In the waning days of a crumbling presidency that never really was, President Joe Biden—or whatever Biden-like facsimile is signing official documents these days—decided to finish out his term with one final blast of outrageous, yet cynical, wokery.
Biden wasn’t content just to pardon his deadbeat son, Hunter, or hand out executive clemencies to more than 1,500 other criminals. No, he had to give mass commutations to inmates on federal death row: 37 to be exact.
That represents another bit of whiplash from Democrats over the past four years. They’ve gone from the party of “defund the police” to the party of “the rule of law” (supposedly) to the party the party of mass jailbreaking and bailouts for murderers.
It seems like the only people those on the Left want incarcerated are their political opponents. That’s only principled if your principles are those of Josef Stalin’s head of his secret police, Lavrentiy Beria.
The White House tried to portray Biden’s mass nullification of death row as an act of conscience, a fulfillment of Biden’s deep opposition to injustice or something. But a close reading of the carefully chosen language of the White House statement about his decision reveals the fact that this is less about Biden’s commitment to life or justice and than it is a payoff to the Left’s activist class.
“President Biden has dedicated his career to reducing violent crime and ensuring a fair and effective justice system,” Biden’s statement reads. “He believes that America must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level, except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder—which is why today’s actions apply to all but those cases.”
It’s that last bit, everything after the “except” that stands out here. The three who didn’t have their death sentences commuted were Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; Dylann Roof, who killed nine in a mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina; and Robert Bowers, the man who committed the mass murder of 11 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
What sets these men apart isn’t really the heinousness of their crimes, but the fact that their crimes made national headlines.
They certainly didn’t seem to care much about the victims’ families.
“I was angry. I’m still angry. I am upset that this is even happening, that one man can make this decision without even talking to the victims, without any regard for what we’ve been through, what we’re going through, and completely hurt, frustrated, and angry,” said the daughter of Donna Major in an interview on TV’s “Fox & Friends.” Brandon Council, who was on Biden’s list of commutations, gunned Major down during a robbery in 2017.
There were other upset families, too.
“While this is truly distressing news on a personal level for my family, it also feels like a complete dismissal and undermining of the federal justice system,” said Marissa Gibson, the widow of police Officer Bryan Hurst who was murdered by now-former death row inmate Daryl Lawrence. “Lawrence’s sentence was imposed by a jury, and it should be upheld as such.”
President-elect Donald Trump rightly slammed Biden’s decision with a Christmas post on Truth Social.
He said merry Christmas to everyone but the “37 most violent criminals, who killed, raped, and plundered like virtually no one before them, but were just given, incredibly, a pardon by Sleepy Joe Biden.”
As more than a few commentators have noted already, what “Biden” did was a grave act of injustice. If he really was opposed to the death penalty, then the appropriate place to start was with Congress. At least make some kind of larger appeal to the American people.
But Biden has never actually been one to care about process or justice. His career has been defined by empty rhetoric and raw political calculations. Now, at the end, he’s cemented his hollow legacy with one last act of egregious coalition nursing with no regard for right and wrong.
It’s a fitting, shameful end to a presidency that will surely rank among the most dismal in our country’s history.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
