Tom Cotton: “last week, Joe Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 convicted criminals, including drug dealers, fraudsters, and…”

“last week, Joe Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 convicted criminals, including drug dealers, fraudsters, and corrupt public officials. These are not sympathetic figures. These are individuals who stole from the poor and poisoned the sick. They tore families apart and menaced communities. They were sent to jail. They belong in jail. With this action, Joe Biden didn't just reward 1,500 criminals; he robbed hundreds of thousands of victims of the closure and justice they deserve. The cruelty of these commutations is only matched by the shameless incompetence of the administration that issued them. This administration admitted--it admitted--that Joe Biden didn't individually review these cases or, for that matter, did anyone else individually review the cases. Yet he nullified the verdict of thousands of jurors and judges anyway. He also disrespected the countless man-hours that Federal law enforcement and prosecutors dedicated to solving these cases. The whole purpose of the Presidential pardon power is to correct individual and limited failures of the criminal justice system. It is in the nature of the power in government itself. We are a legislature. We make generally applicable prospective laws for everyone. Can those laws, in certain cases, yield unjust outcomes? Yes, of course. That is the nature of the legislative power, and the reason an Executive has the pardon power, is to mitigate that injustice in specific, particular cases.…”