Republicans weight preemptive pardons in unintentionally funny ways

The debate about the president Joe Biden issuing preemptive pardons to potential political targets of Donald Trump has clearly reached a new phase. ONE Political report this week helped get the ball rolling, drawing attention to a “vigorous internal debate” in the White House.

By all accounts, that conversation is intensifying. Washington Post published a front-page report on the deliberations notes, “The effort is being led by White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and White House Counsel Ed Siskel, the people said, indicating that the issue is being treated seriously at the highest level in the administration.”

The Associated Press ran a related reportand noted that the outgoing president has personally “discussed the subject with some senior aides,” and New York Times report about the development said the same.

Not surprisingly, there is an increasingly public component to the conversation, as some members of Congress and leading commentators — such as The Times’ Michelle Goldberg — vote support for the provocative idea.

The debate is new, but straightforward: As regular readers know, the idea behind preemptive pardons is to protect innocent people from potential—by some measures likely—prosecutorial abuses before they happen. In other words, people close to Biden believe that Trump and his loyalists, hell-bent on revenge and driven by ambitions of retaliation, are likely to pursue illegitimate investigations of perceived enemies — and the outgoing Democratic president can prevent that from happening by issuing a comprehensive set pardons now before they leave the White House.

For a variety of reasons, it’s not an easy call, but for many Republicans watching the debate unfold, all of this is wildly unnecessary.

Republican Representative Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania, for example, described potential preemptive pardons as “nonsense” because “no one” intends to go after people like former Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney. What the congresswoman may not remember, however, was an online message Trump amplified in June that accused the former Wyoming congresswoman of “treason” and raised the prospect of “television military courts.”

Similarly, the Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany from Wisconsin asked online“If Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney committed no crimes, why are Democrats asking Joe Biden to pardon them?” The answer, of course, is that Trump and his sycophantic allies — including Kash Patel, the president-elect’s pick to lead the FBI, who has already compiled a literal enemies list — may well try to prosecute Fauci and Cheney, among others, whether they’ve done anything wrong or not.

But the piece de resistance came from Republican Rep. Jim Jordan. HuffPost noted The Ohioan’s head-shaking comments on air to Fox Business host Larry Kudlow:

The right-wing chairman of the House Judiciary Committee began by calling the idea of ​​preemptive pardons “ridiculous“, before telling the TV audience in apparent seriousness, “Donald Trump has never been about retaliation.”

Maybe he was referring to another Donald Trump?

I can understand why preemptive pardons would be controversial, but to pretend that the president-elect has little interest in seeking revenge against his supposed enemies is to deny what is patently true.

In recent times, Trump has been in the White House, spending an overwhelming amount of time and energy retaliating against perceived political enemies—both in political and private sectors — seeks meritless prosecution against opponents. All this has been thoroughly documented and confirmed by officials who worked closely together with him during his term of office.

In the run-up to Election Day 2024, Trump was a private citizen who lacked access to government power, yet he sought to use his political influence to seek revenge — even against members of his own party.

As for the immediate future, the president-elect effectively ran on a retaliatory platform: Trump said he wanted to go after his perceived domestic political enemies, and he didn’t seem particularly interested in hiding his intentions. On the contrary, he talked about his desire to abuse the power of the president all the time.

Reasonable people can disagree about the merits of preemptive pardons, but the question of whether Trump has unprecedented vengeful ambitions has already been answered.

This post updates ours related previous coverage.