RICH LOWRY: Joe Biden’s commutations racket

President Joe Biden, or whoever is running the White House, grotesquely abused the pardon power, yet again. Biden commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 of the prisoners on federal death row in response to the lobbying of opponents of the death penalty, keeping intact his nearly unbroken record of bending to left-wing pressure groups while in office.

Biden, or whoever is running the White House, put out a statement averring that the president has long been committed to “ensuring a fair and effective justice system.” Even if true, this is a non-sequitur, because there’s nothing to suggest the handling of all these cases was unfair.

Biden decided a few years ago that he opposed the death penalty after being an unsparing supporter (when he said in the 1990s that crime legislation he favored did “everything but hang people for jaywalking,” he meant it as a compliment). That’s fine. Anyone with such a long — and undistinguished — career is going to shift on issues over time.

Still, that shouldn’t give Biden, or whoever is running the White House, the prerogative to impose his will over and above that of the American people as expressed through Congress. Nonetheless, he did just that, and in behalf of people guilty of truly unspeakable crimes.

You might be tempted to say that Biden has hit bottom, but there are, surely, more acts of clemency to come. Anyone involved in the Biden family’s influence-peddling business must be hoping to get the Hunter Biden treatment in this president’s final hours.

Biden’s commutations weren’t discriminating; they were meant to be sweeping, applying to almost everyone in a broad category of criminals. The goal wasn’t to apply case-by-case mercy, but to thwart a form of punishment sanctioned by the Constitution, specifically authorized by Congress, and recommend and imposed by juries and judges. In fact, as the White House statement notes, the commutations were intended to prevent the incoming Trump administration from imposing the law in these cases.

Obviously, people of good faith can disagree about the morality and utility of the death penalty. The right way to go about ending it, though, is to campaign for Congress to reverse field. Biden didn’t even try. Although the death penalty has been losing support, it’s still popular. Why try to change public opinion and to bring Congress along when the pardon power can be twisted into a weapon to effectively vacate federal statutes?

Even as an act of high principle Biden’s move fails. Either the federal death penalty is a moral abomination that should never be applied, or it’s not. Commuting the sentences of 37 people who committed terrible crimes and leaving on death row another three people who committed infamous acts makes no sense. Yes, the Boston marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was one of the three left out, is a monster. So is everyone else on Biden’s list.

On top of this inconsistency, the Biden Justice department just filed a death penalty charge against the UnitedHealthcare CEO slaying suspect, Luigi Mangione. Does Biden’s DOJ want to put him on death row so some future progressive president, inspired by Biden’s example, can commute his sentence?

If Biden’s Catholic faith moved him — Pope Francis wanted the sentences commuted — it hasn’t had the slightest effect on the president’s strong support for abortion-on-demand, which, not incidentally, is one of the left’s foremost ideological imperatives.

There is a legitimate question about why we have the federal death penalty if we are going to use it so rarely (there had been a 17-year hiatus when Donald Trump’s DOJ restarted executions in his first term). But that, too, is a matter to be taken up by the Congress, not a doddering soon-to-be former president hunting among the scraps of progressive priorities for something that he believes will enhance his legacy in the sad final days of his presidency.

Biden, or whoever is running the White House, should be ashamed.

Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry.