By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, December 24, 2024
President Joe Biden, or whoever is running the White
House, 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, or whoever is running the White House, 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 all 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
crime legislation he favored 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, or whoever is running
the White House, the prerogative to impose his will over and above that of the
American people as expressed through Congress. Nonetheless, he did just that,
and on behalf of people guilty of truly unspeakable crimes.
You might be tempted to say that Biden has hit bottom,
but there are, surely, more acts of clemency to come. Anyone involved in the
Biden family’s influence-peddling business must be hoping to get the Hunter
Biden treatment in this president’s final hours.
Biden’s commutations weren’t discriminating; they were
meant to be sweeping, applying to almost everyone in a broad category of
criminals. The goal wasn’t to apply case-by-case mercy but to thwart a form of
punishment sanctioned by the Constitution, specifically authorized by Congress,
and recommended and imposed by juries and judges.
In fact, as the White House statement notes, the
commutations were intended to prevent the incoming Trump administration from
imposing the law in these cases.
Obviously, people of good faith can disagree about the
morality and utility of the death penalty. The right way to go about ending it,
though, is to campaign for Congress to reverse field. Biden didn’t even try.
Although the death penalty has been losing support, it’s still popular. Why try
to change public opinion and bring Congress along when the pardon power can be
twisted into a weapon to effectively vacate federal statutes?
Even as an act of high principle, Biden’s move fails.
Either the federal death penalty is a moral abomination that should never be
applied, or it’s not. Commuting the sentences of 37 people who committed
terrible crimes and leaving on death row another three people who committed
infamous acts makes no sense. Yes, the Boston marathon bomber, Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, who was one of the three left out, is a monster. So is everyone else
on Biden’s list.
On top of this inconsistency, the Biden Justice
Department just filed a death-penalty charge against the alleged
UnitedHealthcare CEO assassin, Luigi Mangione. Does Biden’s DOJ want to put him
on death row so some future progressive president, inspired by Biden’s example,
can commute his sentence?
If Biden’s Catholic faith moved him — Pope Francis wanted
the sentences commuted — it hasn’t had the slightest effect on the president’s
strong support for abortion on demand, which, not incidentally, is one of the
Left’s foremost ideological imperatives.
There is a legitimate question about why we have the
federal death penalty if we are going to use it so rarely (there had been a
17-year hiatus when Donald Trump’s DOJ restarted executions in his first term).
But that, too, is a matter to be taken up by the Congress, not a doddering
soon-to-be former president hunting among the scraps of progressive priorities
for something that he believes will enhance his legacy in the sad final days of
his presidency.
Biden, or whoever is running the White House, should be
ashamed.
No comments:
Post a Comment