The Only New Rule Against Last-Minute Pardons Can't Reach the Presidency

Kentucky now forbids its governors from issuing any pardon in the sixty days before an election through inauguration. Voters wrote that ban into the state constitution on Election Day, by roughly seventy percent: a direct answer to the more than four hundred lame-duck pardons Matt Bevin handed out as he left the governor's mansion ^[1]. Governor Andy Beshear argued the amendment overshot, reaching past one office to constrain them all. "The answer to this isn't changing the pardon power of every other governor" ^[1]. Six days later, the presidency moved the other way. The direction had been set since spring, when Trump told aides he would pardon "anyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval," because his staff feared congressional investigations if Democrats took the House ^[2]. Asked about it, the press secretary called it a joke, then added that "the President's pardon power is absolute" ^[2]. By October 1 the offer was on the record: Trump told TIME he would consider pardons if Democrats won and began investigating, naming Biden's January 2025 preemptive pardons — clemency issued before any charge exists, to block a prosecution from ever starting — as the precedent ^[3]. On November 9 he announced them: mass pardons for his aides and advisers before his term ends, sparing them, he said, the legal fights he faced himself ^[4]. None of this is one man's habit. Biden issued preemptive pardons in January 2025 for Anthony Fauci, the January 6 committee members, and his own family, and Trump names them as his precedent ^[2]. He has already granted more than 1,800 clemencies this term against fewer than 250 in his first ^[2]. What the federal side has produced against the practice this cycle is paper. Democrats are drafting theories that would treat prosecution-blocking pardons as legally void, civil causes of action against the officers who receive them, and a constitutional amendment restricting the power outright ^[5]. The loudest counterweight of the week was not a rule at all. Justice Sotomayor called for the Court to overturn the presidential immunity ruling, saying she is hoping it will "take back some of the crazy things that it's done" ^[6]. Critics warn that the immunity ruling, combined with the pardon power, forms a "zone of lawlessness" ^[5][6]. So the season's only binding rule lives in one state constitution. It covers governors, and it cannot touch the presidency: the one office where the practice has become standard, under both parties ^[2]. The two moves are joined by calendar and category, not cause.