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![On December 11, 2025, President Donald J. Trump announced a pardon for former Mesa County, Colorado, Clerk Tina Peters. A veritable mob of critics emerged to condemn the pardon as unlawful, illegal, not allowed, and fundamentally inconsistent with the narrowly circumscribed powers of the President to “grant pardons and reprieves for Offenses against the United States,” which clearly refers to federal offenses. 1 In response to the hullabaloo, Professor Jerry Edwards bravely “survey[ed] hundreds of years of history in the past few days” and wrote an article “assessing the originalist case.”2 Professor Edwards made the regrettable mistake of posting his article to the Social Science Research Network (“SSRN”), which concluded that his “manuscript [did] not meet the criteria for posting on SSRN” and subsequently removed it3—demonstrating yet another instance of well-documented bias against originalist legal scholarship.4 To the untrained scholar, Professor Edwards’s scholarship may have seemed like he just copied and pasted the lyrics to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”5 into a Word document, which spanned approximately a page and a half, and conducted no originalist analysis. Even if Professor Edwards did just that,6 characterizing this discussion as somehow unfitting of other works in the originalist oeuvre7 is, yet again, anti-originalist bias. In this brief essay, which was rushedly written to ensure that the whole commentariat was aware of the “entire literature that disagrees”8 with the notion that the President cannot pardon state crimes, I analyze the lyrics of “Never Gonna Give You Up.” I conclude that it has as direct, helpful, and material a bearing on originalist jurisprudence on the President’s pardon power as any leading originalist scholar could muster.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:q3dycka5ce2gybcbau5gfehd/bafkreiciwxwj5gbuomhmhbkn4gncsoy5icfxwyxijxyzm5hw6q5v4xxj3y)
