A blanket pardon for violence that actually happened is no way to restore law and order.

As our editorial noted, and as I argued last month and Noah Rothman argued yesterday, you can make a case that Donald Trump should have pardoned some or even many of the January 6 defendants on a case-by-case basis, and you can even make a case that there is not that much harm in a blanket pardon for the non-violent offenders who have mostly been punished enough by now, but an across-the-board pardon for all the people who assaulted cops is such a terrible idea that even the people around Trump were treating it as radioactive and a non-starter right up until the moment he signed it.

What is the case for a blanket pardon of the violent rioters? That we need to bring a close to a divisive era and promote social peace? Like Noah, I suspect that granting impunity to political violence is apt in the long run to raise rather than lower the temperature of street activism and mob rule. That it was unjust to prosecute anyone? We sometimes pardon people who break unjust laws, or even people who break entirely just laws protesting a greater injustice (Nelson Mandela, for example, was guilty; it was the South African system that was bad). But neither of those is true here. The laws against assaulting the Capitol and D.C. police are just laws. The 2020 election may not have been entirely fair, but it wasn’t stolen. There was nothing to justify violence on January 6.

Defenders of the pardons ultimately fall back on two arguments. One is that the justice system has been so lopsided in its treatment of leftist violence that it’s effectively unfair and a denial of equal protection to prosecute right-wing violence. The other is that January 6 defendants simply were unable to ever get a fair process and trial, so we have to act as if none of them were guilty of violent crimes. Here’s Kurt Schlichter making a version of this double-barreled argument:

The issue is not what they substantively did or did not do. The issue is that there is a two-track justice system where leftist-affiliated potential defendants are either not charged nor prosecuted to a much lesser extent. Moreover, the DOJ has shown bias and malice, it has overcharged and hidden evidence as well as coerced pleas. The judges have shown outrageous bias, and the venue has been demonstrably biased against them. Every single prosecution and conviction, whether through trial or a plea, is utterly and absolutely tainted. None of them can stand. None of them. Donald Trump was absolutely right to pardon almost all of them and the ones he has merely commuted should also be pardoned. Otherwise, to accept the results of these fatally tainted proceedings is to accept injustice. It’s the fruit of the poisonous tree. Let it rot. Every single one of them, including ones who are alleged to have assaulted police, must be pardoned.

This is a dangerous road to go down. To start with, we need more rather than less exemplary punishment of political violence if we want to stuff that particular genie back into the bottle. (It’s also not true, as I have detailed, that nobody was prosecuted in the George Floyd–era protests, but I agree with Schlichter that they were scandalously under-prosecuted). But fundamentally, this is the argument that the Left has been making for years about our criminal-justice system, in particular the claim that the whole system is racist. If you take to its full logical conclusion the idea that we can never prosecute anybody if we don’t prosecute everybody, we end up with Hobbesian anarchy. If we buy the argument that it’s unfair to try the January 6 defendants before D.C. juries because they are so politically one-sided, how is that different from arguing that deep-red counties can’t prosecute (name your favorite “out-group”)? So, yes, make the case that particular defendants were convicted of something they didn’t do, or that they were overcharged or over-sentenced. But a blanket pardon for violence that actually happened is no way to restore law and order.