Again, I wanted to write about antisemitism this morning, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, because I am short on time, having spent too much effort on the New York Times crossword puzzle.

So, let’s do a quickie on presidential pardons. As I said a week or so ago, I think that Joe Biden deserves a break about pardoning Hunter. I am not going to repeat all of that again.

I am surprised at the outrage on the Democratic side. There have been several polls, which have shown that more (but not many, many more) Americans disagree with the pardon than support it, and that many are undecided. Obviously, there is a strong partisan divide.

There has also been a lot of publicity about the pardons that Trump issued (including donors, and people like Stone and Manafort, his political allies), and the polls show about the same amount of approval and disapproval.

The Constitution seems pretty clear, I guess. The president has the ability to pardon or commute sentences in regard to any federal crimes, except for those relating to impeachment. I don’t know that the Supreme Court has even had to rule on this topic. The Constitutional language (I do not know the history of this language) is very broad — it doesn’t specify whether you can pardon a crime that has yet to be committed, or yet to be charged. This does give the courts some grounds to rule upon, I guess.

As to pardons for future charges, I think that the pardon of Nixon dealt with that, and I think (I am rushing here) the Hunter Biden pardon does. Maybe this is fairly standard language.

Whether a president can pardon someone for crimes not yet charged or committed is, I hope, an open question, and I hope it will never have to be decided by the courts, since any judicial decision would threaten the independence of the executive branch as set forth in the Constitution.

But I also hope that Biden does not follow through on the possibility of pardoning people like Liz Cheney and others, those on the Trump or the Patel “enemies list”. These pardons would obviously set up the challenge as to their validity and spur Trump on, and would set the stage where a president (think Trump for the moment) could say: “I hereby pardon anyone who has committed or will commit a federal crime, provided that they are registered Republicans” or something to that effect.

Our federal criminal system would be in chaos. Politics and the imperial presidency would rule. The Supreme Court (who knows?) may even allow it, or determine that this was not a subject on which they had jurisdiction, or it was not a subject on which anyone would have standing to sue.

Obviously, I have just slapped this together (under 10 minutes), but I hope there is a real discussion before the President lets this ball begin to roll down the hill.