Monday’s Final Word

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Closing commuting the tabs ...

“I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” Mr. Biden said in a statement on Monday. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

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Mr. Biden said the commutations were consistent with the standard he has imposed for halting executions “in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.

Ed: So … the federal government should conduct executions? Or should it only do so for miurderers that don’t suit the tastes of one Joseph Robinette Biden? Or whoever is using the autopen for him? This makes no sense in terms of principles, except in the context of attempting to throw sand in the gears of a successor administration. He rescued murderers to pwn the MAGAs, and that’s all — which is why this is so despicable. 

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Amid the blowback over Hunter Biden’s pardon, Biden soon announced almost 1,500 commutations, in what the White House touted as the “largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history.” Like Biden’s son, those people were not individually vetted by the Justice Department, which carefully considers the circumstances of each case before issuing a recommendation. A Pennsylvania judge accused of taking payoffs in exchange for sending children to juvenile detention made the list, sparking another outcry.

The mass commutation benefited only those who had been released from prison into home confinement; the hundreds of people whose clemency petitions have been cleared by the Justice Department — most of whom remain behind bars — are still awaiting the president’s signature.

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Ed: In other words, there is nothing normal about this except for the usual toxic incompetency of Joe Biden and his administration. 

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Ed: This is the polar opposite of “principled.” It’s not even coherent. 

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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.

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Ed: Andy McCarthy’s right that the hypocrisy on these commutations goes well beyond the 37-3 split. It’s been ongoing since 2009 between Obama and Biden. This week just provides the obvious exposure of the gutless politicos involved. 

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Hurst’s widow, Marissa Gibson, called Biden's commutation distressing and a "complete dismissal and undermining of the federal justice system,” in a statement to The Columbus Dispatch.

Heather Turner, whose mother, Donna Major, was killed in a 2017 South Carolina bank robbery, called the commutation of the killer's sentence a “clear gross abuse of power” in a Facebook post, adding the weeks she spent in court with the hope of justice “just a waste of time.”

“At no point did the president consider the victims,” Turner wrote. “He, and his supporters, have blood on their hands.”

Ed: That’s why we have courts and laws to enforce them. If Biden wanted to end the death penalty, he should have asked Congress to change the law to that effect. Instead, he just stole the justice that the victims of these criminals sought in good faith under existing federal law. 

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 Just last month in the White House, he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to Cecile Richards, former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. During her period of leadership (2006 to 2018), more than 13.3 million unborn babies were killed in the United States, as The Federalist previously reported. Richards earned $500,000 a year and facilitated more deaths than there were in the Holocaust.

Killing voiceless, innocent babies does not stir Biden’s conscience, but killing killers does.

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David Strom 8:00 AM | December 24, 2024
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