Biden twice takes up his pardon pen, and I twice excoriate him, plus add context. (For the full version of each column, please follow the link embedded in each headline.)
Biden’s mass pardons are reckless, counterproductive (Dec. 13): Outgoing presidents in recent decades have abused their power to pardon crimes or commute sentences, but Joe Biden is taking the abuse to a new level.
Presidential pardons and commutations can be good policy if judiciously awarded to deserving recipients. However, Biden is handing out blanket pardons for entire classes of crimes. Not only does this practice significantly violate the intent of pardon power, but in practice, it means that wholly undeserving convicts, some of whom committed crimes that shouldn’t be forgiven, will have their records unjustly cleansed.
On Dec. 12, Biden pardoned 39 people, all of whom, according to reports, were nonviolent offenders who had reintegrated admirably into their communities. At first glance, most of those pardons seem reasonable.
The big problem is with his 1,499 simultaneous sentence commutations, including a large number of people who have been serving home detention under a COVID-19 relief law that sent inmates away from prisons where the virus could easily spread into presumably safer home confinement….
In sleazy pardon of his son, Biden did make one semi-good point (Dec. 3): President Joe Biden got one thing right when he announced his unforgivable pardon for his son Hunter Biden for gun-related crimes: The federal statute at issue is poorly written and inconsistently applied. Congress should amend it.
Hunter Biden was convicted of three offenses regarding his use of drugs while owning a gun….
For years, federal courts have wrestled with cases in which prosecutors actually did try to convict people for mere gun ownership unrelated to other crimes. In some of those cases, federal courts have found the statute, as applied to particular circumstances, to be an unconstitutional violation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. In a somewhat parallel case in 2019, a 7-2 Supreme Court threw out a similarly unwarranted prohibition of gun ownership.
Those court decisions make a lot of sense. For someone never convicted of a drug offense to be deprived of his ability to merely possess a gun is to deny a right without due process of law. If someone is suspected of smoking a marijuana joint, that doesn’t mean the federal authorities can forbid him from exercising his First Amendment speech rights, so why would they be able to say he can’t exercise his self-defensive Second Amendment gun ownership rights, completely unrelated to any illegal use of the gun itself?…. {By the way, for you Mobile readers, there is a Stephen Nodine angle here, too. Follow the link in the headline.}
