Let’s quickly review President Joe Biden’s unprecedented lame-duck clemency free-for-all, shall we?
He’s sent three Chinese prisoners back to their country of origin free men, including two spies and a child sex offender.
He’s gone on the biggest one-day clemency spree in presidential history, something he said in a statement was part of “taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for non-violent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses.”
Some of these “non-violent” offenders included a voodoo-practicing, husband-murdering woman known as the “Black Widow” and a juvenile judge who sentenced 2,000 minors to time behind bars — not exactly known as a “non-violent” sorta place — in an infamous kickback scheme called “Kids for Cash,” a move that drew a rebuke from even the very Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. (It makes one wonder — given the “Black Widow” has already killed three lovers for insurance money, should Biden and his handlers be charged on the nonzero chance she murders a fourth?)
And now, as a final parting “gift,” he could be commuting the death sentences of those on death row — including some of the nation’s most brutal and notorious criminals in America’s federal prison system.
According to a Friday report in The Wall Street Journal, “President Biden is considering commuting the sentences of most, if not all, of the 40 men on the federal government’s death row, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would frustrate President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to resume the rapid pace of executions that marked his first term.”
“During his 2020 campaign, Biden listed abolition of the federal death penalty as a campaign plank, and over his term no executions have been carried out,” the Journal noted.
However, even Biden had to acknowledge that abolition of the federal death penalty would have been metaphorically suicidal — at least in the political sense — given who’s on it.
“Those who could see their death sentences commuted to life in prison include an ex-Marine who killed two young girls and later a female naval officer; a Las Vegas man convicted of kidnapping and killing a 12-year-old girl; a Chicago podiatrist who fatally shot a patient to keep her from testifying in a Medicare fraud investigation; and two men convicted in a kidnapping-for-ransom scheme that resulted in the killings of five Russian and Georgian immigrants,” the Journal noted.
Should politicians be charged if someone they pardon commits another crime?
Yes: 99% (483 Votes)
No: 1% (7 Votes)
And, if he were to commute all of the sentences of those on death row, this would include Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; anti-Semitic synagogue mass shooter Robert Bowers, who killed 11 in Pittsburgh in 2018; and white supremacist mass shooter Dylann Roof, who murdered nine at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015.
Those three are being considered as exceptions because the cases are terrorism- and/or extremist-related.
However, therein lies the problem with the logic here: The death penalty either is or isn’t a just penalty. And President Biden’s opposition to the death penalty has been framed in religious terms, with the “devout Catholic” label deployed one last time by Bidenistas as an excuse for the inexcusable.
From the Journal, which still isn’t known as a hive of pro-Biden sentiment: “A broad coalition of religious and civil-rights groups has been pressing Biden to take the step, and the effort gained momentum earlier this month after Pope Francis, in his weekly address, prayed for the commutation of America’s condemned inmates,” the report read.
“If their death sentences were commuted, the prisoners, all convicted of murder, would serve life without parole. Biden, a devout Catholic, spoke with Francis on Thursday and is scheduled to meet with him at the Vatican next month, the White House said.”
Let’s all forget the fact that, as a baptized Roman Catholic myself, I’ll be more than happy when Jan. 20 rolls around and I can stop reminding people there’s a difference between a devout Catholic and a diligent Catholic. (Diligence I’m more than willing to spot Biden, if just for his canny religious performativity. Devoutness in the Catholic faith is more difficult to ascribe to a man who spent the entirety of his administration making it a policy priority to increase the ease with which mothers could kill the unborn, however.)
Bottom line, though: If this is about Catholicism and the moral correctness of the death penalty, it’s a yes or no.
If Biden and his people draw the line somewhere, it’s entirely a matter of policy preferences; there’s nothing in the Bible or Vatican catechism which states that the powers and principalities of earth are entitled to treat the life and punishment of a man who murders individuals out of cold blood because they are a psychopath any differently than they are to treat the life and punishment of a man who murders out of cold blood because of a twisted ideology.
And, indeed, as much as the White House might want to frame this in the warm blanket of left-Catholic social justice, it appears that Attorney General Merrick Garland recommended the exceptions. One has never accused the attorney general of devotion to anything but his own situational ethics, which kind of throws that one out the window.
“It would mean that progressive politics is more important to the president than the lives taken by these murderers,” said Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s outgoing minority leader, in a speech from the Senate floor on Wednesday.
“It would mean that society’s most forceful condemnation of white supremacy and anti-Semitism must give way to legal mumbo jumbo,” he added, referencing Biden’s language about “sentencing disparities.”
It’s worth noting, too, that this debate comes as Biden’s own Department of Justice is pursuing charges that could entail the death penalty against Luigi Mangione, the Ivy League graduate accused of killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City, in a crime purportedly motivated by an animus against capitalism.
Biden’s handlers are probably happy to punt on that one, given the sick nature of the murder but also the sick hero-worship that the left has poured out upon the alleged assassin. But then, why even pursue it when New York state — where Mangione would be tried without the federal charges — doesn’t even have the death penalty? Is this to say that Biden isn’t even in charge anymore? (Please keep a straight face with that rhetorical question, farcical though the answer may be; this is quite literally a situation of life and death.)
Of course, the other possibility is more appalling:
These kiddie murderers and terrorists may get to live out long lives. Merry Christmas, America! From your ol’ pal, Uncle Joe from Scranton!
The death penalty is just, or it isn’t. The judges and juries were right, or they weren’t. It’s insulting enough for a lame-duck president to use the last moments of his president to nullify these judges and juries under the aegis of condemning the death penalty, full stop. It’s even more insulting to the families and friends of the victims of those whose sentences may be commuted to say that the death penalty is unjust unless it makes some sort of political point.
Sadly, it feels so fittingly hypocritical that our “devout Catholic” president could go out on a note of such wretched insincerity.
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