President Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoned 39 others in “the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history,” the White House announced on Thursday.
The amnesty will be extended to roughly 1,500 people who were placed on home confinement during the COVID pandemic and 39 others who were convicted of nonviolent crimes, especially drug crimes, who have “shown successful rehabilitation.”
Sleepy Joe also pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, for tax and gun possession felonies, a couple of weeks ago. Which is the kind of thing a lot of dads would do.
Biden said in the statement he would “take more steps in the weeks ahead.” The more steps the better, if you ask me. We have enough criminals in America to keep the prison industry happy. Some of them are murderers, or worse. I think our outgoing President should be merciful and release the ones who were arrested for smoking marijuana — which is now legal almost everywhere, in case nobody has noticed — or for having same-sex relationships — which is also legal, for some reason.
The first time I heard about a presidential pardon, back when I was about ten years old, was President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, his former boss.
I remember my dad ranting Ford’s decision. He wanted to see that weasel Nixon run through the legal wringer… not let off scot-free to write his best-selling memoirs and travel around the world acting like he was still President.
Apparently, pardoning bad people is something of a tradition in the federal government, beginning with George Washington — he pardoned 16 people — and reaching a fever pitch in 1865 when President Lincoln, and then President Johnson, pardoned practically the entire Confederate Army.
Maybe pardoning Hunter for owning a gun isn’t such a big deal?
Another high point came in 1977, when President Jimmy Carter pardoned more than 200,000 Vietnam War draft dodgers. Also not a big deal, because most of them already lived in Canada. (But when Canada becomes our 51st state, watch out!)
The Lamestream Media has been writing about soon-to-be-President Donald Trump’s threats to pardon the party-goers involved in the January 6 political rally at the U.S. Capitol.
Which is nothing like pardoning the entire Confederate Army, in my opinion.
One important pardon that hasn’t happened yet (as far as I know) but which I think should happen before January 20:
Biden should pardon Donald Trump.
Which is not to say I think Donald Trump is innocent of his various crimes. Far from it. But obviously, most American voters are perfectly happy with a convicted felon as their President. Maybe, deep in our secret souls, we’d all like to be convicted felons… so we elected a leader to live out that fantasy on our behalf?
The thing about a Presidential pardon — as opposed to “commuting a person’s sentence”, which Presidents do more commonly — a pardon wipes your record clean. You become just like an innocent man.
Speaking only for myself, I’d prefer to have an innocent man serving as President, rather than a felon. It would look better in the history books. I’m never going to appear myself in any history books, but Donald Trump will, and why make things look uglier than they need to be?
But the main reason President Biden should pardon Donald Trump:
Because then Trump might, out of a sense of gratitude, stop calling him “Sleepy Joe Biden”.
I wouldn’t put money on it, but stranger things have happened.