By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2024-12-21 14:36:27 | Updated at 2024-12-22 01:32:17
11 hours ago
Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons have been positively scandalous — and the one for his son Hunter hasn’t even been the worst of them.
Biden’s pardons are terrible in and of themselves, but taken together they illustrate a more important point. Pardons are for resolving individual cases one at a time; pardons aren’t for policymaking.
First: Holy smokes, some of these pardons are bonkers, including Biden’s grant of clemency for the corrupt judge at the center of the “Kids for Cash” case, in which former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan took bribes in exchange for wrongly sentencing children to time in for-profit youth prisons, padding his own bank account while helping the prisons to pad theirs.
Some 4,000 juvenile convictions had to be thrown out after the kickbacks were discovered.
And Biden gave clemency to Rita Crundwell, a corrupt local official in Illinois who carried out the largest municipal fraud scheme in US history.
Also on the list: Meera Sachdeva, a Mississippi doctor who committed large-scale Medicare fraud, in part by shortchanging cancer patients by giving them diluted drugs.
She also reused needles, which seems to have led to an HIV infection in at least one patient.
(Biden’s release of a Chinese national convicted on truly horrifying child pornography charges was part of a separate action, a prisoner exchange with the tyrants in Beijing.)
These pardons and commutations are, of course, indefensible — which is why Biden and his team are not attempting to defend them.
Rather, they say that the president did not review these actions on a case-by-case basis, instead relying on a categorical formulation (in this case, nonviolent, non-sexual offenders who had been eligible for a house arrest program during COVID).
And that is precisely the problem.
Pardons, properly understood, are not supposed to be an instrument of policymaking.
Biden should have learned the lesson from his old boss, Barack Obama, who issued more than 1,700 pardons and commutations on his way out the door, mostly for federal drug offenders.
I myself support the legalization of drugs and would prefer that there not be any federal drug prisoners, but the decision is not mine — and it is not the president’s either.
The decision belongs to Congress. This may sound like a redundancy but, somehow, that fact keeps escaping our political leaders: It is up to the lawmakers to make the laws.
The United States has all sorts of bad laws. I’d like to see them changed.
The president can propose changes to the laws, and he can veto bills that he thinks would make bad laws. But he cannot legitimately nullify the laws passed by Congress — he is bound by oath to faithfully execute those laws.
A presidential action that is perfectly legal may still amount to an abuse of power. Imagine a president who thinks that taxes are too high and who announces, on the day of his inauguration, that he will categorically pardon Americans who refuse to pay their income taxes in full during his years in office.
Imagine a president who thinks OSHA rules are too onerous and who simply pardons all violators — or who abuses a different executive power and announces that his administration simply will refuse to investigate or prosecute such cases.
The president is acting within his formal powers to pardon whomever he wants or to prioritize and de-prioritize executive actions.
But that does not make the abuse of these powers legitimate, even where such abuse is not illegal.
Pardons are meant to operate individually and in extraordinary cases: A wrongdoer who has dramatically reformed himself or who has performed some remarkable service may have his sentence commuted or his offense erased from the records.
Clemency may be offered for reasons of pity to offenders who are very old or sick. Pardons are not for resolving policy differences between the president and Congress.
If Democrats had a lick of self-respect — or any real instinct for political self-preservation — they would censure, if not impeach, Biden while they still have the time.
There is a lesson here for Republicans, too: Donald Trump has indicated that he intends to pardon those convicted in the Jan. 6 riot.
There may be an argument for clemency in this or that individual case, but a categorical pardon would amount to a nullification of the law, a post hoc legalization of the riot rather than a particular act of mercy.
The fact that those rioters believed that they were acting in Trump’s behalf makes that case particularly ugly, but, even if Trump were entirely disconnected from the events in question, it is not the president’s place to declare classes of people beyond the reach of the criminal code.
Don’t expect the Republican invertebrates in Congress to make a peep about that, however much they’re howling about Biden’s pardons today.
Congressional Republicans are perfectly happy to play courtiers to the quasi-monarchy the presidency is being transformed into. But if Congress doesn’t stand up for its own most basic power — the power to make the laws — then who will?
Trump’s inauguration is in 29 days. Democrats should think about the precedent they want to set between now and then. They can stand for vulgar Woodrow Wilson-ism — “The president is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can” — or they can stand up for the Constitution and Congress and, not incidentally, for themselves.
They should make an example of Biden. No one can say he doesn’t have it coming.
