The president’s ability to grant pardons and commute sentences is a dramatic but generally quiet power. Presidential grants of clemency generally go through a complex bureaucratic process. They are not usually announced in advance, let alone deployed as part of a campaign to win votes.
But, as with many other things, Donald Trump is changing all that. He has made promising pardons an important part of his 2024 campaign.
This is a bad development in our scheme of constitutional government, a tactic that taints one of the most awesome of presidential prerogatives. Trump is turning clemency from a solemn responsibility to just another tool in his transactional political repertoire.
On Saturday, in an appearance at the Libertarian Party Convention, Trump gave us another example of the lengths to which he will go just to win a few votes. There he offered a clemency quid pro quo.
“If you vote for me,” he promised, “on Day 1, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served. He’s already served 11 years. We’re going to get him home.”
Trump knew exactly what he was doing when he made that promise, since many in his audience were waving “Free Ross” signs. And, as Politico reports, “Ulbricht’s case was one of the top issues that libertarians asked Trump to address before the convention—and it won Trump his biggest applause of the night.”
AdvertisementRoss W. Ulbricht was the founder of an online marketplace called Silk Road, where illegal drugs were bought and sold. Ulbricht operated the website between 2011 and 2013, when he was arrested. He has been a longtime follower of the libertarian hero Ludwig von Mises, who believed that “every action we take outside of government control strengthens the market and weakens the state.”
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementUlbricht was sentenced in 2015 to life in prison by federal Judge........