President Biden will be going home to Delaware soon and it can’t happen soon enough. Sadly, he will be remembered as King Midas in reverse, the opposite of the old king who turned everything into gold. He turned the border into a national security nightmare and humanitarian crisis. He turned Afghanistan into a disaster that did not have to happen. Add the economy and you know what I mean. And then to top it off he has turned pardoning and commutations into a joke.
I agree with Rich Lowry:
President Biden, or whoever is running the White House, has grotesquely abused the pardon power, yet again.
Biden commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 of the prisoners on federal death row in response to the lobbying of opponents of the death penalty, keeping intact his nearly unbroken record of bending to left-wing pressure groups while in office.
Biden… put out a statement averring that the president has long been committed to “ensuring a fair and effective justice system.”
Even if true, this is a non-sequitur, since there’s nothing to suggest the handling of these cases was unfair.
Biden decided a few years ago that he opposed the death penalty after long being an unsparing supporter (when he said in the 1990s that his crime bill did “everything but hang people for jaywalking,” he meant it as a compliment).
That’s fine. Anyone with such a long (and undistinguished) career is going to shift on issues over time.
Still, that shouldn’t give Biden… the prerogative to impose his will over and above that of the American people as expressed through Congress.
And that’s the point.
Maybe President Biden had a “come to Jesus” moment over the death penalty. He is the not the first or last person to have one of those moments. It can happen. It’s a bit strange given all those speeches on YouTube about Biden the crime fighter over the years. Still, he is entitled to change, but it would have been nice if the change of heart had come with a little press conference.
He could have told us why he did it and explain to the families why he did it now. Furthermore, why did this moment of principle happen now and not during the campaign? Once again, we were left in the dark with a little White House statement that he may or may not have written.
So the pardon powers, a very important presidential prerogative, has now been messed up too. Unlike President Ford, who addressed the nation, took questions and even went before a congressional committee to defend the Nixon pardon, all we have from Biden is more of the same silence about everything, from commuting sentences to firing missiles in Syria.
It’s up to the next president to restore the creditability of the pardon power. Once again, everything that Biden touched as president is worse than it was before.
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