The Presidential Pardon Has Become a Privilege We Can No Longer Afford

Dear Reader,

The Founding Fathers granted the President the power to pardon as an act of mercy — a final check against injustice, a path toward rehabilitation, a recognition that even the best legal system sometimes gets it wrong. Alexander Hamilton defended it in Federalist 74 as necessary for “exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt.”

That is not what we are seeing anymore.

What we are witnessing is something far more corrosive: the systematic abuse of executive clemency for personal gain, political favor, and raw self-interest. When a pardon can be bought with campaign contributions, when it shields cronies and family members, when it rewards loyalty rather than rehabilitation, the power has been perverted beyond recognition.

The abuses of executive clemency are bipartisan, and the record is not flattering to either party.

President Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger, and Marc Rich — a major political donor living as a fugitive abroad. Hugh Rodham, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brother, received $400,000 for his efforts to secure pardons for a convicted drug trafficker and a convicted swindler. He later returned the money.

President Biden pardoned multiple family members preemptively — including his siblings James, Francis, and Valerie; Sara, James’s wife; John, Valerie’s husband; and his son, Hunter — before any charges had been filed against them. He also pardoned prominent political figures, actions that many legal observers described as unprecedented overreach.

President Trump pardoned drug traffickers, campaign donors, and political allies. But the most sweeping and constitutionally significant use of the pardon power came when he granted clemency to more than 1,600 individuals who stormed the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 — an event that a bipartisan Senate report and numerous federal courts have characterized as an assault on the constitutional transfer of power. What makes this particularly difficult to reconcile with any principled view of the pardon power is that the man issuing the pardons was himself identified by the House Select Committee as having played a central role in the events that led to the attack. Pardoning the participants in an event you helped set in motion is not mercy. It is something else entirely.

Perhaps most troubling is what has happened since. A number of those pardoned individuals have already been charged with new criminal offenses — a sobering reminder that the pardon power, when exercised without accountability or discernment, does not rehabilitate. It simply removes consequences and, in doing so, may embolden further lawbreaking.

The net effect across all of these administrations is the same: pardons used as personal currency — favors traded, debts settled, loyalty rewarded. This is not mercy. It is a marketplace. The pardon power was designed to serve justice, not to subvert it.

I am calling on Congress to introduce legislation to abolish the presidential pardon — or at minimum, to severely constrain it. Perhaps limit each president to six pardons during their entire term. Require public justification thirty days in advance. Prohibit pardons for anyone who has contributed to the president’s campaigns. Ban pardons for family members, business associates, and anyone in the president’s inner circle. And prohibit any president from pardoning individuals connected to events in which that president played a direct or investigated role.

Some will argue this removes an important constitutional safeguard. I disagree. We have mechanisms for justice: appeals courts, clemency boards, and post-conviction review. What we do not have is a safeguard against the pardon power itself when it is wielded not for the American people but against their interests.

Maybe in a decade — when we have restored some measure of integrity to our highest office — we can revisit this power and return it to its original, noble purpose. But right now, we have proven we cannot be trusted with it. The privilege has been abused too many times, by too many presidents, for too many corrupt purposes. It is time to take it away.

PATRICK J. WOOD
Publisher