the rule of law, and an esteem for mercy. After all, as William Shakespeare so eloquently taught us in The Merchant of Venice, “Earthly power doth then show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice.”
