Monday, December 23, 2024

The True Scandal of Biden’s Death Row Pardons Is That We Don’t Even Know Who Made the Decision

By Philip Klein

Monday, December 23, 2024

 

Andy has a great post going through the corruption surrounding President Biden’s pardon of 37 of 40 death row inmates. Reading through it, I couldn’t help but think about one of the big stories from last week, which was the Wall Street Journal report that Biden’s mental acuity problems, which became undeniable after the June debate, were there from the beginning of his presidency. The article detailed how, as many of us suspected, Biden’s schedule was carefully managed by staff and advisers who limited his interaction with legislators and cabinet officials to avoid revealing the extent of his decline.

 

Under our constitutional system, the president is elected by the American people to oversee the executive branch. The fact that various staffers kept his condition hidden was in effect an end around the Constitution in that it gave a collection of people who were never elected to anything control over the office. Essentially, by hiding his condition from the public, they weren’t protecting the Democratic Party, they were protecting their own ability to influence decisions on issues of substantial importance.

 

That brings us to the president’s pardon power, which is among the most controversial because it allows the president to overrule decisions made in the judicial process. As Andy notes, in making this decision, Biden “has eviscerated the hard work put in by dozens of juries and judges who struggled with the complex law of capital punishment in often grisly murder cases.”

 

While the pardons are bad enough in themselves, it is even a bigger scandal that we don’t know anything about the process that resulted in this grave decision, or to what extent Biden was even cognizant about what he was doing. It’s completely plausible (if not likely) that these pardons were orchestrated by whatever group of progressive activists are running things at the White House right now.

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