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Time is running out for Joe Biden’s presidency. Mostly, he seems resigned to sleep his way to Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. However, the pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, has many people wondering if there’s more to come.
Some radical Democrats have called for Biden to pardon a slate of bad actors like Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, and Liz Cheney. Even Anthony Fauci’s name has been dropped. The Nation notoriously suggested that Biden should issue a blanket pardon for all illegal aliens. Outgoing Representative Jamaal Bowman wants Biden to “pardon the 40 people who are on death row right now,” as well as “the 3,000 people who are in federal jail for trumped-up marijuana charges.”
Biden did issue 39 more pardons and 1,500 commutations this week, and people are still sorting out who those recipients were.
Looking forward, if Biden issues any more pardons to protect his cronies in the Democrat Party from possible prosecution in the new Trump administration, the political justification would be that Biden is supposedly trying to protect his people from what they expect to be Trump’s revenge. Make Trump the bad guy, and voila.
But there’s also a risk in making such a brazen move.
“This is a pardon, after all,” Noah Rothman writes at National Review, “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.”
Politico added, “That the conversations are taking place at all reflects the growing anxieties among high-level Democrats about just how far Trump’s reprisals could go once he reclaims power. The remarkable, 11-year breadth of Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter illustrated how worried the White House is about Trump officials seizing any potential openings for prosecution.”
Maybe they should have thought of that before they set such awful precedents over the last decade.
Beyond the political consequences of pardons, there are deeper concerns about what they might do to our constitutional framework and the public’s trust in our elected leaders, as well as the tradition of peaceful, civilized transfers of power from one administration to the next.
“Pre-emptive pardons for outgoing officials would be a bad precedent, a constitutional abuse, and the next lawfare escalation — as if the country hasn’t had enough of those,” write the editors at The Wall Street Journal. “Perhaps Mr. Biden thinks mass clemency would put this ugliness in the past. Instead it would establish a precedent that Presidents on their way out the door will grant immunity to lists of loyal staff and officials. The risk is developing a culture of impunity, if people in the next Administration expect the same absolution from their guy in four or eight years.”
Notably, the damage to our political institutions was highlighted by none other than Pennsylvania Democrat Senator John Fetterman. He told a shocked panel on “The View” that “I think it’s undeniable that the case against Hunter Biden was really politically motivated, but I also think it’s true that the trial in New York for Trump — that was political as well.” He added, “In both cases, I think a pardon is appropriate, and I really think collectively America’s confidence in these kinds of institutions [has] been damaged by these kinds of cases.”
The case against Hunter Biden was far less political than Trump’s. After all, it was Biden’s Department of Justice that filed tax-related charges against Biden — though only after the attempted sweetheart deal fell apart. Meanwhile, no one other than Donald Trump would have ever been charged with the crimes that were drummed up against the former president.
But the Hunter Biden pardon is about more than just a close father-son relationship. It’s about setting the stage for future pardons of individuals that Hunter could be compelled to identify — individuals who could help incriminate Joe.
“Because of the sweeping pardon,” National Review’s Andrew McCarthy writes, “Hunter no longer has a viable Fifth Amendment privilege from self-incrimination. He is immune from prosecution for any further Biden crimes related to influence-peddling. Hence, he may not refuse to testify if summoned by a grand jury to answer questions about the potentially criminal activities of others.”
All this talk about the presidential pardon raises the question of whether it’s time to end the presidential pardon power altogether. It wouldn’t be hard to find people on the Left and the Right of the political spectrum in favor of it. Historically, presidential pardons were utilized by presidents to unify the nation, not to protect the president’s own from criminal activities.
Unfortunately, Biden’s pardoning of his son Hunter has opened the floodgates for abuse by future presidents.
A final thought: Now that more pardons are likely to land on the resolute desk in the Oval Office before the inauguration, one more might restore some dignity to the Biden legacy: pardon Donald Trump. He won’t do it, of course, but it would go a long way toward fulfilling his incessant promises for “unity” over the last four years.
