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President Joe Biden has officially — all except for those of Robert Bowers (the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue killer), Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (the Boston Marathon bomber) and Dylann Roof (the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooter). Those receiving commutations will remain in prison, probably for life, but the federal government will be unable to execute them. The bulk commutation is a core presidential power, it sits comfortably within the tradition of Anglo-American clemency practice, and it’s politically shrewd. It’s also the right thing to do, especially following the The justification for the bulk commutation begins with what would have happened had Biden done nothing. President-elect Donald Trump has long wrapped his public appeal in cartoonish capital punishment rhetoric — from urging death for the “Central Park Five” to campaign promises . Once in office, Trump further. The during the last six months of his first administration, which matched the number from the . In fact, before Daniel Lewis Lee succumbed to a lethal dose of pentobarbital in the summer of 2020, the federal government . It’s not just that prior administrations couldn’t convert death sentences into executions; they also didn’t seem to want to. Trump and his Justice Department were different. Attorney General the first five scheduled executions as a solemn duty to victims, but, according to sworn testimony from the associate deputy attorney general, the department did not make “a specific effort to reach out to the victims’ families of the 5 that were selected.” And in Daniel Lewis Lee’s case, officials refused to amend the lethal injection calendar to allow the victim's family to attend the execution and were worried about traveling during the Covid pandemic. I’ve previously argued that federal executions operate like vice signals that shape and cohere MAGA, forcing a contrast with (what is depicted as) the left’s virtue-signaled ambivalence and moral equivocation. I’ve as one in which “righteous state killings represent strength and resolve, a clear line separating good and evil, and belief in free will over structural disadvantage.” For Trump, federal executions are a grim exercise in political branding; and they are handpicked political fights that he wins. A new volley of executions would have been a grisly show of political opportunism, and Trump already had a new emcee: , his pick for attorney general. Bondi was Florida’s senior law enforcement officer, and killing prisoners was a defining part of her professional portfolio. Florida executed during her tenure, and she played a pivotal role in through the a invalidating longstanding state practices. She’s a staunch law-and-order conservative, and she will arguably arrive in Washington with more execution experience than any attorney general in American history. There’s no mystery about the execution push that awaited capitally sentenced federal prisoners in the absence of Biden’s intervention. Biden dissolved that gruesome timeline with the bulk commutation. endows the president with “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.” This so-called pardon power involves all forms of clemency, and it includes presidential authority to commute sentences for federal crimes. The Constitution, moreover, permits no legislative restrictions. There is a rich presidential history of using the pardon power in bulk, and it traces back centuries. President George Washington to those who had participated in the violent Whiskey Rebellion. When President Thomas Jefferson took office in 1801, anyone who had been convicted under the Alien and Sedition Acts. President the sentence of Eugene Debs and convicted under the Espionage Act. President Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the most famous practitioner of bulk clemency. He pardoned military prisoners convicted by and sleeping on duty — offenses then punishable by death — and he to former Confederates in exchange for loyalty oaths to a fragile Union. More recently, President Jimmy Carter to over 100,000 men who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War. Clemency norms are also fixed by state practices, since the death penalty is primarily a state-level institution. (During the modern death penalty era, which started in 1976, states have executed people; the federal government has executed .) State-by-state history reveals that there’s nothing unusual about bulk clemency for death-sentenced prisoners. In the last 20 years alone, governors from five states have used bulk clemency power to clear death rows: Kate Brown ( ), Jared Polis ( ), Martin O’Malley ( ), George Ryan and Pat Quinn ( ), and Jon Corzine ( ). In each state, the bulk commutations followed formal death penalty moratoria or prolonged periods of execution inactivity. In short, Biden’s bulk commutation is consistent with longstanding practice both under the federal Constitution and across other American jurisdictions. Indeed, the essential legacy of Anglo-American clemency power is mercy — the executive (royal) prerogative to sand down the sharpest edges of criminal punishment. Clemency power does present problems involving favoritism for political allies and personal friends, but those risks aren’t part of the calculus here. Tsk-tsking about restrained clemency power feels particularly silly at after and as he Biden’s bulk commutation is also an exercise in politically savvy loss avoidance. Death-sentenced prisoners are not automatically queued for execution. DOJ must select the unlucky ones, usually when there’s no pending litigation, and the BOP needs to update execution protocols and for lethal injections. More legal challenges follow, producing a unique cycle of public drama: community remembrance of traumatic violence, painful signatures of grief and loss, and climactic legal battles in the news. Biden has spared Democrats and aligned reformers the political costs of these execution media cycles, which creates cultural space for the Trumpist coalition to nurture and project the crude moral certainty that was so successful with the 2024 electorate. Trump and his allies use the execution cycles to position themselves as tough-on-crime protectors of American safety — rallying political communities against progressive ideas about mercy, human frailty, moral luck and the fallibility of legal institutions. Democrats win these cycles by avoiding them. Like any American political executive, modern presidents are drawn to ; otherwise, it’s too politically disruptive. But here there is no incoming Democratic executive to inherit the fallout. The electorate’s memory — and the derived window of political salience — is far too short for any long-term political repercussions. Finally, one hopes that there is a simple moral imperative at work. Biden must know that bulk commutation was the right thing to do. The American death penalty is suffused with the race of the defendant and the race of the victim. Substantially elevated risk of wrongful executions persists because of , , and . Large meta-studies that the death penalty doesn’t deter future offending relative to other severe punishments. And executions are so temporally separated from sentencing — on average, — that people strapped to the gurney bear little moral resemblance to the people who committed the crime decades earlier. There are also moral problems unique to the death penalty. DOJ typically seeks death sentences only in federal districts that sit within capitally active states, so federal death sentences exhibit an unsettling . Furthermore, there is a troubling arbitrariness in both federal death sentencing and federal executions. That’s because the likelihood of federal death sentences now depends quite heavily on which political party holds the presidency. And the more it depends on that, the less it depends on personal culpability and fairness. In pardoning his son, the disproportionate criminal justice response. If unjust treatment of those committing crimes was an authentic concern, then Biden had an obligation to look beyond the moral horizon of his own family’s interests. And he fulfilled that obligation, at least in part, by sparing 37 people that the federal government would otherwise kill.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers, meet your latest lobbyists: online influencers from TikTok. The platform is once again bringing influencers to Washington, this time to lobby members of Congress to reject a fast-moving bill that would force TikTok's Beijing-based parent company to sell or be banned in the United States. On Tuesday, some influencers began a two-day advocacy event in support of TikTok, which arranged their trip ahead of a House floor vote on the legislation on Wednesday. But unlike a similar lobbying event the company put together last March when talks of a TikTok ban reached a fever pitch, this year’s effort appeared more rushed as the company scrambles to counter the legislation, which advanced rapidly on Capitol Hill. Summer Lucille, a TikTok content creator with 1.4 million followers who is visiting Washington this week, said if TikTok is banned, she “don’t know what it will do” to her business, a plus-sized boutique in Charlotte, North Carolina. “It will be devastating,” Lucille said in an interview arranged by the platform. In an unusual showing of bipartisanship, a House panel unanimously approved the measure last week. President Joe Biden has said he will sign the legislation if lawmakers pass it. But it’s unclear what will happen in the Senate, where several bills aimed at banning TikTok have stalled. The legislation faces other roadblocks. Former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump, who holds sway over both House and Senate Republicans, has voiced opposition to the bill, saying it would empower Meta-owned Facebook, which he continues to lambast over his 2020 election loss. The bill also faces pushback from some progressive lawmakers in the House as well as civil liberties groups who argue it infringes on the First Amendment. TikTok could be banned if ByteDance, the parent company, doesn’t sell its stakes in the platform and other applications it owns within six months of the bill’s enactment. The fight over the platform takes place as U.S.-China relations have shifted to that of strategic rivalry, especially in areas such as advanced technologies and data security, seen as essential to each country’s economic prowess and national security. The shift, which started during the Trump years and has continued under Biden, has placed restrictions on export of advanced technologies and outflow of U.S. monies to China, as well as access to the U.S. market by certain Chinese businesses. The Biden administration also has cited human rights concerns in blacklisting a number of Chinese companies accused of assisting the state surveillance campaign against ethnic minorities. TikTok isn’t short on lobbyists. Its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance has a strong lobbying apparatus in Washington that includes dozens of lobbyists from well-known consulting and legal firms as well as influential insiders, such as former members of Congress and ex-aides to powerful lawmakers, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will also be in Washington this week and plans to meet with lawmakers, according to a company spokesperson who said Chew’s visit was previously scheduled. But influencers, who have big followings on social media and can share personal stories of how the platform boosted their businesses — or simply gave them a voice — are still perhaps one of the most powerful tools the company has in its arsenal. A TikTok spokesperson said dozens of influencers will attend the two-day event, including some who came last year. The spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about how many new people would be attending this year’s lobbying blitz. The company is briefing them ahead of meetings with their representatives and media interviews. Lucille, who runs the boutique in North Carolina, says has seen a substantial surge in revenue because of her TikTok page. The 34-year-old began making TikTok content focusing on plus-sized fashion in March 2022, more than a decade after she started her business. She quickly amassed thousands of followers after posting a nine-second video about her boutique. Because of her popularity on the platform, her business has more online exposure and customers, some of whom have visited from as far as Europe. She says she also routinely hears from followers who are finding support through her content about fashion and confidence. JT Laybourne, an influencer who also came to Washington, said he joined TikTok in early 2019 after getting some negative comments on videos he posted on Instagram while singing in the car with his children. Laybourne, who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, said he was attracted to the short-form video platform because it was easy to create videos that contained music. Like Lucille, he quickly gained traction on the app. He says he also received more support from TikTok users, who reacted positively to content he produced on love and positivity. Laybourne says the community he built on the platform rallied around his family when he had to undergo heart surgery in 2020. Following the surgery, he said he used the platform to help raise $1 million for the American Heart Association in less than two years. His family now run an apparel company that gets most of its traffic from TikTok. “I will fight tooth-and-nail for this app,” he said. But whether the opposition the company is mounting through lobbyists or influencers will be enough to derail the bill is yet to be seen. On Tuesday, House lawmakers received a briefing on national security concerns regarding TikTok from the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence officials. AP Journalist Didi Tang contributed to this report. This story was originally published on March 12, 2024. It was updated on December 23, 2024 to clarify a quote by TikTok content creator Summer Lucille.WASHINGTON — Ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz allegedly paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl and bought and used illegal drugs during more than 20 parties with female escorts, a congressional report said Monday. A final report from the House Ethics Committee accuses the former Florida lawmaker, who was briefly nominated to be President-elect Trump’s attorney general, of illegally paying thousands of dollars for sex with paid escorts, including the underage girl. He also bought and used illegal drugs including ecstasy and cocaine at parties with the women in Florida and on vacation jaunts, the report said. “There is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the 37-page report said. The final report, which says Gaetz likely broke numerous state laws, was released after the House Ethics Committee voted to publicly release it in a reversal of its usual policy. Gaetz sued the committee in federal court on Monday, in a failed effort to block release of the report. “There is a reason they did this to me in a Christmas Eve-Eve report and not in a courtroom of any kind where I could present evidence and challenge witnesses,” Gaetz tweeted. Gaetz, 42, an outspoken conservative Republican, has denied breaking any laws and says he is being smeared by political enemies, although he admits partying too hard in his younger years. Federal prosecutors investigated Gaetz for violating sex trafficking laws in relation to much of the same conduct but declined to charge him. The report details nearly $100,000 in payments from Gaetz to a dozen women for either sex or drugs during about 20 encounters, all of which took place after he was elected to represent a deep-red congressional district in the Florida Panhandle in 2016. “From 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz made tens of thousands of dollars in payments to women that the Committee determined were likely in connection with sexual activity and/or drug use,” noted the report, which lists payments totaling more than $90,000 to 12 different women. All of the encounters were consensual, although one of the women told the committee the escorts were too impaired to consent to sex at times. “When I look back on certain moments, I feel violated,” one woman told the panel, the report said. A Florida woman told the committee she was just 17 and had recently finished her junior year in high school when Gaetz had sex with her twice at a 2017 house party. He paid her $400 cash after the encounters, the report said. The woman said she didn’t tell Gaetz she was underage and he didn’t ask. He has emphatically denied ever having sex with any underage girl. One the report’s most lurid findings surrounded allegations of a drug-fueled 2018 jaunt to the Bahamas, bankrolled by marijuana lobbyists, during which witnesses said Gaetz took ecstasy and had sex with at least four paid escorts. The trip skirted rules limiting gifts to lawmakers, the report said. Gaetz won reelection in November to what would have been a fourth term in Congress. But he resigned on the day Trump nominated him for attorney general in an apparent ploy to prevent release of the damning report. His bid to become the nation’s top law enforcement officer imploded within a matter of days. Not long after that, Gaetz inked a deal with One America News. He plans to join the right-ring network’s primetime lineup in January. The Republican-led panel initially voted against releasing the report because Gaetz was no longer in Congress. But it made a surprising U-turn at a closed-door meeting and voted to release the final version.