Maybe you’re mad about President Joe Biden’s parting gift of a preemptive pardons for Dr. Anthony Fauci and members of the Biden family. If not, you’re likely frustrated that President Donald Trump issued mass pardons for people arrested for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Instead, we’d argue you should be unhappy about a growing political trend in which one person bypasses our courts and our legislative chambers. Pardons are meant to be a check on power, not a source of power.
Former President Joe Biden made headlines on Inauguration Day after he issued big-name pardons, but he’d been granting them for weeks by that time, many of them questionable. Remember, Biden issued a sweeping pardon for his son Hunter, who was convicted on gun- and tax-related charges, and he also commuted the sentence of Leonard Peltier, a man convicted of executing two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the 1970s. Biden also commuted the sentence of Rita Crundwell, who Illinoisans will remember as the disgraced former Dixon comptroller who embezzled $53 million from Dixon taxpayers and spent it on her costly equestrian lifestyle. Those aren’t the only names that raised eyebrows. Biden exercised the power of presidential pardons vastly more than any of his predecessors — thousands during his presidency.
It’s worth noting that some of these pardons made sense, such as those given to 6,500 people who were serving sentences for low-level cannabis-related offenses under old rules. We agree that people should not be imprisoned for activity that is no longer illegal. And this is a good use of pardon power, because it follows updated legislative action.
President Trump, on the other hand, pardoned significantly fewer people during his first term in office — 237. But he began his second term in an entirely different fashion, pardoning over 1,500 people charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6 riots.
When asked about the pardons, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R- S.D., pointed to Biden’s pardon precedent, saying the former president “opened the door.” And while that doesn’t excuse executive overreach, it does ring true.
Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush also dabbled to a somewhat lesser extent in pardoning political allies, making the practice more common and increasingly more acceptable.
As pardons become the status quo, who’s to stop any future president from exercising this power? We’re witnessing a frightening rise of government systems being used as a political weapon to be leveraged for personal gain, for partisan gain and for acts of retribution. Those in power are establishing a precedent that undermines our court system, making the judicial branch irrelevant if you’re close enough with the president. In essence, if you’re Hunter Biden or Steve Bannon, the judicial branch doesn’t matter.
Though some on the left argue Biden’s use of preemptive pardons is necessary to protect against retaliation from Trump, especially for people such as Liz Cheney and others on the Jan. 6 panel, acceptance of such a pardon ahead of any sort of conviction could be construed as a tacit admission of guilt. The most insidious problem with the preemptive pardon is that it prevents the course of justice from ever playing out in the first place, hiding any wrongdoing that may have taken place. The public is left wondering, what did someone do that merits blanket legal immunity?
It’s almost certain these preemptive actions will be challenged in the courts. The Supreme Court has said in the past that pardon powers can be exercised “at any time after (an offense’s) commission.” The key word is “after.” Without a conviction, what is there to forgive? There’s certainly an opening to challenge pardons issued to protect against any future criminal charges.
Ultimately, the most important point is that pardons undermine accountability to the people.
When the president acts on his or her own, he or she oversteps the separation of powers upon which the country’s entire system of governance was built. It’s efficient when one person calls the shots, sure, but that goes against our beloved “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Increased presidential pardon activity has become a way for the president to have more power and serve as judge and jury.
That power must be scaled back and reined in. Our founders believed impeachment to be a sufficient check on this power, but when pardons are issued as a president is leaving office, that’s not the case. One path for reform is a constitutional amendment, such as the one congressman Steve Cohen, D- Tenn, filed to prohibit self-pardon, pardons of family members, administration officials and campaign employees. Another bill introduced several years back, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, included provisions to prevent self-pardons and would’ve required safeguards such as Department of Justice oversight for presidential pardons.
We think these and other such safeguards are worth exploring, but that the best option is to restore the expectation that pardons be used with restraint and for good reason, rather than protecting a president’s self interests.
Trump has claimed in the past that constitutional pardon power gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” Obama vowed to use his “pen and phone” to take on Congress when his legislative agenda bottomed out, signaling a comfort with exercising executive authority in a similar manner.
These are dangerous positions, reflecting an attitude that needs to be guarded against for all future leaders if we hope to protect our republican democracy, which makes it less important who sits in the Oval Office … because of its system of checks and balances.
— Chicago Tribune via TNS
