It was not "dicta." It was part of the actual basis leading them to the decision they rendered in the case.
...which is called
dicta, and is distinct from the ruling itself. Look at the link to
Burdick I posted. This was the ruling of the Supreme Court:
- A pardoned person must introduce the pardon into court proceedings, otherwise the pardon is considered a private matter, unknown to and unable to be acted on by the court.
- No formal acceptance is necessary to give effect to the pardons. If a pardon is rejected, it cannot be forced upon its subject.
The ruling doesn't say that accepting a pardon means that the recipient has admitted guilt, therefore the SC didn't rule that accepting a pardon means that the recipient has admitted guilt. It really is as simple as that.
As per the Constitution, courts can only rule on specific cases that specific parties have brought before them. They aren't allowed to go on a tangent and issue as many rulings as they like on related subjects within the majority opinion. Again, it just isn't how case law works in this country.
I'm not fazed by your transparent appeals to authority, although it is a funny argument coming from you, of all people. People make mistakes all the time, even experts in their own areas of expertise. I suspect that whoever wrote the article for the National Constitution Center just added a bit of trivia without double-checking to see if it was true, as their focus was on writing an article about Nixon and Ford's pardon of him. I must have missed the occasion where every member of Congress apparently made a unanimous statement about how accepting a pardon legally means that the recipient has admitted guilt, but even if they really had done that, they would still be wrong.