Biden is a lame duck, free to do what he wishes. He could start by saving a few \u2013 or a few thousand \u2013 lives<\/p>\n\n\n\n
President Joe Biden<\/a> seems intent on demolishing his legacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For months, the Democrats<\/a> begged him to drop out of the presidential race. He defied them until the 11th hour. Kamala Harris lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For years, capital punishment opponents pressed him to make good on his 2020 pledge to abolish the death penalty. In the past few weeks, they\u2019ve been begging him<\/a> to commute the death sentences of the 40 people on federal death row before Trump delivers them what Project 2025<\/a> icily calls \u201cfinality\u201d. During his last term, Trump dispatched one woman and 12 men \u2013 more executions in six months than during the preceding 40 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Biden has not responded to the pleas of the condemned. Instead, he pardoned Hunter, granting his son immunity from prosecution for any crime he \u201chas committed or may have committed\u201d between 2014 and 2024. The pardon, which experts call unprecedented in scope<\/a>, not only breaks another vow (and \u201ccements his legacy as liar-in-chief\u201d, Fox News<\/a> gleefully reports). It also hands Trump cover to use the Department of Justice to shower mercy on his fellow crooks and assorted sycophants and ruin his foes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now Biden is considering preemptive pardons for the dozens of law-abiding public servants whom Trump is threatening with retaliatory criminal prosecution. Further abusing his office, tarring these people\u2019s reputations with rumors of guilt, Biden is, in short, out-Trumping Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the start, Biden called himself a human rights champion. Speaking<\/a> at the state department shortly after his inauguration, he proclaimed that \u201cupholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law and treating every person with dignity\u201d would be \u201cthe grounding wire of our global policy \u2013 our global power\u201d. There was no asterisk indicating an exception for Palestine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet since 7 October 2023, while Democratic opposition to the war in Gaza has grown to a majority, the Biden administration has drawn, and trampled, one line after another in Israel-Palestine\u2019s sand. A year and a week into the war, on 13 October 2024, the US secretaries of state and defense \u2013 though, pointedly, not the president himself \u2013 signed a letter<\/a> to the then Israeli secretary of defense Yoav Gallant threatening unspecified \u201cimplications for US policy\u201d if Israel did not implement a list of \u201cconcrete measures\u201d to end the starvation, disease and arbitrary displacement \u2013 to \u201creverse the downward humanitarian trajectory\u201d in Gaza, \u201cstarting now and within 30 days\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thirty days passed. The conditions were not met. The Democrats lost the election, in some part due to disaffection over the war. Bernie Sanders brought a resolution to the US Senate floor to withhold military aid to Israel, citing US law prohibiting it to countries that use the weapons to commit war crimes. The White House quietly lobbied<\/a> against the resolution, claiming that \u201cdisapproving arms purchases for Israel \u2026 would put wind in the sails of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas at the worst possible moment\u201d. With nearly 44,000 Palestinians killed and 2 million displaced, it was unclear when a better moment might be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next day, the international criminal court issued arrest warrants<\/a> for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Gallant and the presumed-dead Hamas leader, Ibrahim Al-Masri (known as Mohammed Deif), alleging the same war crimes and crimes against humanity that Sanders cited in support of his resolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And barely a week later, Biden asked Congress to approve a $680m arms package<\/a> for Israel, which it did. The package included the weapons the Israel Defense Forces had been using to wipe out entire families, with no apparent military objective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What else has the president been doing since the election to burnish his memory in the world\u2019s eyes? He recognized<\/a> National Family Week, National Apprenticeship Week and National Impaired Driving Prevention Month. He pardoned two Thanksgiving turkeys. And oh, yes, he brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, leaving the IDF undistracted from pulverizing every structure and living thing in Gaza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Biden is capable of changing his mind. In 1974, for instance, he opined that he didn\u2019t \u201cthink a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body\u201d. In 1994, he boasted<\/a> of his steadfast record \u2013 \u201cno fewer than 50 occasions\u201d \u2013 of voting against federal funding for abortion. He reversed that stance<\/a> in 2019, and, running for president in 2020, promised to \u201cprotect women\u2019s constitutional right to choose\u201d. The candidate had noticed that states were \u201cpassing extreme laws\u201d against abortion. \u201cCircumstances have changed,\u201d he said \u2013 again, too late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are a few explanations for this almost petulant farewell performance. Perhaps Biden is mad at the Democrats for pushing him aside. Perhaps Mr Nice Guy is the same obnoxious misogynist who interrogated Anita Hill during Justice Clarence Thomas\u2019s 1991 confirmation hearings and declined to take testimony from three other women<\/a> who alleged that Thomas had sexually harassed them too. Perhaps Biden is not really \u201cdriven\u201d by human rights, as Politico\u2019s Nasal Toosi concluded<\/a> earlier this year, though he\u2019ll tack them on if they don\u2019t interfere with other realpolitik or economic goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or perhaps he\u2019s entered the later stages of dementia and, in the muddle, switched parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the hell with explanations. The question is: now what? Circumstances have changed. Biden is a lame duck, free to do what he wishes. Trump is the next president. Biden\u2019s legacy may be shot \u2013 and what\u2019s not shot, Trump will shoot down or take credit for. But the president still has time to do the right things. He could start by saving a few, or a few thousand, lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n