’Tis the season.

No, not the Yuletide; that joyous annual season is behind us. It is instead the season of the eleventh-hour pardon, when a soon-to-depart president, freed of concerns about the political implications, makes copious use of the chief executive’s most boundless, corruptible, and, in modern times, unnecessary power. The Constitution should be amended to end it.

The authority described by Hamilton as “the benign prerogative” in Fed­eralist No. 74 is inscribed in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. It endows the president with “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” In the late 18th century, there were sound reasons for it.

Federal crimes were few and far between then. They are the only ones that the presidential power reaches. Governors have traditionally enjoyed clemency power with regard to the multitude of state offenses, and it was then assumed that law enforcement would remain predominantly a state concern.

Nascent federal police power in­volved offenses that were extraordinarily grave, and not just in terms of imprisonment (and worse) for those implicated. The new republic faced potentially existential threats, with hostile foreign powers on the doorstep and insurrectionist forces within. Treason is the only crime defined by the Constitution, and anti-government uprisings were a sufficiently grave concern that they factored heavily in the Framers’ decision to vest the president with clemency authority. “In seasons of insurrection or rebellion,” Hamilton elaborated, “there are often critical moments when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.”

The pardon power has in fact been invoked throughout the nation’s history to ease strife and promote reconciliation. In one of its first uses, President Washington pardoned a pair of Whiskey Rebellion agitators sentenced to death for treason — to the chagrin, ironically, of Hamilton, notwithstanding its being a textbook application of his thinking. President Lincoln made copious resort to his clemency authority for dozens of Confederate soldiers and officials, and in 1863 he made broad amnesty a core part of his vision for post-war reconstruction of the South and healing of the Union. It fell to President Andrew Johnson to issue that broad pardon to treasonous Rebel forces. That was in 1868 on Christmas Day, the heart of the season in which presidents typically extend clemency — originally in homage to the virtues of redemption and forgiveness. But today, pardons having become increasingly political and unsavory, it’s just as likely that Christmas is pardon time because fewer people are paying attention over the holiday.

Of course, there is not necessarily a disjunction between partisan political considerations and the national interest. President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, in an effort to move the nation and his administration beyond the Watergate crisis. His successor, Jimmy Carter, mass-pardoned approximately 200,000 Vietnam draft evaders, dwarfing President Harry Tru­man’s pardoning after World War II of about 1,500 conscientious objectors. History remembers these clemency grants kindly. They spurred vehement protest at the time, though, in the tinderbox that was then American politics — as when President Reagan relied on the Carter amnesty to rationalize pardoning FBI officials convicted of illegal break-ins during the investigation of domestic anti-war terrorists. One of those officials, Mark Felt, was later revealed as the “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame.

Alas, while national healing is the best use of the pardon power, it is not the usual use.

Today, the U.S. Code overflows with federal crimes, and there are thousands of prosecutions — though the approximately 150,000 federal inmates account for only about 7 percent of the total U.S. prison population. While many federal offenses are extremely serious, the vast array are less so, involving nonviolent conduct (mostly fraud) that violates the federal regulations governing a great many activities. So the majority of federal convicts and suspects, necessarily in­cluding special pleaders, are guilty of crimes that, while condemnable, are run-of-the-mill. These circumstances lend themselves to politicized and self-interested clemency grants.

Thus is the pardon power frequently used for partisan political advantage. Most infamous in this category is President Clinton’s unabashed de facto sale of a pardon to a wealthy fugitive, Marc Rich, the since-deceased indicted racketeer who’d provided lucrative donations to the Clinton library and Demo­cratic coffers. More common is the pardon power’s invocation to appease political supporters and outrage political opponents, national security be damned. Examples include Clinton’s execrable clemency grants to convicted terrorists of the Weather Underground and the violent Puerto Rican separatist group known as the FALN, and even a full pardon for Patty Hearst, the newspaper heiress who joined a domestic terrorist group after being kidnapped by it.

Hearst’s sentence had already been reduced by Carter. Such commutations — which reduce the sentence and, usually, result in prompt release from prison, although the underlying conviction is not expunged — are the species of clemency more common than pardons (the legal effect of which is to erase the offense as if it had never happened). To appease the Left, President Obama commuted the lengthy sentences of an unrepentant FALN terrorist leader and of Chelsea Manning, the transgender former Army intelligence analyst convicted of leaking classified information. As we go to press, some supporters are urging President Trump, as comeuppance for the spy agencies’ asserted sabotage of his administration, to pardon Edward Snow­den and Julian Assange, similarly responsible for extensively exposing national-security secrets. Trump has acknowledged that he is weighing a Snowden pardon. Former Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher concedes that, in a meeting with Assange, he suggested that a pardon would be available if Assange denied Russia’s culpability in hacking the DNC emails that Assange’s WikiLeaks published — though Rohrabacher insists that the president did not put him up to this.

In short, the pardon power’s abuse is now more commonplace than its proper exercise, and there is no reason to believe that this will change.

Trump has been criticized for floating pardons as an inducement for loyalists to spurn cooperation with the Russia “collusion” investigation. His supporters counter that the collusion probe was a politicized witch hunt — an argument for which I have sympathy, though it hardly should negate criminal convictions after trials and guilty pleas. In any event, Trump has pardoned Mueller-probe figures Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and George Papadopoulos, among others. He has also pardoned assorted political allies and well-connected special pleaders, such as Joe Arpaio (former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.), Dinesh D’Souza (the conservative commentator and filmmaker), and Charles Kushner (the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner).

There is nothing new under the sun, though. Clinton (of course) pardoned Susan McDougal, who stayed silent in prison rather than cooperate with Whitewater prosecutors. He also pardoned John Deutch (his CIA director) for mishandling government secrets, and Henry Cisneros (his HUD secretary) for charges related to payments to his mistress. Clinton pardoned his half-brother, Roger Clinton, as well, for distributing cocaine. His FALN pardons were designed to make his wife, Hillary Clinton, more appealing to Puerto Rican voters in New York during her Senate campaign.

President Reagan pardoned George Steinbrenner, the since-deceased owner of the New York Yankees, for making illegal campaign contributions to Nixon. President George H. W. Bush pardoned Reagan-administration officials caught up in the Iran-Contra debacle. Obama pardoned Marine general James Cart­wright (his former Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman) for lying to the FBI about having fed the media classified info on Iran’s nuclear program. And emblematically of his imperial style, Obama used his power to achieve federal sentencing reforms that Congress refused to legislate, granting clemency 1,927 times, mostly to reduce felony drug-trafficking sentences. By contrast, his predecessor, George W. Bush, granted clemency just 200 times.

Today, the pardon power, more often than not, stokes scandal and reinforces the corrosive perception of a two-tiered justice system that favors the politically connected. This significantly outweighs its benefits. It is not worth preserving.

Criminal justice is now night-and-day different from Founding-era conditions. Federal jurisprudence has yielded a revolution in the due-process rights of criminal defendants and in Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishments. Death sentences are nearly unheard of and, despite a spurt in the last year, will return to dormancy with Joe Biden’s inauguration. The robust federal court system, furthermore, provides for multiple levels of direct appeal, then seemingly endless collateral appeal (habeas corpus). Might we still encounter a gross miscarriage of justice that’s incapable of being reversed? Yes, but the chance of that has been drastically reduced in today’s legal system. On the rare occasion when a correction is needed, the courts are far more likely than a president to proceed fairly.

Moreover, since their inception in the 1980s, the federal sentencing guidelines have substantially succeeded in enforcing uniformity in sentencing for similarly situated defendants. Though the guidelines are advisory, judges usually follow them. Formerly, the system was sullied by disparate sentences based on the proclivities of the judge rather than on the nature of the offense or the recidivism of the offender. Now, sentencing is more just. And while plea-bargaining undeniably raises the conviction rate, defendants benefit from reduced charges and diversion from prison sentences.

All of this renders vanishingly small the number of cases in which the pardon power might be appropriate to address true injustice. And there are other, fairer ways to do that. Convictions may be vacated and expunged by legislation. The president could seek Congress’s cooperation in granting clemency when justice and consensus warrant doing so. As we have seen throughout the pandemic, moreover, the executive branch has the power to grant early release on humanitarian grounds.

There is simply no good reason we should be in the position of indulging the controversy du jour over whether Presi­dent Trump has the power to pardon himself (he does, by the way), and whether he is in enough undeserved hot water to use it. The modern history of the pardon prerogative is the antithesis of benign. Its indecorous use undermines rather than enhances our ideal of a single, enlightened standard of justice for all. We would be better off without it, and the Constitution should be amended to that end.