Same source as below. My comments (just record keeping)

The president's commutation was a political act, for which he may and should pay a heavy political price. What's most important in our system is not that every agent have the best intentions, but that ever agent or branch be assumed to defend his/her/its prerogatives. The executive, the judiciary and the legislative; the prosecution and the defense; the press: all should exist in tension. Objectivity is not assumed as in a courtroom between prosecutor and defense it is not allowed: a lawyer may not betray his client except in the most extreme circumstances.
Also you ignore the role of the jury.
Of course there's always the question of who makes the law, and it's a question again that has to be debated continuously. The only people who get around this issue are fundamentalists who argue that only god's laws matter. If pedants like PZ Myers and others would stop arguing with believers and start listening to them (as a matter of ethnography rather than logic) they would realize that religious fundamentalism is the logic of legal foundationalism and that science as such is irrelevant. It's not rational, it makes no sense, to argue with priests about science. The only reason to do so is to defend faith-based naturalistic epistemology. The argument to have with fundamentalists is whether or not we are capable of being moral creatures without being tied down to a stake. Argue with fundamentalists about moral philosophy. That's all they care about. The rest is smoke and mirrors.
Meanwhile naturalism is the logic of Chicago school economics and the delusional ahistorical rationalism.
I'll end where I came in:

"Politics: About Conflict"
As a matter of history and language would you have said the above so directly and simply even 4 years ago? And would it have seemed as obvious to so many people then as it does now?
I doubt it.
That's not a criticism, it's just an observation of how language and ideas change, and how people are changed by events.
Some people like to think it's always the other way around.

Naturalism is as vulgarly foundational as Nino Scalia's Judicial reasoning. It operates under the illusion that the stability of numerical meaning can be transposed to language.
Would this post on this subject, politics, have been written as clearly and directly 4 years ago?
No. Simply No.
History. Context. Zeitgeist. Call it what you will.
Americans are the only people on the planet who still think that they live outside the rules that govern everything else. We're the products of history. Refusing to look back changes nothing.