Pardons Fail to Serve Any Common Purpose

Jan. 23, 2025

That didn’t take long.

It was almost guaranteed that Donald Trump would claim a mandate he doesn’t have, overreach, and the pendulum that swung toward him in November would begin swinging away from him.  Before We All Go Off the Deep End – Our Common Purpose.  Within a matter of two days, at least two-thirds of this already has occurred.

The President made no bones about it in his Inaugural Address on Monday.

His words: “My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place, and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed, their freedom.”

He doesn’t have the mandate he thinks he has.  His election wasn’t so much a yes vote for him as it was a no vote against Democrats.  Voters demonstrated their ire with Democratic economic policies, unfair as that might be, as well as their reluctance to put a woman, perhaps particularly a black woman, in the White House.

But don’t try telling that to the President.  He has a history of seeing things the way he wants to see them, and then acting upon those impulses.

This week has been all about shock and awe.  The most egregious of his controversial moves was to free the 1,500 rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.  Perhaps this is what he was referring to in his Inaugural Address when he spoke of giving back people’s freedom.

While this post might be seen up to here as a predictable liberal response to these actions, and perhaps it is, this is where Our Common Purpose kicks in.  For when it comes to pardoning the rioters, Trump’s actions do not represent or reflect the will of the people.

In a poll commissioned by Our Common Purpose just days after Jan. 6, a tiny 3% of the nationwide sampling said the rioters were justified in assaulting the Capitol.  Long before the courts got involved, 43% of respondents characterized the rioters as domestic terrorists and an additional 24% called them criminals.  Still another 17% dismissed them simply as fools.

That was in the moment.  Of much more lasting significance, in poll after poll conducted by Our Common Purpose, Americans have asserted their strong belief in the rule of law.

Principle #5 of the 10 Principles to Unite America states “We are a nation of laws – that need to be equally applicable to all.”  In the survey taken just after Jan. 6, 77% strongly agreed with that sentiment, another 18% somewhat agreed.  Before and after, in poll after poll, the results have come back virtually the same.

Now 77% might not sound like a lot by some standards.  But in political terms, it qualifies as a super majority.

Then most recently, in Our Common Purpose’s study of American values that is now being rolled out, law and order placed among the Top 5 of our nation’s most important values.

Which brings us to this week.  More than 1,500 lawbreakers are now walking the streets, their actions whitewashed by the unilateral decision by one man to override our laws and legal system. Militias somewhere are no doubt cheering, but the pardons are an in-your-face attack on the rule of law. Unfortunately, this ideal is being undermined at the highest levels.  We are descending into a downward spiral that threatens the fairness and perceived objectivity of our judicial system, and the faith we place in it.

To its credit, the U.S. Supreme Court saw this coming in its otherwise lamentable ruling last summer that granted broad immunity to the President.

Court Undoes Trump Sentencing Day – Our Common Purpose

Court Creates False Equivalency – Our Common Purpose

As damaging in many ways as that ruling was, part of the justification put forward in the majority opinion was the aim of preventing any president from being prosecuted by his successor on spurious grounds.  The ruling insulated the president from such political shenanigans but what about those political actors who don’t inhabit the White House?

Joe Biden pardoned his son for fear of what would happen to him under the new administration.  Then he pre-emptively pardoned a number of others including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Gen. Mark Milley whom he feared would be brought up on charges for the crime of doing their jobs.

The barbed response, in this Alice in Wonderland world, was why feel the need to pardon them if they didn’t do anything wrong.   And as long as we are issuing pardons, why not release the 1,500 criminals who assaulted police officers, physically threatened the well-being of the vice president and Congress, and ransacked the Capitol?

The escalating politicization of the judicial process threatens to upend the standards by which most of us have learned to conduct ourselves.  It’s an outrage to law-abiding citizens, and all the mores so to those who are sworn to uphold the law. In no way does it serve our common purpose.

We are better than this.  Our leadership needs to be better than this.  It is hard to imagine how we pull out of spiraling away from “we are a nation of laws — that need to be equally applicable to all” without a steady hand at the helm.