Both edges of the political spectrum appear to have convinced themselves that the remedy to lax penalties for the other side’s violent rioters is lax penalties for their own.
Both edges of the political spectrum appear to have convinced themselves that the remedy to lax penalties for the other side’s violent rioters is lax penalties for their own.
T he arguments Republicans have made in their opposition to Joe Biden’s contemptuous pardons are pretty compelling. The former president’s sweeping and even preemptive pardons subvert ongoing legal processes and, therefore, the law. His commutation of Leonard Peltier’s life sentence for killing two FBI agents weakens the legal deterrent against murdering law enforcement so long as the killer enjoys some political cachet. The GOP’s self-styled image as the party of “law and order” has purchase insofar as it contrasts with the Democrats who turned a blind eye to crimes committed by the right people amid circumstances that pique left-wing sympathies.
The persuasive power these arguments once enjoyed has been diluted by Donald Trump’s “full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
The roughly 1,500 pardons and commutations associated with the blanket exoneration of anyone implicated in that day’s events don’t just capture non-violent offenders. Indeed, most of those who were convicted of misdemeanors — the majority of the January 6 convicts — were sentenced only to probation. The only people that Trump could spring from prison were those who were convicted of violent acts or having a deadly weapon in their possession at the Capitol.
Devlyn Thompson attacked a police officer with a metal baton. Robert Palmer bludgeoned another officer with a fire extinguisher, among other items of debris he could find strewn about the ransacked Capitol steps. Julian Khater shot pepper spray into the faces of three Capitol Hill police officers. David Dempsey used all these weapons and more in his frenzied attack on law enforcement. They are free today, along with those who were convicted of seditious conspiracy for the preparation and planning that culminated in that premeditated act of mass violence.
This should not be surprising. Donald Trump retailed his intention to do precisely what he did last night. And there was no reason to expect that he would face any resistance from the rest of the Republican Party. During the 2024 Republican primaries, GOP voters were treated to a raucous debate over which of the Republican Party’s presidential prospects would pardon the January 6 protesters faster and with the utmost zeal. And yet, we should still reserve the right to at least some astonishment over this brazen subversion of the rule of law because so many of Trump’s allies told us that the prospect of this very outcome was just crazy talk.
Shortly after his election, Trump sought to reassure the public that he would be more discreet with his pardon pen. “I’m going to do case-by-case, and if they were non-violent, I think they’ve been greatly punished,” he insisted. His incoming White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, concurred. Only those “who were denied due process and unfairly persecuted by the weaponized Department of Justice” would receive clemency, she maintained. “If you beat up a cop, of course you deserve to go to prison,” JD Vance assured Americans with the utmost self-confidence. “If you violated the law, you should suffer the consequences.” House Speaker Mike Johnson seconded the notion. “I think what the president said, and vice-president-elect JD Vance has said, is that peaceful protesters should be pardoned, but violent criminals should not,” he observed. “That’s a simple determination.”
It sure is. But these assurances were part of a campaign of misdirection. Trump and company asked us to scrupulously observe an elementary distinction between violent and non-violent offenses – a categorical differentiation anyone with a lick of sense would also make — when they had no intention of respecting it themselves. This line was little more than the nearest rhetorical weapon at hand; a tribute vice pays to virtue, the virtue being the naïve belief that political violence is wrong per se and must be stridently opposed by every upstanding steward of the American civic compact. The vice is — or, rather, should be — self-explanatory.
Republican partisans can convince themselves that Biden’s callous abuse of the pardon power mitigates or even justifies the course Trump has taken. But it does not. Political violence does not happen in a vacuum. One side’s brutality catalyzes a reciprocal response from the other. Those who are truly appalled by the growing threat posed by left-wing political violence should intuitively understand why policing their own side is a valuable exercise, if only to arrest the cycle of reciprocity acts of political violence beget. But Republicans who support these pardons will sacrifice the moral authority they would have needed if they were to convincingly argue for the preservation of domestic tranquility.
Apparently, a consistent revulsion toward political violence in whatever form it takes is a quaint and, indeed, controversial notion. Both edges of the American political spectrum appear to have convinced themselves that the remedy to the problem of lax penalties for the other side’s violent rioters is lax penalties for their side’s violent rioters. This is a recipe for more political violence, not less. We should expect it.