Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 21/strong>
by Dace Potas
Just hours after being sworn into his second term as president, Donald Trump delivered on his campaign promise of pardoning Jan. 6 rioters. More than 1,500 people who were charged or convicted of crimes relating to the Capitol riot in 2021 are now free, thanks to Trump.
There is an argument to be made that some Jan. 6 defendants had been charged aggressively by the Biden Department of Justice to send a message. However, Trump’s sweeping pardon goes so much further than fringe cases or simply pardoning peaceful demonstrators.
In this case, the pardons further politicize the justice system in our country and are another example of how presidents cannot be trusted with this type of power.
Trump says pardons help us find unity, but they do just the opposite
Trump claims that these pardons are meant to begin “a process of national reconciliation,” likening his reasoning here to the same reasoning for other famous mass pardons in the past.
More than four years removed from the Capitol riot, people seem to forget what actually happened that day. Trump’s pardon of Jan. 6 defendants extends to even the most violent of rioters. It extends to those who destroyed parts of our nation’s Capitol. It extends to those charged with assaulting police officers. It extends to the leadership of extremist groups that helped instigate the attack on the Capitol.
In all, 418 people who were charged with violent crimes were pardoned, including 181 who have already been convicted. People who brought weapons to the Capitol were pardoned. Those who took part in injuring more than 140 Capitol police officers were pardoned. Those who caused $2.9 million in property damage to our nation’s Capitol building were pardoned.
If the Biden DOJ were engaging in vengeful prosecution, Trump is rewarding loyalty with “get out of jail free” cards.
While I have sympathy for the people who were led astray by Trump and genuinely thought that the 2020 presidential election was being stolen, being misled by a politician is no excuse for violently attacking police officers. The rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, were adults fully capable of understanding the criminal activity they were engaging in and should be punished as such.
It’s time to amend the pardon power. The past several weeks proved that.
While Trump used the pardon power for his political purposes on Monday, this is hardly the first misuse of the power in recent weeks or even that very day.
Joe Biden used his last breaths as president on Monday to pardon several of his family members, alongside several other political targets of the incoming Trump administration. Just weeks ago, he used that pardon power to rescue his son from a possible prison sentence.
Don’t get me wrong, Trump’s abuse of power is more brazen, protecting hundreds of people who tried to violently overturn an election. However, both sides are contributing to the effective degrading of the pardon power that was once held in such high regard.
What happens when all of our political figures are immune from prosecution? Those political figures act as if they will be immune. I want my political leaders to fear prison when they act because that is the only thing that keeps many of them from breaking the law. Without that fear, our leaders will only act in their own interest.
The pardon power is a relic from when we didn’t elect criminals as president, and now that we do, it should be abandoned. Unfortunately, the pardon power requires a constitutional amendment to be removed, lowering the chances of it going away significantly. If there were a 28th Amendment, though, it would free us from this mess.
Under our current trajectory, there is no end in sight to the accelerating abuse of this pardon power, and our leaders have shown no interest in either party taking the high road to correct course. Until then, our leaders will continue to be more reckless and more brazen.
Author is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.
