“There’s reason to be worried about the plethora of pardons from Trump and Biden”

Kyle Cheney for Politico:

Over a span of 12 hours, two presidents went on a clemency spree.

The extraordinary wave of pardons Monday — from Joe Biden as he left the White House and from Donald Trump as soon as he returned to it — demonstrate the potency of the Constitution’s pardon power, but also expose its perils, constitutional scholars say.

The pardon power — a relic of English monarchs that was adopted by America’s founders as a way to extend grace and mercy in exceptional circumstances — can’t be checked by Congress or the courts. And in a country gripped by political rancor, that power is increasingly prone to abuse, experts say.

Both presidents, on the same day, stretched the pardon power to new, questionable frontiers in wildly different ways.

“It was perhaps a constitutional mistake to give the president this one unchecked, unilateral power,” said Mark Rozell, a George Mason University expert on presidential power. “Madison believed that any power granted without institutional checks would be abused. The recent exercises of the pardon power by two presidents proves he was right.”

Biden kicked off the pardon binge when he granted preemptive clemency to political allies, including Gen. Mark Milley, a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Covid czar Anthony Fauci, members of the Jan. 6 committee and, minutes before departing the White House, his own siblings and their spouses. In each case, Biden described them as potential targets of a vengeful Trump administration.

Trump, on the other hand, delivered massive blanket clemency to virtually all of the roughly 1,600 people who have been prosecuted in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including hundreds of people who assaulted police and a dozen convicted of a sedition plot….

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