That's interesting. How would you change it?

The Executive having the power to pardon (or to refuse to prosecute) for crimes is meant as a check on legislative power to make life miserable through imposition of bad law. Just throwing that check away seems a bit destabilizing.

I mean, I'm with you on the the American justice system being capricious in terms of minor crimes being able to ruin a person's civil standing like marijuana possession has done; and rampant abuse of overclassifying certain types of crime as felonies, thereby disqualifying someone from participation in the civic process (something I genuinely have begun to abhor as I've gotten older, because of the perverse second-class citizen caste it creates with minimal if any remedy for restoration of rights without an absurd amount of pressure being applied by someone who has paid their debt to society).

However, it is putatively rule of law. Just rule of law with the assumption of input by men. Law is in itself a tool. A tool is nothing without the hand that wields it.

What angers me more is that we don't come down harder on those that maliciously attempt to use the tools of law against other tools of law. I.e. attempting to circumvent Constitutional rights through judicial review, or passing laws that everyone knows violate one Amendment or another and relying on the small number of Supreme Court justices and their auspices to just ignore passing a final decision on a case.

Frankly it seems like a somewhat intractable problem, but nevertheless, I can't deny that the United States at least puts up a good fight in terms of trying to make it work nevertheless.

Anyway, would love to hear your thoughts on it.

I think it's less about what formal powers the different branches of government have, and more about how they use them in practice. As a parent comment said, the USSR constitution was good on paper, but not so much in practice. On the other hand, here in the UK, the queen technically has supreme power over everything (and even ignoring that, our Prime Minister is head of both the executive and the legislature), and yet in practice this doesn't get abused too much (arguably recently that has changed a little).

The UK is a bit weird though because of its “unwritten constitution”, which acknowledges that the Queen’s power is in fact very limited (to the point where she doesn’t even publicly express opinions). It mostly works due to the specific history and culture of the UK.

TL;DR Politics is downstream of culture.