Biden's Shakespearean End: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Beginning in March 2021, President Joe Biden periodically met with historians to learn what traits made some American Presidents great. Regardless of what attributes they said were necessary, Biden proved that he had none over time. He lacked George Washington’s military acumen, Abraham Lincoln’s statesmanship, FDR’s geopolitical vision, and Ronald Reagan’s oratorical skills. Instead, Biden displayed the military expertise of Douglas Haig, the statesmanship of Nicholas II, the geopolitical foresight of Neville Chamberlain, and the rhetorical ability of Elmer Fudd.

A better comparison would be to some tragically flawed leaders in Shakespeare’s plays, such as Lear, Macbeth, Caesar, and Anthony. They each had dreadful outcomes, as did most of the nation during Biden’s tenure.

Biden’s use of the Article II Pardon Clause offers an excellent opportunity to assess Biden’s character when using the powers of that office. As the Supreme Court has told us, the clemency power is exclusively the President’s to use; he may exercise it at any point after a federal crime has been committed, whether before or after any charges have been brought or trial held, and neither Congress nor the federal courts may second-guess his or her decision to grant or deny relief.

The only two limitations on the President’s power are that he may relieve only “Offenses against the United States” and may not use a pardon in “Cases of Impeachment” to maintain someone in office whom Congress has impeached (under Article I, § 2) and removed (under Article I, § 3). The clemency power, according, is the very definition of a prerogative.

Let’s examine how Biden’s use of his clemency power is appropriately viewed in the context of one of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Prologue: The Pardon of the Stoners—Although Shakespeare rarely included a prologue to his plays, some of his works did, such as Romeo and Juliet, and they set the scene for what later played out in the acts to follow. In Biden’s case, we saw just such a prologue on October 6, 2022, a month before the 2022 mid-term elections, in his grant of pardons to federal offenders convicted under federal or District of Columbia law for the simple possession of cannabis. The pardons were clear political theater designed to show that “stoners” should vote for Democrats in the election in November.

How could I be so cynical? Well, despite the pardons, no one was released from federal prison; the pardons did not apply to possession of other drugs; the pardons did not apply to “non-citizens,” including illegal aliens; the pardons did not remove cannabis possession from the federal or D.C. criminal codes; and Biden issued the pardons a month before an election in which everyone expected that voters would wallop his party. These pardons were just like getting a present at Thanksgiving, a way of signaling that more would come to “good” little boys and girls who would vote to keep the Democrats in power.

Biden saw the presidency as a larger-scale mayoralty, an office that enabled its holder to hand out goodies to satisfy favored constituencies rather than the chief executive officer of a nation with interests different from and superior to those of any particular political or social following. We would see that “vision” played out time after time during the rest of Biden’s term.

Act I: The Pardon of Hunter Biden—Think of that pardon as being comparable to Santa pardoning a very naughty elf just because he was Santa’s favorite helper (and because Santa didn’t want to hear the elf’s stepmother, Lady Macbeth, caterwaul for the rest of Santa’s days about his allowing her stepson to go to the hoosgow).

After the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) had cut Joe and his son Hunter every break imaginable—including offering Hunter a plea bargain that would have wiped away every crime he had committed—DOJ charged Hunter with some false statement and tax offenses to retain a fig leaf of credibility that justice is blind.

The problem is two-fold: Justice—or at least the Justice Department—wasn’t blind while Merrick Garland was Attorney General, and, in any event, the fig leaf was transparent. When Hunter was tried for making false statements, even 12 jurors from Joe’s home state of Delaware couldn’t ignore the overwhelming proof of Hunter’s guilt, and Hunter’s later counseled guilty plea to the tax charges proved as a matter of law that he was guilty of those charges too.

But the boss of the Biden Crime Family wouldn’t let proof of Hunter’s guilt lead to the punishment, whether direct or collateral, of Joe’s business partnership with the Chinese. Joe pardoned Hunter for every federal crime he did or could have committed since Biden started intervening in foreign affairs on his son’s behalf.

Joe’s defense was that the Justice Department had been picking on Hunter. Spare me. Joe was Garland’s superior officer in the federal hierarchy because, as President, Joe possessed all of the “executive Power,” not just the administrative part of appointing his lieutenants. Joe could have ordered Garland not to prosecute Hunter. Or, if he was concerned about the political repercussions of publicly granting Hunter an unjustified favor, Joe could have “suggested” that one of his assistants perform the dirty deed. After all, that’s why God created staff: to carry out tasks that a superior wants to be done without hesitation, failure, or publicity so that the boss—excuse me so that the “Big Guy”—can plausibly deny being involved. After all, there was an election coming up, and voters needed to be snookered again into voting Democratic.

That is what made Hunter’s pardon corrupt. Joe had repeatedly promised for months and months that he would not pardon Hunter, and Joe’s minions repeated that lie over and over. All that was to persuade some voters that Joe was ethical and stood for the proposition that justice is blind. Everyone knew that pitch was hooey. Everyone, that is, except for the White House staff and media “journalists” (I’m being kind) who had covered up Joe’s lies (and senility). No White House official admitted that Joe had lied, even after evidence surfaced that he had decided to pardon Hunter long before he did; Biden’s lie made his press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre look “credulous or complicit” about Joe’s repeated lies, yet no White House official resigned on the ground that Joe had boldly, unabashedly, and willfully lied to the American people when he was running for re-election or during the candidacy of his party’s eventual nominee. The underlying problem is not just that Joe Biden is a liar—or as Senator Tom Cotton put it, Biden’s word is “trash”—but that Biden tried to euchre the electorate into voting for him, and later Kamala Harris, by claiming to be an ethical, impartial chief executive who could be trusted with captaining the ship of state.

Act II: Clemency for the Masses—The poet Juvenal said Roman leaders need not fear rebellion if they kept the masses happy with bread and circuses. Someone must have offered Biden that advice because he has attempted to distribute whatever benefits he controls (or mistakenly thinks he controls) to his constituents. Student loan absolutions are a common example.

Biden recently decided to use clemency as well. On December 12, he pardoned, or commuted the sentences of, nearly 1,500 persons and bragged that it was the largest number of clemency recipients in one day in modern American history. What he didn’t brag about was the commutations for Michael Conahan, a former judge who accepted bribes to sentence minors to private, for-profit detention centers in the “Kids-for-Cash” scandal; Rita Crundwell, the former comptroller of Dixon, Illinois, who embezzled almost $54 million from the town; or Eric Bloom, who defrauded investors of more than $665 million. Brag-ging about them would likely have tarnished the image that Joe wanted to display. As National Review’s Jim Geraghty noted, “Joe Biden has a real soft spot in his heart for fraudsters, swindlers, and embezzlers, huh? I guess game respects game.”

Commutations recognize that some sentences are unduly long or that even prisoners can sometimes deserve an early release for worthwhile conduct they have undertaken while in prison. But commutations are bastardized when a President uses them in an attempt to burnish his image with history, especially when they are doled out to create the faux image of a benevolent, merciful chief executive, to persuade historians to treat his administration favorably, or when one is packing up to leave 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. All three conclusions are justified in this case.

Act III: The Clearing Out of Death Row—Scene 1—Whatever one might believe of the morality or efficacy of capital punishment, there can be no doubt about its constitutionality. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments expressly refer to the death penalty as a legitimate sanction for crime; capital punishment was the standard punishment for felonies at common law and at the time of the nation’s founding; that penalty is still authorized for multiple federal offenses; and a majority of states have the death penalty on their statute books. In the words of Andrew McCarthy, “It was a staple of law enforcement, in the United States and around the world, when the Constitution was adopted.” The belief that the death penalty is unconstitutional justifies drug testing the believer.

Several governors, however, have decided to clear out death row as they left the governor’s mansion behind. New Mexico Governor Tony Anaya said that he did it because his religious and moral principles prohibited execution as a punishment. In commuting those capital sentences, however, Anaya did not explain why he never told the electorate when campaigning for office what he would do if elected. Illinois Governor George Ryan also emptied death row on the ground that he did not trust the accuracy of the Illinois criminal justice system to decide which offenders should be executed. But there is a reasonable belief that Ryan, who later was convicted of federal corruption charges, was merely trying to generate sympathy with potential jury members.

Biden decided to follow suit. In 2021, he cynically said that he was not going to execute any federal death-row prisoners until the Justice Department had re-viewed how the federal government carried out that sentence. After nearly four years, AG Garland has never publicly released any report on the issue because the entire enterprise was a joke. Just another cynical effort to deceive the American public. (Does anyone see a theme running throughout Biden’s presidency?) On December 23, 2024, when 99 percent of Americans were concerned with Christmas or Hanukkah, Biden dropped the other shoe by granting clemency to 37 of 40 people on death row. “Fully a quarter of them were sentenced to death for killings inside prison, and two others earned their death sentences for killings following a prison escape . . . Still others killed cops or witnesses or engaged in murder for ransom, hire, or organized crime.” Choir boys, each and every one.

Look also at the three people whom Biden has allowed to remain on death row (albeit, as explained below, only for another few weeks): Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber; Dylann Roof, the white racist who in 2015 murdered black worshipers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina; and Robert Bowers, who killed worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 against whom Biden’s own DOJ had sought the death penalty in 2023. Biden’s White House Fact Sheet explained that he thought that death was an inappropriate punishment “except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”

Terrorism and hate-filled murder? How convenient! It was pure chance that Tsarnaev was from a Democratic state that treats the Boston Marathon like Jesus' ’Via Dolorosa; that Roof murdered several black worshipers, a primary Democratic constituency, in a state represented in Congress by Jim Clyburn, who saved Biden’s run for the presidency in 2020 by endorsing him before the South Carolina primary; and that Bowers murdered Jews, members of a historic Democratic voting bloc. Color me cynical, but I doubt that Biden would have left them facing judgment day sooner than they would have liked if it weren’t for the likely reaction of longstanding Democratic constituencies.

Scene 2—Besides, a possible Scene 2 to this act will play out very shortly. Some parties appealed to Biden as a “fellow” Roman Catholic to commute the sentences of federal death row prisoners. Even if that is true—Biden draws a difference that the Catholic Church does not: between executing guilty adults who committed brutal murders and innocent babies still in the womb who have done nothing wrong—and Biden did not seem moved two days before Christmas. But Biden is scheduled to meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican on January 10, leaving open the possibility that if the Pope asks Biden to commute the death sentences on the remaining three condemned prisoners (perhaps following a suggestion by a Biden staffer), Biden will agree to do so while invoking religion and trying to shift some of the blame to the Pope. Whatever the reason (or lack of one), don’t be surprised if Tsarnaev, Roof, and Bowers move off death row before Donald Trump is sworn into office.

Act IV: The Pardon of the Biden Crime Family—What is the difference between the situation that Hunter Biden faced early in December and the one that the rest of the Biden Crime Family faces now? The former had been convicted of a felony and was facing a sentencing hearing that could have resulted in his imprisonment. In contrast, the latter has not been convicted of anything. This leaves open the question of whether Joe will pardon himself (which, as I have argued elsewhere, he can do) and every family member who could conceivably be charged with any federal crime.

The recent public disclosure of photographs showing Joe and Hunter with Chinese officials during their trip to China while Joe was Vice President is just the cherry on top of the sundae of incriminating evidence that the Biden family profited off of his position in government. If Biden believed that “Hunter was singled out” for prosecution by a Garland-led Justice Department “only because he is my son—and that is wrong,” he certainly may reach the same conclusion about a Pam Bondi-led Justice Department.

Act V: The Pardon of Illegal Aliens—The last act of this tragedy may be Biden’s boldest move. There are millions of illegal aliens within the United States because of Biden’s matador-like approach to enforcing immigration laws. President-elect Trump has declared that he will end that policy on Day 1 of his administration, likely by signing an executive order immediately after giving his acceptance speech. In an attempt to sabotage that action, Biden may try to pardon all of the illegal aliens in this nation.

While this may be popular with his demoralized constituents, that effort won’t work; that is, it won’t stop Trump from moving forward with his plan to turn our immigration policy around 180 degrees. As Justice Hugo Black argued in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, commonly known as the Steel Seizure Case, the legitimacy of presidential order “must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.” The Article II Pardon Clause grants the President the power “to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States” (emphasis added). As Chief Justice John Marshall explained some 190-plus years ago in United States v. Wilson, a pardon “exempts the individual on whom it is bestowed from the punishment the law inflicts for a crime he has committed” (emphasis added). Deportation proceedings are civil, not criminal, and a deportation order is not a criminal punishment. In Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ words, “[t]he purpose of deportation is not to punish past transgressions but rather to put an end to a continuing violation of the immigration laws.” Moreover, even if an alien’s illegal status were deemed to be a crime, it is a continuing offense, one committed every day that the alien is in this country, and no President can authorize a party to commit a crime on an ongoing basis.

The bottom line is this: while Biden cannot enable illegal aliens to remain in this nation by trying to “pardon” their illegal status, that may not stop him from trying, it is just another opportunity to stick his finger in Trump’s and the public eyes.

There you have it. Biden as Shakespeare. Of course, the tragedy is that Biden has been our chief executive since 2021, a position he was never fit to hold and repeatedly proved he could not carry out ethically and responsibly. We have already seen Acts I to III of this tragedy and may still see Acts IV and V soon. But the curtain will fall on this performance at noon on January 20, 2025. Halleluiah!

Paul J. Larkin is the John, Barbara & Victoria Rumpel Senior Legal Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.