Obama Sets New Records in Number of Presidential Pardons and Commutations of Sentences


One of the legitimate powers of the president is to pardon those convicted of crimes.  That’s not to say that a power has to be legitimate, or even make sense, for Mr. Obama to try to use it to accomplish his agenda.  We’ve seen enough of that over the past eight years.  But when he pardons someone, at least he is exercising a power that he actually possesses.

Not that he uses that power wisely or correctly — he doesn’t.  In fact, he just set a new world’s record for the number of acts of clemency granted in one day by a US president.

President Obama granted 78 pardons and 153 commutations on Monday — a single-day record for the use of presidential clemency power as Obama engages in an historic end-of-term clemency surge.

With just 32 days left in office, Obama more than doubled the number of pardons he granted in the previous seven years.

And he continued his vigorous use of a lesser form of his clemency power, having now commuted the sentences of 1,176 federal prison inmates — mostly for long, mandatory-minimum drug sentences imposed during a war on drugs waged over the past three decades.

Instead of just taking it upon yourself to negate the penalties of laws you don’t like, wouldn’t the correct approach have been to take the lead in promoting legislation to change those laws?  Probably would have taken too much time away from golf outings.

Anyway, there’s still a lot of unfinished business for Mr. Obama to attend to in this regard.  He’d better get a move on.

But time is running out for Obama to address the backlog of clemency cases at the Office of the Pardon Attorney. As of Nov. 30, there were 1,937 pardon petitions and 13,042 applications for a commutation of sentence still pending.

He’s managed to surpass Bill Clinton in this regard.  Here’s a refresher on Mr. Clinton’s use of executive clemency if you need one:

With more than half of Obama’s clemency actions taking place in his last year in office, pardon expert P.S. Ruckman Jr. called it “the greatest last-minute surge in history” — even exceeding President Bill Clinton’s use of pardons in the last months of his presidency.

But unlike Clinton, who used his pardon power to help relatives and political allies, Obama’s pardons on Monday did not include any of the more politically charged cases that activists have been urging him to grand his presidential mercy to. (Former secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have not applied for clemency, and Obama says all pardons must go through the application process.)

Instead, the list of Obama’s newest pardons reflects a variety of federal crimes including drug dealing, bid rigging, illegal gambling, possession of untaxed alcohol and the illegal importation of tortoises.

The part about Bill Clinton’s pardoning of relatives and friends we understand — that’s just standard Clinton Cronyism at its best.

But Obama pardoning someone for “the illegal importation of tortoises?”  Now he has gone too far.  Surely his legacy will be forever tainted by such an egregious act.

Source:  USA Today



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