There’s been a lot of talk about presidential pardon powers. The Constitution arguably failed to properly limit those powers but it did place one clear limitation on them.
The presidential pardon power is not meant to be used in exactly the way that Biden is now trying to use it. Specifically the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
Biden or rather his advisers and allies are plotting to hand out preemptive pardons.
President Joe Biden’s senior aides are conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, according to senior Democrats familiar with the discussions.
The White House officials, however, are carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who’ve committed no crimes, both because it could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms, and because those offered preemptive pardons may reject them.
The deliberations touch on pardoning those currently in office, elected and appointed, as well as former officials who’ve angered Trump and his loyalists.
Democrats, the White House and the media, as well as Joe Biden, assured us that when he gave a full pardon to Hunter Biden, it was just about the gun and tax charges, rather than blanket coverage for all crimes. In fact it was a blanket pardon for all crimes.
Biden associates appear to have used Hunter as a trojan horse to just hand out the same pardons to themselves.
Revealingly, they’re talking about this to each other and the media before even mentioning it to Biden.
The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
Why bother? He’s just the president. He doesn’t need to know until they stick the paper in front of his nose.
This is why there needed to be a 25th amendment intervention. Right now people in the White House can get a man who’s legally the president to sign off on anything and everything… including blanket pardons for all.
That is a violation of the intended purpose of presidential pardon powers.
Specifically, Biden has turned pardons into a “Get out of Jail card” where political officials associated with an administration can’t be arrested or tried for their crimes because they have a political card. This is banana republic stuff, more specifically it’s Tammany Hall stuff.
In my book, ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left’, there’s a scene where a Tammany Hall leader in New York describes just such a card.
Tammany Hall nominations came from “a few unprincipled blackguards” along with “favored thieves who receive indulgences from the police judges and officers to commit a certain number of crimes without molestation, in consideration of the valuable political services which they render” a Tammany political contender claimed in a speech to the organization.
You might have seen this depicted in fiction, but it was real. And the party is trying to bring it back.