December 24, 2023
On Friday, December 22, the Oval Office issued a full federal pardon to all Americans who have ever used marijuana.
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The media coverage pretends to be thorough by talking about this blanket pardon’s obvious limits: it pardons people for only the federal violations, so it doesn’t get them out of state violations, and it applies only to possession and use, not to such commonly related crimes as dealing, gang involvement, weapons charges, and robbery.
This therefore sounds reasonable, moderate, even harmless. It’s not picking a fight with the states, just dealing with federal prosecutions, not committing obvious overreach. It sounds like just a harmless Christmas present to private individuals, the stoners who just smoke in the basement but don’t commit other crimes.
Unfortunately, as usual, appearances are deceiving.
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First, by simply pardoning everyone for a crime still on the books, the Biden-Harris regime is flouting long established federal law. There have been federal laws for generations against the possession and use of pot.
Generally speaking (though this is not universal), Democrats are for erasing such bans (on the grounds that there are worse drugs out there), and Republicans are for keeping the bans (on the grounds that no country’s problems were ever solved by getting their population strung out on dope). If they campaign for Congress to lift the ban, and succeed, they could then have a case for issuing retroactive pardons (subject to points two and three below). But by doing it before Congress agrees to lift the ban, they are just repeating their frequent habit of acting as if the Executive Branch is unbounded by either the specific laws of the nation or the overarching checks and balances of our “three federal branches” system.
For this reason — steamrolling all standing congressional and judicial action like this — it is an impeachable offense.
Second, everything is precedent. There are a few states that have decriminalized marijuana, and there are many others that are considering doing so. Even though this blanket pardon doesn’t literally apply to state law at all, the fact of it will put more than a thumb on the scale, on the side of those state-by-state decriminalization efforts.
In each state, the advocates for leaving the ban in place have federal law on their side. But now that they can point to a federal pardon on the matter, there’s an undeserved claim to federal precedent that the decriminalization side can use in their arguments to counter it. The White House has no business meddling in state law this way, in direct contradiction to longstanding federal law.
What happens if states use this pardon as the final winning argument that flips their states from the ban column into the decriminalization column? Then the White House will have successfully used its position to drive yet another wedge between federal and state law, disrupting what ought to be a harmonious relationship, more than ever.
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Third, most importantly, and probably most complicatedly, we must discuss the issue of the plea bargain.
In the United States, whether at the federal level or the state, whenever someone can be charged with multiple different violations — and criminals usually can be — prosecutors usually weigh the odds and costs involved in a trial, negotiate with the defendant and his attorney, and settle on a reduction of counts down to the one that gets a guilty plea and an acceptable amount of prison time.
A criminal might commit a number of crimes in a night — say, robbery, drug possession, reckless (pot-affected?) driving, and maybe a couple of weapons charges — and the prosecution will agree to waive the rest of the charges if they settle on the one that’s easiest to prove and has an acceptable sentencing range.
As a result, all those thousands of people who are “in jail for possession of marijuana” are really not in jail just for having pot at all. It only looks like it, because that’s the one listed. That doesn’t mean they didn’t do all those other things.
They are usually in jail for multiple crimes, ranging from brawling to rape, from gang activity to weapons charges, from selling drugs to robbery. But some crimes are harder to prove than others, and if you can put the criminal behind bars for five years for a plea to the pocketful of dope, it’s a win for society. The criminal goes to jail, and our overworked law enforcement officers can move on to the next case.
What happens when a president (or governor) disregards all this background information, waves a magic wand, and makes the one crime for which they were convicted go away? Now, all of a sudden, these criminals are back on the streets. Or if they’re already on the streets, because they did their time in the past, now the other conditions of their release are likely to be washed away, too. Maybe they were forbidden from being near children, or banned from handling cash at a bank, or their licenses to work in a medical or dental office were revoked. With a pardon, they can reapply to such positions and again work as bus drivers or dental hygienists or preschool teachers or nannies.
There you have it. We had a system that worked; it locked up people who should be locked up, and it kept them out of certain jobs that would hold temptations for them, or held other risks, when they got out.
And now the Biden-Harris regime, once again, is ripping up a system that worked.
If the prosecutors had known, back when they negotiated the plea bargain, that some autocrat-in-chief would issue a blanket pardon on the drug charge one day, they might have made different choices. Maybe they would have just settled on the robbery charge or the brawling charge or the molestation charge. But they didn’t know then.
Five, ten, fifteen years ago, nobody would ever have dreamed that a candidate who was tossed out of the primaries twice before, for plagiarizing speeches and lying about his own résumé, would one day end up in the Oval Office with the power to do a stupid thing like this. You can’t blame the prosecutors who negotiated those plea bargains in good faith, assuming that no future executive order would someday pull the floor out from under them.
Once again, the Biden-Harris regime has disregarded established law to shake up the system, siding with the criminal against the law-abiding citizen, disrupting the American system in every way it can.
Disruption is what these people do, without a care in the world about the amount of damage that results.
The inauguration of the next sane president cannot come soon enough.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and trade compliance consultant. A one-time Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. Read his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II, and the brand new Volume Three).
Image via Pexels.
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