In the real world, there are not always good options. There are sometimes just less-bad ones.
Look, when Biden made the choice of appointing Merrick Garland as Attorney General, he chose the least-political person possible, who would and did bend over backwards (and contort himself into all sorts of weird shapes) just to not even appear to be at all politicized. At the time, I was happy that Biden chose Garland, but unfortunately, it appears that I was wrong. Garland’s unwillingness to go after Trump for his very real crimes (until he took it out of his own hands by appointing a Special Prosecutor) has allowed Trump to get back into the Presidency…and, Garland’s bending over backwards to make sure there was not even the slightest appearance of the DOJ being politicized did not even prevent the Republicans from claiming that the DOJ was being weaponized against them when in fact, the exact opposite was the truth. And, it is not preventing Trump from appointing the most political and despicable human beings possible to head the DOJ and the FBI, so that it really is weaponized to an even greater extent than it was under Bill Barr (Holding the Line: Inside the Nation's Preeminent US Attorney's Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department: Berman, Geoffrey: 9780593300299: Amazon.com: Books)
Biden isn’t the one undermining legal institutions, it’s his successor that seeks to do so. Had the nominees for FBI head and AG been anything but shills, it would not have been necessary. When someone tells you that he intends to weaponize the DOJ to go after those who have dared to question him, believe him.
Besides being a legal grey area to issue preemptive pardons it’s not for Biden to decide what are baseless investigations and how much supposed havoc is warranted in a criminal investigation to uphold the laws of the United States.
I’m sure you will feel the same way when the next president decides an investigation would be too much strife for someone with very high responsibilities in government.
To paraphrase Churchill’s statement about democracy, Biden’s decision to give these pardons was the worst possible decision that he could have made…except for all the others.
Trump’s unending torrent of lies, half-lies and general weirdness means you have to believe all, none, or carefully pick out the real stuff from the dross. Hard to do.
This is related to what I call the fundamental contradiction of pacifism: It takes two people to keep the peace, but only one to break it.
Sure, in an ideal world, every President would believe in the rule of law, and leave criminal prosecutions in the hands of the DoJ, sticking to the facts of each case. But we don’t live in that world, we live in the one where Trump will be president again in less than two hours, and he’s already declared his willingness to break the peace. So we either fight back, or we sit here and get hit. “Not getting hit at all” is simply not an option.
When you have somebody who isn’t right in the head and has people who are actually willing to die for him, you have to take extraordinary steps. Orange man bad isn’t just a cute saying, it’s the literal truth.
Biden can say that these pardons are “without an admission of guilt,” but the Supreme Court held in Burdick v. United States that a pardon, “carries an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it.”
Which raises another issue, in order to become effective these pardons must be accepted by the individuals being pardoned. As soon as he’s sworn in, Trump can rescind any pardon that has not been physically delivered to and accepted by the recipient. I hope he knew exactly where all of these people were going to be today.
I didn’t say I agreed with the pardons, just that an independent judiciary does nothing to protect people who have done nothing wrong from being damaged by being prosecuted.
Do you have a cite for this claim, and particularly the part I’ve bolded? I’m aware of pardons having been revoked before delivery, but I’m not aware of the any case where the validity of such a revoked pardon has actually been adjudicated. Nor am I aware of any case where anyone contested the validity of a pardon that had been delivered but had not yet been “accepted” (whatever that term is supposed to mean).
If I knew that a madman had planned to terrorize innocent people and do everything possible to ruin their lives, I’d be more worried about the madman than I would be about the victims putting fences around their houses.
I think the much bigger problem is that Biden’s action sets a precedent for pre-emptive pardoning. Even though the recipients in the current case may not have done anything wrong, future presidents whose underlings and allies have done something wrong will now be emboldened to pardon them before leaving office. Worse yet, they may implicitly or explicitly encourage wrongdoing by said underlings and allies with the intention of pardoning them after the fact.
I’m not going to comment one by one, some of which I am not familiar with, but here is the relevant quote from Wikipedia:
I was under the impression that he issue of admission of guilt was legally settled but apparently it is disputed, like many other issues around the power of presidential pardon.