RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, as we covered here, the Biden Justice Department filed a death penalty charge against Luigi Mangione, the alleged cold-blooded killer of health insurance executive Brian Thompson. Mangione was already facing state murder charges for the murder committed on a Manhattan street. The only reason to pile on a capital charge — for an administration that both says it philosophically opposes the death penalty and has imposed a moratorium on executions since President Biden entered office in January 2021 — was to grab headlines in a case that had riveted public attention.

And now, just days later, Biden has cynically commuted the sentences of almost all remaining federal death row inmates — 37 of the 40 — so that none of those defendants will be executed.

I say “cynically” because this is the game Biden and Democrats in power play with capital punishment, which is broadly popular nationally but reviled by their party’s progressive base. For public consumption, in murder cases that enrage voters, they take on the mantle of capital punishment’s reluctant champions. Thus did the Obama-Biden Justice Department indict Dzokhar Tsarnaev on death charges when he and his brother bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013 — notwithstanding that Obama, like Biden, had imposed a moratorium on executions. And when a Democrat-appointee-dominated First Circuit appellate court irrationally reversed the death sentence endorsed by the Boston federal jury, the Biden Justice Department appealed and convinced the Supreme Court to reinstate it.

But that was out of one side of the administration’s mouth. On the other side, Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland were assuring their political base not to pay any mind to these theatrics because, after all, they weren’t going to allow anyone to be executed.

And, naturally, Tsarnaev is one of the three death row inmates whose sentence Biden did not commute — the others are Dylann Roof, the white racist who in 2015 murdered black worshipers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, and against whom the Obama-Biden Justice Department sought the death penalty despite its claimed constitutional qualms; and Robert D. Bowers, the Jew-hating murderer who killed worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, and against whom the Biden Justice Department decided to proceed with death penalty charges in 2023.

The Democrats’ death penalty cynicism aside, this is a corrupt invocation of the pardon power — I should say, yet another corrupt invocation — by Biden.

First, he used it on behalf of his son after indignantly vowing to the nation, repeatedly, that he would do no such thing — along the way, avoiding the admission that he was complicit in the influence-peddling that resulted in the tax charges against his son, and shamefully claiming that Hunter Biden had been selectively targeted when, as he well knew, the Biden Justice Department had selectively protected both Hunter and the president.

Next, he issued a record raft of clemency acts — 1,500 in a single day — which were a combination of (1) gifts to connected Democrats convicted of eye-popping fraud and corruption offenses and (2) a determination to use the pardon power, not for individual grants of clemency, but to achieve categorical sentencing reductions that Congress has declined to enact.

Now, Biden has done something similar, and in its way more unseemly, on death sentences.

There is no valid constitutional objection to capital punishment. It is referred to expressly and approvingly in the Constitution (the government may deprive a person of life provided there is due process of law). It was a staple of law enforcement, in the United States and around the world, when the Constitution was adopted. If, as progressives claim, the nation has evolved beyond the death penalty, there would be an easy way to make that manifest: Congress could enact a law prohibiting the death penalty. But it hasn’t because, far from a consensus against capital punishment, the public broadly approves of it.

Unable to get the constitutional or legislative change that aligns with his stated policy preference — a preference in the execution of which Biden, as he has been wont to do for a half century, insults our intelligence — the president has abused the pardon power. He has usurped Congress’s power to make the laws, which includes the authority to prescribe punishment for federal criminal offenses.

In so doing, Biden has eviscerated the hard work put in by dozens of juries and judges who struggled with the complex law of capital punishment in often grisly murder cases. And he has elevated his personal policy preference over the grief and quest for justice of the families of the victims — except, of course, in three relatively recent cases in which the Justice Department, under the direction of Obama and Biden, had to deal directly with those families and couldn’t bring itself to defend its haughty progressive principles.

As for the reporting that Biden was annealed in his lawless action by consultation with Pope Francis, I am constrained to repeat what we at NR stated a week ago in editorializing against the then-prospective abuse of the pardon power to nullify the death penalty:

While we hold out hope for the president’s repentance in the interests of his immortal soul, his administration has pursued policies of implacable hostility to many core Catholic teachings, not least to the sanctity of human life. The sincerity of invoking faith only now would be rightly called into question — especially since the Church does not teach that public officials have a duty to subvert duly enacted death penalty laws. Moreover, the president’s oath to the Constitution contains no exceptions for conscience. If he cannot discharge the duties of his office for religious reasons, Biden should resign.

Biden should long ago have resigned because he cannot discharge the duties of his office for reasons of mental and physical incompetence that transcend his conveniently invoked and ignored religious convictions. Abusing the pardon power, as he has now serially done, is an impeachable offense. As I’ve previously predicted, moreover, we haven’t even gotten to the worst of the pardons yet — they’re about a month away.