Biden Giving Liz Cheney, Bennie Thompson Presidential Citizens Medal
Cheney and Thompson led the January 6th committee.
President Joe Biden will give January 6 committee leaders former Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) the Presidential Citizens Medal today at 5:00 PM ET.
I’m laughing.
Cheney and Thompson are two of 20 people who will receive the medal. From The AP:
Biden will award the Presidential Citizens Medal to 20 people in a ceremony Thursday at the White House, including Americans who fought for marriage equality, a pioneer in treating wounded soldiers, and two of the president’s longtime friends, former Sens. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., and Chris Dodd, D-Conn.
“President Biden believes these Americans are bonded by their common decency and commitment to serving others,” the White House said in a statement. “The country is better because of their dedication and sacrifice.”
The J6 committee recommended Trump “and conservative lawyer John Eastman for criminal prosecution because of their alleged efforts to subvert the peaceful transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6.”
The Presidential Citizens Medal is the second-highest civilian medal. Former President Richard Nixon created the medal to honor those who “performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens.”
A statement by the White House applauded Cheney, claiming she “has raised her voice — and reached across the aisle—to defend our Nation and the ideals we stand for: Freedom. Dignity. And decency. Her integrity and intrepidness remind us all what is possible if we work together.”
I’m laughing even more.
Biden still has time to award blanket preemptive pardons for people like Cheney and Thompson:
Mr. Biden is considering blanket preemptive pardons for prominent critics of Trump from both parties to protect them from possible “retribution” or legal prosecution by the incoming administration, multiple people familiar with the ongoing discussions told CBS News earlier this month. Among those who were under consideration are Cheney, Sen. Adam Schiff of California, who served on the Jan. 6 select committee while in the House, and retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has called Trump a “fascist.”
Well, as Elizabeth pointed out, Cheney might need that pardon because the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight recommended criminal investigations into Cheney for alleged witness tampering during the J6 hearing.
Now I’m laughing so hard I’m snorting.
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lol
Here comes the Pardon
How dare that nasty Trump to go after someone that was awarded a phony-baloney peace award!
Let’s Go Pardon!
I suspect at some point, for reasons articulated in Dobbs, SCOTUS will take back certain pardons finding no intent on the part of the founders to enable a premeditated crime spree
SCOTUS will come to their senses and rule that pardons were meant to apply post-conviction but can be issued after and indictment and maybe during an investigation but never as a preventative measure.
I’m not sure that would be a good thing. Pardons aren’t supposed to just be to show mercy to to fix/prevent unjust prosecution. Let’s say we have an attorney general run on a campaign of promising to target a specific person and that they will find something, anything, to get that person. That’s not how the system is supposed to work. It’s actually persecution. A pardon is supposed to be a check on that type of abuse.
As to a blanket pardon, there’s a lot of laws you can go to prison for. In my state for instance, if you were to say, shoot someone and they lived, you could be charged with Attempted Homicide, at least two types of Aggravated Assault, at least two types of Simple Assault, Recklessly Endangering Another Person, and several others off the top of my head. A creative or vengeful prosecutor could start tacking on traffic citations for when you fled the scene, which could be 90 days in jail each, plus fines. That’s “fine” if this is actually a criminal attempting to murder someone, but we’ve recently seen prosecutors persecuting obviously innocent people for engaging in self defense. We don’t want them pardoned for Attempted Homicide, only to get charged with the litany of other possible charges. There are even more federal laws that can easily be abused. A blanket pardon helps prevent this from happening.
Long story short, Biden is abusing the pardon process. But I am extremely hesitant to change it because I know the next Democrat is going to abuse the hell out of the prosecution process and someone will later need to fix it.
Ford pardoned Nixon despite a lack of any criminal investigation of Nixon. It was a way to put Watergate behind us.
And, as we predicted, it didn’t work.
If a POTUS has authority to issue pardons for the smallest set of offenses, he has a right to issue blanket pardons (that is, to issue a pardon for the set of all offenses). If he has authority to issue pardons to right past wrongs and do justice, he has the authority to prevent future injustices.
The problem is that the Founders intended our government for honorable people, not criminals. Criminals will abuse even just authority. It’s the least of what they do (with the balance being acts for which they have no authority at all).
No, they will not rule that, or if they do they will not have found their senses but lost them. It would be a brazenly dishonest ruling, of the sort I would expect from… well, from Alan Grayson, or Sheldon Whitehouse, if they were ever elevated to the Court, God forbid.
Pardons have always been understood to be available before someone is charged, and even before someone is suspected! Blanket pardons of the kind Carter granted to all Vietnam draft dodgers go all the way back to Washington.
There’s a general rule in constitutional interpretation that if the first congress did something, or if Washington did something, and no one at the time protested, it’s presumably constitutional and you need a strong argument to claim that it isn’t. Because those were the people who best understood the constitution, and cared about it, so if someone thought it was being violated they spoke up.
I would like to see Trumps new AG fight this at SCOTUS using Hunter as a test case. Pardoning someone for anything they ever did in their lives including things not discovered or investigated was never the intent of the Founding Fathers. This creates a super criminal who can get away with anything including murder.
Like putting lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.
I find a comparison of Liz Cheney to a pig is insulting to the pig.
The former porcine Congresswoman from Wyoming…
Depends which pig. There are some pretty nasty ones out there.
Pelosi, Rosa DeLauro and Helen Thomas come to mind
Hypothetically, lets say Trump gets to the end of his 4 year term and offers blanket pardons to everyone who was in his administration. Think of the howling coming from the democrats.
Alternatively, Trump could instruct his appointees to push through his policies by hook or crook with the promise of pardons to cover everything.
You can bet democrats won’t be applauding but clamoring for changes in the pardon power.
This is a very good point, but it applies to any President. Would the Supreme Court in effect allow the use of the Constitution to create a dictatorship? If such a promise were made, the Executive Branch would not have to follow any federal law at all. The President would become a dictator free to ignore the other two branches. I would believe there is some point going beyond which the Court would not tolerate.
Such a POTUS could act any way he desires until the last day of his term. After that, he’d be without authority. Certainly, he could use force to remain in power, but he would also cease to have the veneer of lawfulness he had while still legally the POTUS. Although he may have already given himself and his comrades a blanket pardon in perpetuity while still having the authority to do so.
That’s when it’s time for torches and pitchforks (in addition to AR-15s), and for attorneys general to look the other way in the interests of justice, if not the law.
Our system wasn’t made for criminals, but that’s what we have in positions of authority in all our current governments (meaning federal, state, and local govts).
Well, the pardon power does not extend to impeachments. The constitutional way to beat a president playing this type of pardon game is to impeach him.
That is correct, but a pardon in this case would be issued on the way out of office. In the meantime those in the executive branch could have perjured themselves before Congress or the FISA Court, could have accepted bribes, spied on citizens, misused IRS audit powers, or leaked illegally to the press knowing that in the end all would be forgiven by the pardon. We are pretty close to that scenario with the push for so-called blanket pardons by Biden. That to my mind although short lived (4 or 8 years) is a dictatorship.
DaveGinOly what do you mean by “a blanket pardon in perpetuity”? If you mean merely that it can never be revoked, then yes, that’s the nature of pardons. If you mean that the pardons can cover crimes committed after they were issued, then no, it’s also in the nature of a pardon that it can only wipe away offenses that already exist.
Pardons are instants, not permanents; as soon as they’re used they disappear, and when a fresh offense is committed there’s no pardon to wipe it away.
The British would have given Benedict Arnold a medal if they could have.
They certainly could have. I don’t think they did, but there was nothing stopping them.
I think President Trump should revoke those two medals and demand their return, under the same rule that supposedly allowed Biden to pull presidential immunity from Trump’s advisors. Not that he should actually attempt to *enforce* such removal by an FBI raid at 3AM to reclaim the medals, but it makes a wonderful talking point. What he can do is strike the records of the awards from the official documents and leave it at that. Sorry Loser Liz. You said it was ok when you did it to him.
Trump should give everyone persecuted by her and her committee the same medal with her being the specific reason they got it.
Yes, a medal with every J6 pardon. The stakes have been raised.
Or at least recall them temporarily to install tracking chips.
I don’t think he can revoke them, but he can announce that the whole order has been tarnished and is being retired, and a new medal will be issued. He can even offer to replace the tarnished medals with the new kind, for those who actually deserved them in the first place.
After she campaigned for The Cackler?
Yeah but the British were enemies of the Americans. The Democrats on the other hand….
Oh, wait,
The Americans WERE British… until they won, and then they weren’t.
Yes, the colonists were literally alienated by their own government.
They were fighting for their rights as Englishmen.
By this and various actions initiated particularly since the election, this White House truly has demonstrated a runaway case of TDS.
Bennie Thompson got a medal for introducing legislation that would have taken away Donald Trump’s Secret Service protection. Biden wanted him dead. No joke.
What would a SLUG like Creepy Joe know about “common decency?”
How did Hunter not make the list?
The real ones come with money.
Hopefully she will need to pawn the medal to help pay legal fees. Rick Harrison – “I’ll go up to 20 bucks, that’s the best I can do. “
Reward for persecution of Trump and Jan6 Ralliers
And hopefully no pardon comes with it.
20 days is all the time in the world.
she can hang that medal in her cell …
I suspect no pardon…..the medal is all she and her fellow miscreants will receive before the indictments.
It would fit the behavior of the current administration. They adore useful idiots when they’re useful, but the minute all the ‘useful’ wears off, under the bus they go. Of course, this means they have no leverage to use if Liz decides to double back and tell the truth about the Dem’s actions, so I’m still at about 50/50 on pardon/nopardon.
Roman fell becuse or this kind of crap
They think they’re untouchable and are just shoving it in conservatives faces.
It’s up to Trump and his team to prove them wrong.
Because if he doesn’t, it will be a million times worse.
Cheney is not going anywhere. She is in the crosshairs for lying and withholding evidence in her Jan 6 performance.
Apparently, using a pardon power to give the finger to citizens who voted against you is becoming the new Democrat craze.
https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2025/01/02/woke-da-seeks-final-revenge-on-voters-who-kicked-him-out-of-office-n4935600
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