A Perilous Argument for January 6 Pardons

As our editorial noted, and as I argued last month and Noah Rothman argued yesterday, you can make a case that Donald Trump should have pardoned some or even many of the January 6 defendants on a case-by-case basis, and you can even make a case that there is not that much harm in a blanket pardon for the non-violent offenders who have mostly been punished enough by now, but an across-the-board pardon for all the people who assaulted cops is such a terrible idea that even the people around Trump were treating it as radioactive and a non-starter right up until the moment he signed it.

What is the case for a blanket pardon of the violent rioters? That we need to bring a close to a divisive era and promote social peace? Like Noah, I suspect that granting impunity to political violence is apt in the long run to raise rather than lower the temperature of street activism and mob rule. That it was unjust to prosecute anyone? We sometimes pardon people who break unjust laws, or even people who break entirely just laws protesting a greater injustice (Nelson Mandela, for example, was guilty; it was the South African system that was bad). But neither of those is true here. The laws against assaulting the Capitol and D.C. police are just laws. The 2020 election may not have been entirely fair, but it wasn’t stolen. There was nothing to justify violence on January 6.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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As our editorial noted, and as I argued last month and Noah Rothman argued yesterday, you can make a case that Donald Trump should have pardoned some or even many of the January 6 defendants on a case-by-case basis, and you can even make a case that there is not that much harm in a blanket pardon for the non-violent offenders who have mostly been punished enough by now, but an across-the-board pardon for all the people who assaulted cops is such a terrible idea that even the people around Trump were treating it as radioactive and a non-starter right up until the moment he signed it.

What is the case for a blanket pardon of the violent rioters? That we need to bring a close to a divisive era and promote social peace? Like Noah, I suspect that granting impunity to political violence is apt in the long run to raise rather than lower the temperature of street activism and mob rule. That it was unjust to prosecute anyone? We sometimes pardon people who break unjust laws, or even people who break entirely just laws protesting a greater injustice (Nelson Mandela, for example, was guilty; it was the South African system that was bad). But neither of those is true here. The laws against assaulting the Capitol and D.C. police are just laws. The 2020 election may not have been entirely fair, but it wasn’t stolen. There was nothing to justify violence on January 6.