Team Biden’s Impressively Terrible New Idea

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, December 05, 2024

 

The outgoing president’s staff seem to have a lot of time on their hands. Enough, at least, to play around with some really awful ideas — most of which, we have to assume, do not escape the rooms in which they’re being considered. But one particularly malodorous waft of brain flatulence found its way into reporters’ ears yesterday. And although it’s a competitive category, this one may be the dumbest, most destructive political maneuver this administration has yet entertained.

 

Without yet consulting the president, Biden’s senior aides are engaged in a “vigorous internal debate” over whether to “issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted” for retribution by Donald Trump’s Justice Department, Politico’s Jonathan Martin revealed:

 

Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Rarely does one encounter an idea so self-evidently meritless that it is equal parts offensive and impressive.

 

All Democrats would have to do to fully comprehend the foolishness of this approach would be to imagine a Republican president doing it. But the party that is soon to be out of power has been embracing its post-election nihilism of late.

 

If the abuse of the president’s pardon authority is not already apparent, maybe those who are intrigued by this proposition should ask themselves why the assumed targets of Trumpian vengeance would happily assume their own guilt for crimes of which they have not yet been accused. This is a pardon, after all, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Burdick v. United States establishes that accepting a pardon carries with it “an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it.” If the Biden White House issued these pardons, they’d be doing the Trump administration’s work for them by branding them criminals in some ill-defined way.

 

Moreover, the precedent Democrats are flirting with establishing here would be an abhorrent one. And because bad precedents beget worse precedents, the forces this White House is toying with unleashing should not be considered lightly. If the president can use the pardon power to immunize his subordinates in anticipation of crimes not yet committed, it will create incentives for future administrations to do so. With that insurance policy in their back pockets, administration officials no longer have to fear congressional subpoenas and investigations or the prospect that federal law enforcement will be looking over their shoulders.

 

For a party that only a few months ago rent garments over the threat posed by the Supreme Court’s expansive reading of presidential immunity when engaged in official acts, it would be immensely hypocritical for the Biden administration to extend that immunity to subordinates based on the hypothetical that they may one day endure persecution. That hypothetical could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the novel maneuver the Bidenites are only contemplating today will fast become best practice. The transfer of power from one party to another will become an ever more adversarial process. Continuity of government itself could become an unanticipated casualty.

 

In sum, it’s a terrible idea. So, it couldn’t possibly be real, right?

 

“I think it’s real,” Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s first White House communications director, told CNN on Thursday morning. “I would imagine Biden views this as an opportunity to ensure that people who don’t deserve to be targeted that way aren’t.” Perhaps, but Axios reporter Alex Thompson posited a grubbier theory to explain Team Biden’s heedlessness. You see, Democrats were discouraged when Biden justified his retroactive pardon of his son by claiming that he alone could be unjustly targeted. By belatedly applying that rationale more broadly, the Biden team might soothe some frayed nerves inside the Democratic coalition.

 

So, it’s all politics. But it’s politics of the worst sort, the kind that would sacrifice propriety — indeed, those cherished “norms” we so often hear about — upon the altar of expediency. Hopefully, this float lands with a resounding thud and we never have to hear about it again.