A pair of right-wing scholars from the American Enterprise Institute, Marc Thiessen and Danielle Pletka, made a plea to President Joe Biden in The Washington Post on Monday: Pardon Donald Trump on your way out the door.
This comes as Trump's remaining criminal cases appear to be in varying stages of dead or in limbo following his re-election — which they argue should be defeated outright to let America heal.
"From a legal standpoint, Trump does not need a presidential pardon. Special counsel Jack Smith is in the process of shutting down his federal investigations. If Smith does not close his cases, Trump can simply fire him the second he takes office. At the state level, Biden has no pardon power, but the cases against Trump appear to be falling apart," they wrote.
However, they argued that the country as a whole would be unified by this decision.
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Their key argument is that in doing so, Biden could head off a cycle of partisan use of the state against political candidates: "Absent decisive action, we could find ourselves at the start of a vicious cycle, in which Republicans now argue they are justified in weaponizing the justice system to go after Democrats, and Democrats then feel free to retaliate when they regain power — sending the country spiraling into a miasma of partisan litigation."
Such a move, which was also previously urged by outgoing Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), has happened in the past, with former President Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon following his resignation over the Watergate scandal — a decision that, far from healing the country, proved wildly unpopular and contributed to Ford's undoing in the subsequent election of 1976.
Biden, for his part, already committed against pardoning Trump when they ran against each other in 2020. But Thiessen and Pletka insist he should reconsider, and that this time it would make the country better off.
They concluded by quoting Biden's 2020 victory speech, where he said “To everything there is a season — a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow. And a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America.” Should Biden do what they are advocating, they wrote, "history can still record that, in the waning days of his presidency, Joe Biden finally delivered on that promise."
