Presidential pardons

Late in his first term, Donald Trump pardoned a Memphis woman named Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving life in prison without parole. While in prison, Johnson was a more than exemplary inmate, becoming a certified hospice worker for the dying, writing plays and acting as a spiritual leader and mentor to her fellow female prisoners. Alice Marie Johnson is a voice for people, especially women, who are in jail for the wrong reasons After her release, Johnson published a book called After Life: My Journey from Incarceration to Freedom and became a public advocate for clemency. In February last year, Trump named her the US’s first-ever “pardon czar,” an informal advisor for pardons and clemency in his administration. “Alice has been just incredible,” Trump said.

President Joe Biden granted 1,500 pardons in what was the largest single-day act of clemency by a US president back in January, on his final full day in office. But these were not the typical pardons since Biden did not actually sit down, uncap a fat Sharpie and draw out his signature. No: the pardons were granted with the autopen, and the Department of Justice and congressional Republicans have been investigating whether the former president was actually aware they were being signed. After seven months of crickets, Biden finally broke his silence on these accusations, last Thursday. He spoke to the New York Times, maintaining he "made every decision," and he did it "because there were a lot of them." The January 19 pardons did two things.

Whom do you suppose wrote this: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false”?  The one person I can assure you did not write it is its supposed author, former president Joseph R. Biden, who by the way is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer.  Moreover, pace Biden’s suggestions, it is clear that he did not sign many of the myriad “pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations” issued over his name.

The commentariat is awash with experts on prostate cancer. What precipitated this sudden acquisition of specialized medical expertise? Why, the announcement that former president Joe Biden is suffering from stage four of the big PC which, the news reports are gasping, has metastasized to his bones. Let me pause to join Donald Trump in expressing my best wishes to the former president for “a fast and successful recovery.” Let me also recall how suddenly the world became populated with epidemiologists after the Wuhan flu led Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx and the entire bureaucratic establishment to discover their inner totalitarian hankerings. The revelation about Biden’s health is a sort of synecdoche for a much larger universe of pain.

The government can take away your liberty for moving furniture, I get that now. When it makes you into a liar, well, that’s a step too far. I’d explained to my five children that dad would be spending the next seventy-one days at an all-male retreat, but when I arrived at Coleman Federal Prison they immediately put me in solitary confinement. The punishment is the process, they say, unless you spend any amount of time in solitary. In that case, the punishment is the punishment. The guards no doubt wanted me to spend time in quiet reflection before granting me the privilege of engaging in fellowship with my retreat mates, a hodgepodge of petty-crime white-collar types. I had plenty of time over the next seventeen days to think about how I had arrived in sunny Sumterville.

The mood in Washington, at least in the quarters I frequented, has been almost giddy these past few days. I watched Donald Trump’s second inauguration ceremony from the snug fastness of a secure, undisclosed location close to the White House. Joining me were about 300 politically mature citizens. Some were young, some old; some male, some female; many walks of life were represented. There were periodic cheers during the address, beginning with Trump’s declaration of “a national emergency at our southern border. “All illegal entry will immediately be halted,” he said, “and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” My comrades liked that.

Joe Biden is not going gently into that dark night, politically or cognitively. He is going down with large, bold actions. The latest is a mass commutation for some 2,500 “nonviolent drug offenders.” Biden’s justification is that they were sentenced under laws that have now been overturned as the country has moved to more lenient treatment of all drug offenses and eliminated differences between laws penalizing crack cocaine and powdered cocaine. Those are reasonable justifications, but they are far from the whole story and far from the way the White House is selling the action to voters and friendly journalists. The vast majority of the prison terms were actually given to dealers or violent offenders, mostly members of criminal gangs.

It’s been a month since the President pardoned a turkey, so why pardon a flock of them now? Presidential pardons and commutations may be lawful and traditional, and the conduct of government agencies in the Trump years has certainly confirmed that presidential fiat might be fairer than the Justice Department. But some of the names in Trump’s flurry of pre-Christmas pardons smack of the Washington insider-trading that Trump has decried — and suggest we might be better off with no pardons at all.There are exceptional cases, of course, but they are rare. The necessity of Andrew Johnson pardoning Confederate combatants after the Civil War is obvious.

For 30 years, Donald Trump regularly visited the Paul Molé Barber Shop in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Adrian Wood, the barber who owns the shop, remembers that Trump would instruct barbers precisely where to snip his mane, and would never allow them to expose his bald spot, as revealed by a report in the New York Post: ‘He’s a complete control freak. He dictates exactly how you cut every hair on his head. “Cut here, cut there. That’s enough.” And you just do what he says.