Today, President Biden will preside over this nation’s annual Thanksgiving tradition and pardon two turkeys. Since the middle of the 19th century, presidents have been marking the holiday by performing this ritual act of mercy. Abraham Lincoln was the first to do so.
In our era, this ritual takes place in the White House’s Rose Garden, where the president is, as Swedish anthropologist Magnus Fiskesj puts it, the “high priest of the pardon.” Pardoning a turkey might seem frivolous in a world with many serious problems and with many incarcerated individuals all over the nation seeking clemency. But it is a very public occasion that highlights the vast power of the president and other chief executives to extend mercy and grace to others.
The key example of that power, Fiskesj suggests, is found in “decisions on wielding or withholding the executioner’s axe.”
As we approach the Thanksgiving holiday, a lot of ink has already been — and will continue to be — spilled urging Biden to do more than pardon a turkey and commute the sentences of everyone on federal death row. And on Nov. 20, 60 members of Congress joined in that call.
Biden should indeed do so, although that act would save only 40 lives.
As important as it is that Biden turns his opposition to capital punishment into concrete action, such action is even more important at the state level, where some governors also will be pardoning turkeys this Thanksgiving. That is because, in death penalty states, there are now more than 2,200 people awaiting execution.
It is time for Democratic governors in those states to use their sovereign power to put down the executioner’s axe. They can build on a long tradition of governors........