His Majesty The President

The president is becoming the 18th Century monarch Americans rebelled against

Joe Biden has given his son Hunter a full pardon.

It’s hard to imagine a more selfish move. Any hope of rallying effective opposition to the grotesque abuses of presidential prerogatives sure to come in a second Trump administration is wiped out at a stroke. And the consequences beyond that? Who knows.

But to understand how disgraceful Biden’s act is — an act he repeatedly said he would not do — it’s important to understand it in a much wider context. And that requires some history.

Stretching back into the medieval era and beyond, English kings always held what became known as a “prerogative of mercy,” meaning the king could commute death sentences or erase any other sort of charge or punishment. It was the king’s sole discretion. There was no check on the power, no principles that must be followed. The king decided and that’s all there was to it.

The ghost of George III is so going to roll his eyes this July 4th.

When the American colonies rebelled and broke from Britain, their new constitution replaced the hereditary king with an elected president, but in many ways the existing relationship between British Crown and Parliament was reflected in the powers of President and Congress. That included the prerogative of mercy, rebranded as the power of pardon. The president could use it essentially however he chose. The only real limits were that the offences must be under federal law and they cannot be the product of Congressional impeachment. Beyond that, it’s all up to the president.

In recent decades, presidents have put that power to inarguably legitimate use by creating a vetting procedure in the Department of Justice to consider applications from people who argue they were victims of excessively severe punishments or other injustices. But presidents have also used the same power in increasingly shameless ways. Recall Bill Clinton’s “Pardongate,” when, on his last day in office, he issued a mass pardon that drew a formal, bipartisan denunciation by Congress, along with a list of other pardons of people tied to the Clintons through family, friends, business associates, or rich donors to the future Clinton library. One of the happy beneficiaries of the president’s royal mercy was the president’s brother. It was grotesque. But perfectly legal.

Nothing like that happens in Britain because while Britain still has a king, that king, contrary to what so many Americans imagine, holds nothing like the powers George III held in the 18th century. Today, the royal prerogative of mercy is nominally exercised by the king but the decision to use the power is not the king’s to make. (The last time a king did so was the early 19th century.) Parliament decides who forms the government, the government decides how the prerogative is used, and there are set standards and procedures that ensure it is used fairly and properly. Not on a whim. And certainly not for the personal benefit of any official. In other words, it is used exclusively as the presidential power of pardon is used when the Department of Justice is allowed to take the lead. Abuses like Bill Clinton’s — and Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s — are not permitted.

So there’s some irony here.

Whenever the British Crown makes headlines in America, Americans roll their eyes and take to social media to scorn those ridiculous Brits. “I can’t believe they still have a king!” they say. “How backward!”What they don’t understand is that Britain’s king is not the 18th century monarch they imagine.

And they really don’t get that the American president increasingly is.

For a century, the power of the president has expanded and the White House now exercises a vast array of powers, many of which are increasingly unchecked. The most notable and consequential is the power to authorize the use of military force, which nominally belongs to Congress alone but, in practice, is increasingly a decision made by the president.

Along with that, the Supreme Court recently invented — out of whole cloth — a lifetime grant of immunity of presidents from prosecution for actions committed while in office. As a dissenting justice noted, a president can now order the military to assassinate his political opponents, our commit any other heinous crime you care to imagine, and if the president’s party controls Congress and declines to impeach and convict him — which has never happened in the history of the United States — he is immune from prosecution forever.

And the incoming president is now demanding his party’s senators effectively abandon one of their chief constitutional roles and not vet the president’s top executive appointments. To mix my historical metaphors, Donald Trump’s plan is not all that different from Augustus Caesar stripping power from the Senate but maintaining the institution, so Romans would continue to declare “SPQR” — “the Senate and the People of Rome” — long after the republic was dead and buried.

And on top of all that, there is the power of the pardon.

I won’t recap what’s happened in recent years because the tales are all depressingly familiar. Got a rich donor who needs a favour? No problem. Want to reward loyal criminal flunkies who took the fall for you? Just say the word.

Got a loved one caught with his hand holding a gun in the cookie jar? No problem, Joe. Poof! It all goes away.

And according to the incoming president — who just had criminal charges of conspiring to subvert an election and carry out a coup whisked out of existence thanks not to exoneration at trial but to delays created by deft legal maneuvers, a remarkably cooperative Supreme Court, and voters angry at the price of eggs — the president can even use the power of pardon to forgive himself. Just in case that lifetime immunity isn’t immunity enough.

The 19th century Queen Victoria would find this all terribly arbitrary and corrupt. And backward.

The simple truth is that 18th century kings — the sorts of kings Americans still like to revile on July 4th — are nowhere to be found in Europe. They vanished long ago.

But like Sauron slowly restoring his material form in the Third Age after its destruction in the Second, an 18th century king is emerging from shadow and taking shape in the District of Columbia.