Stop the Pardon Vapors

Since the United States Constitution was not handed down to the Founding Fathers atop Mount Sinai, it is not an infallible document. In fact, significant parts of it were and still are in need of major correction. For instance, Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, which states:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

The presidential pardon comes from the “royal prerogative of mercy,” which existed in England even before the Norman Conquest. But here in the United States, we fought a revolution to rid ourselves of the monarchical yoke. The president of the United States is not a king — or, at least, he was not supposed to be prior to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling earlier this year. Overruling a jury or a member of the judiciary, for any reason whatsoever or no reason at all, is not what mere mortals elected to govern for a short period of time should be able to do.

Presidential pardons should not exist. Presidents don’t speak Ex Cathedra like the Pope, nor are they God’s anointed representative like a king. They should be subjected to the same laws as the rest of us, which also means that they don’t get to dole out clemency like some lord of the manor hearing pleas for mercy from the serfs.

Still, it is laughable that some people are having palpitations about Joe Biden’s blanket pardon of his son, Hunter. Biden, you see, is “modeling” poor behavior or setting a bad “precedent” for a future president. Heavens to Betsy! Now there will be no stopping Donald Trump!

Have these people been living in a Bob’s Big Boy space rocket for the last decade? Do they really believe that by pardoning his son after promising that he wouldn’t, Biden has shattered norms and that this may untie his successor's hands to do something unseemly once he is president?

My friends, there are no more norms. None. They were shattered when Donald Trump rode down that golden escalator in 2015 and bent not just the Republican Party but almost every other institution, including much of the legacy media, to his will.

I don’t need to list all the ways that Trump has blown up the dignity of the office which he will once again occupy on January 20th. Suffice it to say that between what he did and what his hand-picked Supreme Court has allowed him to do, our country will never be the same. Something was broken when Trump was elected in 2016 and whatever it was further shattered into a million pieces when he was re-elected last month. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never put Humpty together again.

Demanding that Biden obey norms that Trump eviscerates every day is the reason we are here. The media constantly — constantly — exacts a different standard for anyone not named Donald Trump. For God’s sake, twenty-four hours before the Hunter pardon, Trump announced that he was appointing Charlie Kushner, his son-in-law’s father, as the United States Ambassador to France. Kushner was a convicted felon who served time in prison for, among other things, hiring a prostitute to ensnare his brother-in-law and then sending the ensuing sex tape to his sister in order to retaliate against them for cooperating with law enforcement against him. Remember when Trump pardoned him? Yeah, probably not — because it did not merit the wall-to-wall coverage I watched on cable news last night when Hunter was pardoned.

Yet there are pundits out there acting like Aunt Pittypat having the vapors at the Atlanta charity bazaar because Biden did something selfish after promising that he wouldn’t. Do they think we are living in a world where Trump was just a temporary mistake, like that idiot you dated for a few months in college and haven’t thought about since? Did they not pay attention when Trump pledged vengeance against the people he believes wrongly indicted him for inciting an insurrection and storing classified documents illegally in a random Mar-a-Lago bathroom? Did they not hear him refer to the “Biden Crime Family” repeatedly on the campaign trail? Do they really think that Trump won’t go after Biden any way he can once he is back in the Oval Office, including by directing his attorney general to indict Hunter for offenses we have not yet even considered? Did they not notice whom Trump has nominated to run the FBI and the Justice Department?

There is no stopping Trump. Biden knows this. He nodded to what he expected Trump to do in his statement last night. “In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough,” the president wrote.

I promise you I was appalled when Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich on his way out the door and my loathing of presidential pardons extends even further back. Gerald Ford should never have pardoned Nixon. Alexander Hamilton should never have insisted on giving presidents the power to give blanket pardons in the first place.

Biden should not have had the power to overrule a jury of Hunter Biden’s peers, which found him guilty. He should not have had the power to overrule Hunter’s own guilty plea, for which he was soon to be sentenced.

In a world where we didn’t elect a vindictive felon who is even now plotting to use the Department of Justice as his own personal vendetta apparatus, I would be more outraged about Biden’s actions. But that world does not exist. And anyone who is tut-tutting about bad precedents and norm shattering better wake up. Trump has dragged us down into the mud with him and if you have the luxury to sit back and pontificate about how unseemly this all is, you are a luckier person than the rest of us, who are gravely concerned about what Trump is going to do once he has the power to deploy the federal government to go after his enemies.

It’s possible that after Trump is gone, we will be able to build something different from the rubble. But it won’t be the same and anyone who thinks that Trump has not irretrievably broken something is living in a fantasy world.

Trump is going to pardon the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. He will pardon Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, the two aides who were indicted alongside him in the documents case. He will pardon whoever else he feels like pardoning, either because he likes the cut of their jib or because the grifters around him collected a few million bucks to secure those pardons. Because he can. The Constitution says so.

All of this would have happened whether Hunter Biden got a pardon from his father or spent his days rotting away in a jail cell. How do we know this? Because past is prologue and Charlie Kushner will soon be spending a very pleasant four years living in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré as the United States Ambassador to the French Republic.

Here is the bottom line for all the people outraged about this pardon: It’s not 2015 anymore. After everything that has gone on over the past decade, whatever norms and precedents you grew up with will never see the light of day again.

When they go low, we don’t go high. We go smarter, if we can. And we put away the smelling salts and stop pretending that we are still living in some antediluvian world, where the Great Flood never happened.

If you expected Biden to go high when Trump swore to use his immense presidential powers to exact vengeance, you have the luxury of living in a rich fantasy world where the rest of us can’t afford to join you.

Odds and Ends:

Speaking of Norm-Shattering

Jane Mayer of the New Yorker has quite a story out this morning about Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department. You can read all about it here but to highlight a few key revelations: it seems that Hegseth has what you might call a very serious drinking problem, a penchant for sexually harassing women, at least one allegation of sexual assault levied against him by a woman attending a Republican conference, a long and ignominious history of financial mismanagement and a deep-seeded desire to murder all Muslims.