I realize presidential pardons have gotten a bad wrap lately. Clinton’s Marc Rich fiasco didn’t go well. The first President Bush pardoned — on Christmas Eve — the very officials who could have implicated him in the Iran-Contra scandal, not to mention a Pakistani heroin smuggler.
Nevertheless, this President Bush’s stinginess when it comes to pardons is hardly consistent with his so-called “compassionate” agenda.
With the stroke of a pen, President Bush last week bestowed forgiveness on four people who were long ago convicted of minor crimes, spent no time in prison and completed their probations.
The presidential pardons were holiday gifts that wiped away embarrassing and possibly career-crippling criminal records while restoring the civil rights of the four recipients. But some scholars of presidential pardons were less struck by Bush’s show of mercy than by his reluctance to show it by granting clemency petitions more often and in more significant cases.
“He continues not to view his role as chief executive as one where he should temper the justice handed out by the justice system with mercy,” said Douglas A. Berman, an Ohio State University law professor who studies presidential pardons. “This really is a stingy view of things, especially given how much larger our federal justice system is now” than it was in years past.
In four years, Bush has issued 31 clemency orders, zero for the nation’s 174,000 federal inmates. His father had 77 during his one term, Clinton, Reagan, and even Nixon had several hundred, while FDR had over 3,000 during his run in the Oval Office.
All told, Bush is the stingiest of any modern president and among the most callous in presidential history when it comes to clemency. “Compassionate”? Hardly.
The AP recently noted that two 19th century presidents — James Garfield and William H. Harrison — were even worse than Bush on this. That’s true, but the AP didn’t provide readers with a full context: Harrison died of pneumonia within a month of taking office and Garfield was shot four months into his term and was bedridden until he died two months later. Among the healthy presidents, Bush is in a league of his own.
I suppose none of this should come as a surprise; Bush was equally coldhearted in Texas. Not only did he execute Texans at a record clip as governor, but he extended only 18 clemency grants, making him the stingiest Texas governor in the latter half of the 20th century. (This isn’t a partisan matter; the last Republican to hold the office before Bush, Bill Clements, used the power 822 times — or about 46 clemencies for every one of Bush’s.)
At this point, the cushiest job in Washington has to be the deputy attorney general at the Justice Department who reviews the files in the pardon office.