Grab a drink—I know it’s early in the morning, but morning whiskey doesn’t mean you have a problem—and absorb this nonsense from The Nation. The Lefty magazine hasn’t always been insufferable, as they’ve had decent pieces on Russian collusion hysterics, but this is a real doozy here. With the second Trump presidency on the horizon, the Left is pleading with Biden to issue a blanket pardon for all illegal aliens before he’s wheeled out of office.
The article is a screed, a rage piece over the 2024 loss, Kamala Harris’ incompetence, and the Democrats’ continued journey into the political wilderness if they don’t find some chutzpah. Oh, the Left is raging, but for all the wrong reasons. Anyway, it’s quite the piece, but the whole premise is undercut by one sentence (via The Nation) [emphasis mine]:
So let me float a modest proposal: To redeem the use of the pardon power, Biden should disburse it far and wide. One obvious use of it, which would yield robust moral and political benefits, would be to grant a preemptive pardon to undocumented (and documented) immigrants now facing the prospect of indiscriminate mass deportation when Trump takes office next month—people who entered the country illegally within the last 20 years, who are currently awaiting an asylum decision, or are under the age of 12. (This idea isn’t original with me, by the way—I encountered it on the Bluesky account of an old friend, Daniel Radosh.) Special care should be taken to include the legal recipients of Temporary Protected Status, such as the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, relentlessly demonized by the Trump campaign—Trump is bound to try to abolish the TPS program as he moves forward on mass deportations. If Democrats are serious about confronting advancing MAGA fascism, this would be an effective way to throw up major obstacles to its enforcement at the outset.
The strategy could prove legally fruitless over the long haul, particularly as Trump can count on a MAGAfied federal court system to shore up his phony, jury-rigged argument that an immigrant “invasion” warrants expansive emergency war-power measures from the executive. But an imminent plan to legally target and repatriate a non-white population based on antisocial and violent traits imputed to them on the basis of national origin is indeed a dramatic and inestimably damaging lurch toward fascism, so a correspondingly urgent and expansive use of executive power to thwart it is a first-order political exigency. That’s especially true for an opposition party that’s frequently invoked the threat of MAGA authoritarian rule to democracy and the rule of law. Democrats disastrously sat on their hands when the first Trump White House established its more modest, but equally bogus, agency to combat the nonexistent wave of violent immigrant crime; indeed, to its shame, the Biden White House left it intact after rescinding the executive order that created it. A mass pardon for immigrants imperiled by this horrific escalation of Trump’s xenophobic predations would mark a long-overdue clean break with the Democrats’ craven and unimaginative collaboration with draconian border policies designed to stoke unfounded moral panics and political revenge fantasies on the right, as well as supplying a bulwark of support for taxpaying workers in this country menaced by brown-shirt raids dispatched from Washington.
That’s the moral case for a mass preemptive pardon for immigrants; the political one is less urgent, but equally compelling for a Democratic Party that’s driven itself into the electoral wilderness without a compass. The Harris-led party never met the electorate with a clear and decisive sense of purpose or identity, professing to defend democracy and the interests of working Americans at the same time that it let major donors set its economic agenda and romanced a never-significant cohort of Never-Trump GOP supporters. Its message on immigration was especially lackluster and self-undermining, as Harris vowed to sign the brutal and regressive Republican border overhaul that Trump sabotaged in order to continue campaigning on immigration moral panics; meanwhile, Biden has scarcely done anything to address the plight of immigrants during his final days in office.
A bold bid to upend the Trump White House’s mass deportation agenda out of the gate would send an unambiguous message that Democrats will go to great lengths to prevent the further spread of fascist rule and xenophobic lies from a cynical and morally bankrupt GOP. It would create much the same galvanizing effect on the anti-Trump opposition sparked by the brigades of protesters and legal supporters who sought to block the Muslim ban in the early days of Trump’s first term.
Again, the legal grounds for a mass-immigrant pardon could be shaky; since “unlawful presence” is a civil offense, a presidential pardon, which only applies to criminal ones, probably wouldn’t override the deportation offensive in court. Still, some immigration lawyers suggest that there is in fact a solid case for pardons.
When liberals say “some” in these situations, it’s usually academics or lawyers who are outside the mainstream and all-around abject lunatics who are so nutty even the most ardent anti-Trump networks eschew their presence on-air.
After all that, it turns out a pardon wouldn’t do much, and I doubt even the most pro-illegal alien attorney would argue otherwise.
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