Get rid of the much-abused pardon power, to protect democracy, the rule of law, and equality under the law

Get rid of the much-abused pardon power, to protect democracy, the rule of law, and equality under the law
Joe Biden, Donald Trump

The corrupt pardons issued by Presidents Biden, Trump, and Clinton have undermined the rule of law, showed favoritism toward presidential cronies, and made it easier to attack democratic institutions. Their disgraceful pardons and commutations show why presidents should never have been given the power to pardon criminals or commute sentences in the first place.

President Trump has just pardoned 1500 January 6 defendants, including people convicted of assaulting police officers — such as those who bashed cops on the head, used bear spray against police, crushed a cop in a doorframe, carried around zip-ties (presumably to detain and handcuff lawmakers), and orchestrated the riot on January 6, 2021.

Earlier, President Biden pardoned his own brothers, son, and other relatives for crimes committed over a long period of time — shielding them from prosecution for crimes such as tax evasion, bribery, and corruption. Biden’s pardons of his brothers, sister, brother-in-law and sister-in-law cover any nonviolent crime committed between 2014 and this year.  Biden also gave his own son Hunter Biden a “full and unconditional pardon” covering an 11-year period, from January 1, 2014 to December 1, 2024. This includes not only the gun and tax crimes for which Hunter Biden had already been convicted, but a blanket pardon for “those offenses which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” during that period. That time frame included the two years when Hunter sat on the board of a foreign gas company, which he joined in April 2014, and his business dealings in China while his father was vice-president. Biden earlier recognized that it would be improper to pardon Hunter, and promised not to do it, but then broke his campaign promise and did it after the election.

Hunter Biden engaged in corrupt influence peddling, abetted by his father. Joe Biden lied about not meeting his son’s foreign patrons, as photos released by the National Archives later showed. Influence peddling by the Bidens was revealed in photos and emails found on Hunter’s abandoned laptop. Hunter Biden’s laptop contained copious evidence that Joe Biden was complicit in his son’s influence peddling, noted the New York Post. Joe Biden falsely claimed that his son earned no money from China. But as the Washington Post fact-checker notes, that is false — his own son admitted otherwise.

Pardons and commutations have been repeatedly misused by Presidents to free violent subversives, making it harder to deter crimes such as the January 6 riot.  In 1979, President Jimmy Carter foolishly freed three Puerto Rican radicals who had shot and wounded five members of Congress, and an attacker who had attempted to kill President Harry Truman!

President Clinton foolishly commuted the sentences of Weather Underground terrorists Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, who bombed the U.S. Capitol. “The 1983 U.S. Senate bombing was a bomb explosion at the United States Senate on November 7, 1983…The attack led to heightened security in the DC metropolitan area, and the inaccessibility of certain parts of the Senate Building. Six members of the radical far-left Armed Resistance Unit, also known as Resistance Conspiracy, were arrested in May 1988 and charged with the bombing,” such as Linda Sue Evans, who to was sentenced to “prison for conspiracy and malicious destruction of government property.”

President Obama released FALN terrorist Oscar Lopez-Rivera.

All these commutations of terrorists’ sentences — like Trump’s awful pardons and commutations for the January 6 rioters — encourage illegal behavior, by making it less costly to try to overthrow our government or attack the police.

Clinton corruptly pardoned the fugitive billionaire criminal Marc Rich, whose family had funneled millions of dollars to the Clinton library and Democratic campaigns. Rich had “traded illegally with America’s enemies including Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, where he bought about $200 million worth of oil while revolutionaries allied with Khomeini held 53 American hostages in 1979….He did deals with Khadafy’s Libya, Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, Communist dictatorships in Cuba and the Soviet Union itself. Little surprise that he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.”

Given all these corrupt and perverse pardons and commutations, it was a big mistake to ever give presidents the power to pardon or commute sentences for crimes.

A few of the Founding Fathers prophetically warned against giving presidents the ability to pardon criminals. “George Mason of Virginia strongly opposed the President’s ‘power of pardoning because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic.’ Mason rhetorically asked, ‘If he has the power of granting pardons before indictment, or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection?'”

But the pardon power was a traditional prerogative of the executive (from the days of the English monarchy), so it was included in the Constitution. A bad idea, and relic from the era before democracy. Pardons undermine the rule of law, by letting criminals off the hook. They undermine equality under the law, by letting some people escape accountability for crimes that other people remain incarcerated for. And they undermine democracy, by letting presidents free people involved in attacking the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another (as on January 6).

The pardon power has been used by presidents to be soft on crime, corruption, and governmental abuses of power. Biden commuted the sentences of murderers, rapists, and robbers, such as freeing a “black widow” who murdered three ex-lovers. Biden also commuted the sentence of a corrupt judge who was part of a scheme that sent 2,500 kids to a for-profit prison for excessive periods, in exchange for kickbacks. The kids were given excessively long sentences in order to keep the for-profit prison full. And he granted clemency to Chinese spies and the brother of Hamas’s founder. Biden also commuted the sentences of criminals who stole over $5 billion and politicians who took bribes.

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