We Asked the Georgia House Speaker If the GOP Could Pardon Trump. The Answer Was Pretty Clear Cut.

If former President Trump or any of the other 18 defendants indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, on Monday are convicted, they have a serious problem: Even with a fully Republican-controlled state government, the prospect for pardons appears nearly impossible.

In Trump’s two federal cases, there is always the chance that a Republican—say, Donald Trump—could win the presidency in 2024 and pardon Donald Trump. That is not the case for the two indictments at the state level. But the first of those, the one brought in New York, is considered the flimsiest of the pending cases against Trump, so it may not reach the point of requiring a pardon.

In Georgia, however, there is no clear escape hatch.

Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, does not have the authority to hand out pardons. Under the Georgia Constitution, a five-person State Board of Pardons and Paroles is “vested with the power of executive clemency, including the powers to grant reprieves, pardons, and paroles; to commute penalties; to remove disabilities imposed by law; and to remit any part of a sentence for any offense against the state after conviction.”

Even if that board were stacked with appointees who were clones of Donald Trump, the board has a very strict interpretation of what a pardon is. To qualify for a pardon, an applicant must have already completed his or her sentence five years prior to applying. They must have lived a law-abiding life during those five years, not have any pending charges, and have paid all fines in full. A “pardon,” in the Georgia state government’s parlance, is “an order of official forgiveness and is granted to those individuals who have maintained a good reputation in their community following the completion of their sentence,” according to the pardon board’s website. It “does not expunge, remove or erase the crime from your record. It may serve as a means for a petitioner to advance in employment or education.” In other words, it’s a piece of paper that would do little else besides get Trump a job as a line cook at 97 years old.

On Monday night, Mike Davis—a former Republican Senate Judiciary Committee aide who now runs the conservative Article III Project—suggested that the Republicans running Georgia should change the current pardon system.

“Under the Georgia law, there is a statute that limits the Republican governor’s ability to pardon,” Davis said on Fox News, “and I think that the legislature in Georgia needs to amend that statute and give Governor Kemp the ability to pardon in this situation because this is clear election interference.”

The issue, however, is not statute: It’s the state constitution. And changing that is a process.

“Amending the state constitution to change clemency powers would require a 2/3 vote of both the State House and Senate and ratification by a majority of voters in the state’s next general election,” Kaleb McMichen, a spokesman for Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns, explained to me in an email. “As you may be aware, neither political party holds a supermajority of either the State House or Senate making the odds of a controversial amendment meeting the threshold required by the Constitution highly improbable.”

“There have been no discussions of any such legislative action” to put pardons under the governor’s direct control, McMichen wrote.

In other words: If Trump and/or his co-defendants are convicted of the many felony counts with which they were charged on Monday—many of which come with jail time—there is no apparent way out. Perhaps Trump could conjure some sort of conspiracy, with more than a dozen co-conspirators, to apply some kind of illegal reading to the Georgia state constitution. It’s not like he’s gotten in any trouble for something like that before.