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      What is a presidential pardon and how has it been used in the US?

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      Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter on Sunday for any federal crimes “he committed or may have committed” between 1 January 2014 and 1 December 2024 has brought renewed focus on the expansive power the US constitution gives the president to grant official clemency.It’s a power that presidents have deployed since George Washington, who pardoned those involved in the Whiskey Rebellion, to Donald Trump, who pardoned his political allies.What is the pardon power?The presidential pardon power is explicitly outlined in the US constitution.Section 2 of article II says that the president has the power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment”. The president’s power only applies to federal crimes, not state ones. It also does not apply to cases of impeachment.The founders took the pardon power from England, where there was a longstanding tradition of the king’s ability to issue mercy pardons. There was some debate about whether Congress should be required to give approval of pardons and whether there should be an exception for treason, but Alexander Hamilton pushed the constitutional convention to include a broad pardon power solely vested in the president. “As men generally derive confidence from their numbers, they might often encourage each other in an act of obduracy, and might be less sensible to the apprehension of suspicion or censure for an injudicious or affected clemency. On these accounts, one man appears to be a more eligible dispenser of the mercy of government, than a body of men,” he wrote in Federalist no 74, one of a series of essays to promote the ratification of the constitution.When it came to treason, he argued that the president could deploy the pardon power as a tool to negotiate and unify the country. “In seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth; and which, if suffered to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall,” he wrote.Bernadette Meyler, a law professor at Stanford University who studies British and US law, described it as “the one emergency power written into the constitution, other than the suspension of habeas corpus.“It’s one thing that is a concession to the idea that there might be certain unforeseen circumstances that the president would have to intervene in,” she said. “It goes along with the president’s control also over the army and navy and military power because, in the context that it was being contemplated, it was really being thought about as another tool within the ability to control domestic unrest.” How has the pardon power been used?George Washington issued the first pardons in 1795 to two men who were involved in the Whiskey Rebellion, a violent uprising in Pennsylvania to protest a tax on whiskey and other alcohol products by the nascent federal government.A key moment in the pardon power came after the civil war, when president Andrew Johnson issued “a full pardon and amnesty” to any person “who, directly or indirectly, participated in the late insurrection or rebellion” during the civil war. This and similar pardons around the same time led the US supreme court to interpret the pardon power to allow the president to grant broad amnesty to a group of people and not just for specific crimes already committed, Meyler said.After Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in the 1970s after Watergate, Gerald Ford issued a full and unconditional pardon for any crimes.In 1977, Jimmy Carter issued a mass pardon for those who had dodged the draft for the Vietnam war. At the end of his term in 1992, George HW Bush pardoned six people involved in the Iran-Contra affair, including the former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger.In his last day in office in 2001, Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother and gave an extremely controversial pardon to Marc Rich, a fugitive convicted of financial crimes whose ex-wife had been a major donor to Democrats and the Clinton campaign. Barack Obama granted clemency to more than 1,700 people while in office, including hundreds who had been convicted of non-violent drug offenses.Who did Donald Trump pardon?Trump did not hesitate to use the pardon power during his presidency to help political allies. He pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law Jared. The elder Kushner had pleaded guilty years earlier to tax evasion and witness tampering (Trump has now tapped him to be ambassador to France).He pardoned his political adviser Steve Bannon, who faced charges of defrauding donors on a charity related to building a wall at the southern border. He also pardoned Paul Manafort, who served as a top official on his 2016 campaign, and Trump ally Roger Stone.Trump pardoned the former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, the conservative personality Dinesh D’Souza, and Elliott Broidy, a major Republican donor. He also pardoned the rapper Lil Wayne and Alice Marie Johnson, a woman who had spent decades in prison for drug offenses but earned considerable attention after Kim Kardashian took on her cause.Trump has said he will issue a mass pardon for those involved in the January 6 attacks, a move that would end years of work by the justice department to investigate and criminally prosecute those involved in the attacks.Do other countries have a pardon power?The power to pardon is one that widely exists around the world, said Andrew Novak, a professor at George Mason University who is the author of Comparative Executive Clemency: The Constitutional Pardon Power and the Prerogative of Mercy in Global Perspective.But the United States is somewhat unique in allowing its chief executive the ability to pardon without having to get input or sign-off from others.“Biden can grant a pardon without input from anybody, which is much more of like a medieval English king conception of the pardon power, which is kind of ironic,” he added. “We have kind of an old-fashioned conception of the pardon power, at least generally.”“Having this unlimited pardon power that’s more similar to like 1700s England than it is to the current state of affairs in the western world,” he added. “In most countries in Europe, and the comparators in the developed world, they require input from someone else.” That requirement for input, Novak said, can somewhat limit a pardon being used to serve political or personal interests, the way it can be used in the US.Many countries also don’t allow for a pardon before conviction, Novak said, and there has been a movement over the last few decades in other countries for more transparency to ensure that proper processes are followed.About half of constitutions around the world limit the pardon power to something that can only occur after conviction, are only for specified offenses, or require an executive to consult others, Novak said. It’s uncommon for countries to have a ban on self-pardoning or pardoning a family member, he added.“Maybe it’s not common because the circumstance doesn’t arise very often,” he said. “The pardon power has always been a corruption risk going back to medieval times and can be used for many forms of self-dealing, like shielding one’s close associates or supporters.”The US founders understood impeachment to be an important check on the pardon power, Meyler said. “As we’ve seen it’s extremely hard to actually convict on an impeachment so that has proved to be really a fictional limitation on the president’s power.” More

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      Joe Biden issues ‘full and unconditional’ pardon to son Hunter

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      Joe Biden has issued “a full and unconditional” pardon to his son Hunter Biden covering convictions on federal gun and tax charges, the US president said in a statement released by the White House on Sunday.The decision marks a reversal for the president, who had repeatedly said he would not use his executive authority to pardon his son or commute his sentence.Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced for his conviction on federal gun charges on 12 December. He was scheduled to be sentenced in the tax case four days later.In the statement, Joe Biden said that he had long maintained that he would “not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted”.But, he argued, “it is clear that Hunter was treated differently”, adding that the charges in the case “came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election”.Hunter Biden was found guilty in Delaware in June on three felony counts relating to his purchase of a handgun in 2018. He had written on his gun-purchase form, falsely, that he was not a user of illicit drugs.He pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in Los Angeles in September, opting for an “open” plea, where a defendant pleads guilty to the charges and leaves his sentencing fate in the hands of the judge.The tax charges carried up to 17 years behind bars and the gun charges were punishable by up to 25 years, though federal sentencing guidelines were expected to call for far less time and it was possible the president’s son would have avoided prison time entirely.The pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted”.Joe Biden said on Sunday evening that his son had been prosecuted when “without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form”.He noted in the statement that “those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions”.Biden accused his political opponents of singling out his 54-year-old son.“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong,” he said.“There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”Biden departed for Angola later on Sunday evening for what may be his last foreign trip as president before leaving office.Speculation had been mounting that the president would issue a pardon since Hunter was seen with his father in Nantucket over the Thanksgiving break.Donald Trump had said in October that he would not be surprised if Hunter Biden were to receive a pardon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I wouldn’t take it off the books,” Trump said. “See, unlike Joe Biden, despite what they’ve done to me, where they’ve gone after me so viciously … And Hunter’s a bad boy.”On Sunday, Trump reacted with outrage, writing on his social network: “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!” Just one day earlier, though, Trump had reminded Americans that he himself had previously used the pardon power to wipe away convictions of those close to him. In his final weeks in office, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in law, Jared Kushner, as well as multiple allies convicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. On Saturday, Trump announced plans to nominate the elder Kushner to be the US ambassador to France.Republicans have long zeroed in on Hunter Biden’s difficulties – questions around lucrative foreign consultancies, broken relationships and a crack cocaine addiction – in an effort to politically damage his father.A laptop Hunter Biden left in a Delaware repair shop that made its way into Republican hands formed a scandal in the closing days of the 2020 election. Republicans claimed that the so-called “laptop from hell”, which featured images of Hunter posing with guns, sex workers and crack cocaine, was suppressed by media favorable to Democrats.Hunter Biden later published a book, Beautiful Things: a Memoir, that detailed his struggles as a drug addict. The Biden family denied more serious accusations that Hunter’s profitable financial arrangements with businesspeople in Ukraine and China amounted to graft using the family name.James Comer, one of the Republicans leading congressional investigations into Biden’s family, denounced the pardon. “The charges Hunter faced were just the tip of the iceberg in the blatant corruption that President Biden and the Biden Crime Family have lied about to the American people,” Comer wrote on X. “It’s unfortunate that, rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction – mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” Hunter Biden said in a statement on Sunday, adding he had remained sober for more than five years.“In the throes of addiction, I squandered many opportunities and advantages … I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”Hunter Biden’s legal team filed Sunday night in both Los Angeles and Delaware asking the judges handling his gun and tax cases to immediately dismiss them, citing the pardon.In the statement announcing the pardon, Joe Biden said that for his “entire career” he had followed a simple principle: to tell the truth to the American people.“Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a president would come to this decision.”Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report. More

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      Trump transition team signs agreement to begin takeover from Biden

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      Donald Trump’s team announced on Tuesday it had signed an agreement to start the complex process of transferring control of the federal government to themselves, although the details of the plan suggested some breaks with standard practice.The incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said the team would now be sending in “landing teams” into the various departments and agencies as it prepares to take over the bureaucracy of the executive branch.“After completing the selection process of his incoming cabinet, president-elect Trump is entering the next phase of his administration’s transition,” Wiles said. “This engagement allows our intended cabinet nominees to begin critical preparations.”But the agreement with the Biden administration, known as a memorandum of understanding, appeared to be a pared-down version of what is normally signed by presidential transitions with caveats that indicated a departure from usual restrictions.The signing of the memo normally unlocks up to $7.2m in government funding to help staffing costs and other expenses, as well as the use of government office space through the nonpartisan General Services Administration.The financial assistance comes with strings attached – the transition team has to agree to disclose its donors and impose a $5,000 limit on contributions – and the agreement was supposed to be signed months before the election.The transition team is normally supposed to sign an ethics agreement, which paves the way for transition aides to start receiving government information such as classified briefings and the granting of security clearances.The announcement by Wiles in a press release suggested that the Trump team had negotiated its own language around some of those restrictions.While the Trump team was committed to making the identities of its donors public, and would not accept any foreign contributions, Wiles said that it would not be using any government money and its entire operation would be privately funded.Government ethics experts have previously noted that such an arrangement would allow people seeking to curry favor with the Trump White House to donate directly to him, raising concerns about possible conflicts of interest.Wiles also said that the Trump team had its own ethics plan, rather than the formal government one, leaving unclear whether all relevant transition aides would be eligible to receive full government briefings that included classified information.That caveat on the ethics plan dovetailed with reporting by the Guardian that the Trump team is planning for political appointees to receive temporary security clearances on the first day and only face FBI background checks after it had taken over the bureau.Trump’s lack of interest in engaging with the formal transition stems from the first Trump administration, when officials turned over transition team records to the Russia investigation, according to people familiar with the matter.Trump has previously broken convention with the transfer of power. In 2016, his campaign organized what appeared to be a standard process, until Trump fired his transition team’s leadership after he won the election and cut off communications with the Obama administration.In 2020, Trump again seemed to follow standard procedure until immediately after the election, pressuring the General Services Administration to not recognize Joe Biden’s election win so his team could not access the federal financial assistance. More

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      in Elections

      Rudy Giuliani tells judge he can’t pay his bills in courtroom outburst

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      The former New York mayor and lawyer to Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, erupted in court on Tuesday, telling a judge: “I can’t pay my bills!”Sketches by courtroom artists, who create pictures for the media to use when cameras are not allowed in court, such as federal courts, showed a furious Giuliani, 80, pointing at the judge in his case, Lewis Liman.The hearing in federal court in Manhattan concerned a near-$150m judgment won by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia elections workers whom Giuliani defamed while advancing Trump’s lie that electoral fraud in 2020 cost him victory over Joe Biden.Liman said Giuliani had not been complying with orders to surrender assets.Giuliani said on Tuesday: “The implications you are making against me are wrong. I have no car, no credit card, no cash, everything I have is tied up, they have put stop orders on my business accounts, and I can’t pay my bills!”Giuliani’s fall has been spectacular. After making his name as a hard-charging prosecutor who took on organized crime, he was mayor for two terms, in office on 11 September 2001 and widely praised for his leadership after the terrorist attacks on the US. His 2008 presidential run flopped but Giuliani enjoyed a successful consulting and speaking career before allying himself with Trump when the property magnate entered Republican politics in 2015.Giuliani missed out on a cabinet appointment but became Trump’s personal attorney – work that fueled Trump’s first impeachment, in 2019 for blackmailing Ukraine for political dirt. Giuliani then became a prime driver of Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election – work which produced criminal charges, to which he pleaded not guilty, the huge defamation judgment, and disbarments in Washington and New York.In New York on Tuesday, Giuliani’s lawyer told the judge his client had turned over assets including a Mercedes Benz sports car once owned by the film star Lauren Bacall. An attorney for Freeman and Moss said Giuliani had turned over the car but not the title to it. Attorneys for the two women have also said they have gained access to Giuliani’s $5m Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan, but have not secured “the keys, stock, or proprietary lease”.In court, the judge told Giuliani’s lawyer: “A car without a title is meaningless … your client is a competent person. He was the US attorney in the district. The notion that he can’t apply for a title certificate – ”Giuliani cut him off, saying: “I did apply for it! What am I supposed to do, make it up myself? Your implication that I have not been diligent about it is totally incorrect.”He then launched his outburst about financial problems.Giuliani’s lawyer asked Liman to extend deadlines, given he had only just started on the case after previous attorneys withdrew. Liman denied the request, saying: “You can’t restart the clock by firing one counsel and hiring another. He has already received multiple extensions, and missed multiple deadlines.”Trial is set for 16 January regarding whether Giuliani must also give Moss and Freeman his Florida home and four New York Yankees World Series commemoration rings. On Tuesday, Giuliani’s lawyer asked if the trial could be pushed back, so his client could attend inaugural events for Trump, who will be sworn in as president in Washington DC on 20 January. Liman said no.Outside court, Giuliani told reporters Liman was “going to rule against me. If you were sitting in the courtroom and couldn’t figure it out, you’re stupid.” He also said the judge’s “background is serious leftwing Democrat … about as leftwing as you get” – even while acknowledging Liman was nominated by Trump.Giuliani said he did not regret defaming Freeman and Moss.“I regret the persecution I have been put through,” he said. More

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      Trump camp rivalries come to fore over efforts to oust top adviser

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      Internal rivalries spilled into public view on Monday as Boris Epshteyn, a top adviser to Donald Trump, found himself at the center of an ouster effort over accusations he asked potential administration nominees to pay monthly consulting fees in exchange for lobbying for them to the president-elect.The maelstrom engulfing Epshteyn suggested that barely 20 days since Trump won the election, the knife-fight culture of the first Trump presidency, where bitter aides took any opportunity to remove rivals, had returned.Over the weekend, David Warrington, the Trump 2024 campaign’s general counsel, finalized the main conclusions of a review into Epshteyn that found he had unsuccessfully solicited tens of thousands of dollars from potential nominees including Scott Bessent, who has been tapped to be Treasury secretary.According to the review, one day after Trump met with Bessent for the first time in February, Epshteyn invited him to lunch at a hotel in Palm Beach, where he asked for a monthly retainer of at least $30,000 to promote his name at Mar-a-Lago in case Trump won the election.Bessent declined and complained to an aide that Epshteyn tried to shake him down. Later, when Epshteyn asked Bessent to invest $10m in a three-by-three basketball league, he declined but told associates Epshteyn would probably give him better access if he had taken up the offer.The review into Epshteyn, a longtime Trump adviser who has wielded outsized influence with Trump over cabinet picks and positions in key departments, also concluded Epshteyn’s employment and access to Trump should be terminated, according to two people briefed on the findings.But Epshteyn remained part of Trump’s inner circle as of Monday evening, with Trump riding high on the news that special counsel prosecutors had moved to dismiss the two federal criminal cases against him – a victory he credited to Ephsteyn.The first person that Trump called when prosecutors withdrew the cases against him was Epshteyn, according to two people with Trump at the time, which occurred just as CNN first reported the existence of the review into Epshteyn’s consultancy scheme.For the remainder of the day, Epshteyn was on the offensive as his allies dismissed the review as an attempt by Warrington to decapitate Epshteyn after he successfully pushed for Bill McGinley to be the White House counsel, rather than Warrington, who had also been in contention for the role.Epshteyn’s allies later portrayed the review as a political hit job capitalizing on Epshteyn’s role in pushing for the former congressman Matt Gaetz to get the nomination for attorney general before it sank under the weight of sexual misconduct allegations.Epshteyn denied the allegations. “I am honored to work for President Trump and with his team,” he said in a statement. “These fake claims are false and defamatory and will not distract us from making America great again.”If the failure of the Gaetz nomination was seen as an opportunity to oust Epshteyn, even in part, it may have been a miscalculation since the original idea to have Gaetz lead the justice department came from Trump himself, according to a person with direct knowledge of that conversation.One Trump adviser who does not care for Epshteyn speculated on Monday night that his influence was weakened by the allegations. But another Trump adviser suggested Epshteyn may have emerged stronger. “Trump isn’t impressed by a pile-on because that’s what all those prosecutors did to him,” the adviser said.Epshteyn’s staying power with Trump has remained constant over the years and surprised newcomers to Trump’s orbit. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have both remarked to associates that they did not understand why Trump placed so much trust in Epshteyn.The principal reason for that trust in the last two years, according to multiple aides and associates, has been because Trump has regarded him as a major reason for how he sidestepped legal peril during the 2024 campaign.Epshteyn assembled and oversaw the Trump legal team during the criminal investigations and in the multiple criminal cases, including when Trump found it nearly impossible to find capable lawyers to represent him. “Boris was always right,” Trump is said to have remarked about Epshteyn’s legal strategy.That endeared him to Trump, who has taken Epshteyn seriously on policy and personnel suggestions, even if they were derided by others on the Trump team. When Trump named his top picks for the leadership of the justice department, they were Trump’s personal lawyers who had all been recruited by Epshteyn. More

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      in US Politics

      We must defend elective abortions, not just the most politically palatable cases | Moira Donegan

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      A Kentucky woman known by the pseudonym Mary Poe recently filed a lawsuit against her state, seeking an abortion for what was once a banal reason: because she wanted one.Poe, who was about seven weeks pregnant at the time of the lawsuit’s filing, has since had an abortion out of state. But her attorneys argue that she still has standing to sue to overturn Kentucky’s two abortion bans – a six-week ban and a separate total ban – arguing that the laws violate the state constitution. This much, at least, is typical: lawsuits challenging abortion bans have sprung up across the country since Dobbs, with women and their families seeking to overturn bans, expand exceptions, or get some compensation from the state for the graphic, distressing, disabling or deadly outcomes that the bans have made them suffer.The US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe in Dobbs cited the surge in activist litigation around abortion – a product of conservative investment in anti-choice legal shops – as part of their reason for doing so. Surely this must be a contentious, controversial issue that the federal bench is ill equipped to resolve, the judges from the conservative legal movement reasoned – because look how many complaints the conservative legal movement has filed against it!This rationale was always disingenuous, but it has also been proved flatly wrong: Dobbs has not got the courts out of the abortion business. Instead, lawsuits over abortion have exploded. The anti-choice camp has pounced, seeking to further restrict abortion by banning pills; targeting reproductive rights advocates, abortion funds and sexual health educators; claiming rights for fetuses or embryos; or by asserting that men who father pregnancies have a right to keep women from terminating them.But the pro-abortion rights side has been busy with litigation, too. Women who have been put at great health risk or made to suffer terrible, painful complications as a result of bans brought a class-action lawsuit in Texas. Bans have been challenged over and over again – on religious liberty grounds, on the grounds of state constitutional provisions securing the right to make individual healthcare decisions, under a federal law that guarantees emergency room treatment for patients needing stabilizing care, and under state constitutional clauses guaranteeing liberty, due process and privacy.The Kentucky lawsuit is part of this latter camp. Mary Poe has cited Kentucky’s constitutional guarantees of individual rights to both privacy and self-determination, which she says have been violated by the bans. “I feel overwhelmed and frustrated that I cannot access abortion care here in my own state,” she said in a statement delivered via her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union. “I am bringing this case to ensure that other Kentuckians will not have to go through what I am going through, and instead will be able to get the healthcare they need in our community.”This kind of desire for an abortion – the dignified simplicity of it – has been missing from much of the post-Dobbs abortion rights discourse. After the ruling, as trigger bans shot into effect across the country, clinics shuttered their doors, and scared women tried to discern their options, there was no shortage of tragic stories highlighting the brutality, indignity and gendered bigotry of the laws. But as the dust settled and members of the Democratic party, the major reproductive rights advocacy groups and the liberal legal movement surveyed the national scene, a consensus emerged that the face of the mainstream pro-choice movement would be the patient who experienced a medical emergency.Women who had suffered horrific medical complications became lucid, moving and highly sought after tellers of their own stories, explaining how abortion bans has risked their health: Amanda Zurawski, for example, was denied an emergency abortion at 18 weeks, subsequently went into septic shock twice, and one of her fallopian tubes was so scarred that it is now permanently closed, inhibiting her future fertility. Kate Cox was denied an abortion after discovering that her fetus has trisomy 18, a rare genetic condition which is incompatible with life, and which, because of Cox’s own medical history, also endangered her fertility and life.During her presidential run, Kamala Harris ran an ad featuring a woman identified only as Ondrea, who suffered a miscarriage at 16 weeks and was denied the standard care due to her state’s abortion ban. She developed sepsis and almost died. The ad features a shot of Ondrea in a bathroom, staring at her body in a mirror wearing only a sports bra. Her belly bears the scars of the emergency surgery that eventually saved her life – the surgery that she never would have had to have if it weren’t for the ban.It does not diminish these women’s bravery, their suffering, or the wrongness of what was done to them to say that they are only one small fraction of those who need abortions in America. These are married, middle-class women with wanted pregnancies; Zurawski and Cox are both white. Cox has spoken movingly about her hopes to meet her future child, a girl; in the ad that features Ondrea, she and her husband hold a baby blanket. These are women whose suffering at the hands of abortion bans has nothing to do with a refusal or distaste for heterosexual, married, middle-class life. Their suffering can be made visible precisely because they are so acceptable.Not so with Mary Poe. Poe may well be married, middle-class and white; from her statement, in which she talks about the difficulty of finding childcare, we can infer that she, like most abortion patients, is already a mother. But Poe is not suffering a physical emergency; she is not enduring any pain or medical misfortune that she can use to purchase social license. She is not, in other words, a woman whose claim to an abortion is based on a plea for mercy. She is merely a woman who seeks to be in control of her own life, one who believes that things like privacy and self-determination apply to her, too.“I have decided that ending my pregnancy is the best decision for me and my family,” Poe writes in her public statement. “This is a personal decision, a decision I believe should be mine alone, not made by anyone else.”This was not always a radical proposition. But in the post-Dobbs world, it has sadly become one.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Biden must Trump-proof US democracy, activists say: ‘There is a sense of urgency’

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      The skies above the White House were cold and grey. Joe Biden greeted the championship winning Boston Celtics basketball team, quipping about his Irish ancestry and tossing a basketball into the crowd. But the US president could not resist drawing a wider lesson.“When we get knocked down, we get back up,” he said. “As my dad would say, ‘Just get up, Joe. Get up.’ Character to keep going and keep the faith, that’s the Celtic way of life. That’s sports. And that’s America.”Such events continue to be among the ceremonial duties of a “lame duck” president with waning influence. Biden has cut a diminished figure in recent months, first surrendering his chance to seek re-election, then finding himself sidelined by the doomed presidential campaign of his vice-president, Kamala Harris.But with his legacy imperiled by Donald Trump, the president is facing calls to mitigate the oncoming storm. Advocacy groups say Biden, who turned 82 this week, can still take actions during his final two months in office to accelerate spending on climate and healthcare, secure civil liberties, and Trump-proof at least some fundamentals of US democracy.Trump’s signature campaign promise was a draconian crackdown on illegal immigration. He has nominated officials including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, architects of family separations at the southern border during his first term, and vowed to use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.The plans include mandatory detention, potentially trapping immigrants in inhumane conditions for years as they fight deportation. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is leading an opposition effort, urging Biden to halt the current expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facilities, especially those with records of human rights abuses.Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU national prison project, said Ice detention facilities “characterised by abusive conditions, pervasive neglect and utter disregard for the dignity of people in their custody” are key to Trump’s logistical plan.Dozens of people have died in Ice detention facilities – mostly owned or operated by private prison corporations – over the past four years, according to the ACLU, and 95% were likely preventable if appropriate medical care had been provided. Yet the Biden administration has backed new Ice detention facilities in states where they did not existed before, such as Kansas, Wyoming and Missouri.“We are calling on the Biden administration to take action now, in the final days of the administration, to halt any efforts to expand immigration detention and to shut down specifically abusive facilities once and for all,” Cho told reporters on a Zoom call this week. “We don’t need to put down runway for the Trump administration to put in place these mass detention and deportation machines.”She warned: “We know that the anti-immigrant policies of a second administration are going to be far more aggressive than what we saw in the first term, and mass arrest and detention is going to become perhaps the norm to create and carry out these deportation operations unless we can do all we can to put a halt to them.”View image in fullscreenAnother crucial area for Biden to make a last stand is criminal justice. In his first term, Trump oversaw the execution of more people than the previous 10 presidents combined. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, then imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021.Trump has indicated his intention to resume such executions and even expand the death penalty. His nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a public apology in 2013 while serving as Florida’s top law enforcement officer after she sought to delay the execution of a convicted killer because it conflicted with a fundraiser for her re-election campaign.Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s capital punishment project, told reporters via Zoom that Trump said “he will work to expand the death penalty. He’s going to try to expand it to people who do not even commit killings. He’s called for expanding the death penalty to his political opponents.“But perhaps most dangerously in Project 2025 [a policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation thinktank] – and we believe every word of it is this – he promised to try to kill everyone on death row, and the reason why we have to believe this and take it so seriously is the record that Donald Trump left where he, in a span of six months, carried out 13 executions.”The ACLU and other groups are therefore pressing Biden to commute the sentences of all individuals on federal death row to life in prison, fulfilling a campaign promise and preventing potential executions under Trump. Commuting “is really the thing that Biden can do to make it harder for Trump to restart executions”, Stubbs added.Pastor Brandi Slaughter, a board member of the pressure group Death Penalty Action, told reporters this week: “We know what the next president plans to do if any prisoners are left under a sentence of death under the Biden administration. We’ve been there, we’ve done that.”Biden has also received 8,000 petitions for clemency from federal prisoners serving non-death penalty sentences that he could either reduce or pardon. The former senator has long been criticised for his role in drawing up a 1994 crime law that led to the incarceration of thousands of Black men and women for drug offences.This week, members of Congress including Ayanna Pressley and James Clyburn led 64 colleagues in sending a letter to Biden urging him to use his clemency power “to reunite families, address longstanding injustices in our legal system and set our nation on the path toward ending mass incarceration”.They were joined at a press conference on Capitol Hill by Maria Garza, 50, from Illinois, a prison reform advocate who spent 12 years in a state prison. She said in an interview: “There is a sense of urgency because a lot of the people that are sitting waiting for clemency are people that have de facto life sentences that will die in prison if they don’t [receive clemency]. A lot of their unjust sentencing was because of the 1994 crime bill that he was the founding father of.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMitzi Wall, whose 29-year-old son Jonathan is incarcerated on a seven-and-a-half-year federal cannabis charge, called on Biden to keep a campaign promise to grant clemency to more than 4,000 people in federal prison for nonviolent cannabis crimes.“We voted for President Biden,” she said. “He gave us hope and we’re asking him to do nothing more than keep his promise.”Wall, 63, from Maryland, added: “President Biden was partly responsible for writing the 1994 crime bill that thrust families into abject poverty and pain. I know he feels bad about that and he can right that wrong with the power of the pen. I’m appealing to him as a father whose son [Hunter] could very possibly be going to prison.”In other efforts to protect civil liberties, the ACLU is recommending a moratorium on all federal government purchases of Americans’ personal data without a warrant. It is also asking Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act to prevent potential abuse of surveillance technologies under the Trump administration.Meanwhile, Trump has pledged to rescind unspent funds in Biden’s landmark climate and healthcare law and stop clean-energy development projects. White House officials are working against the clock to dole out billions of dollars in grants for existing programmes to minimise Trump’s ability to rescind or redirect these funds. Earlier this month, the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, announced more than $3.4bn in grants for infrastructure projects across the country.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, notes that Trump will have the power of impoundment to stall the money flowing out of the government and can order rescissions to programmes funded by Congress.“The singular thing that Joe Biden can do is expedite the flow of federal dollars in all the programmes,” Schiller said.“Any money that is supposed to leave the treasury to go to schools, food safety, environmental protection – anything that is not yet distributed needs to get distributed. It’s like emptying literally the piggy bank before you go on a trip. President Biden needs to be literally getting as much money out the door in the hands of state, local and community organisations as he can.”Another priority for the White House is getting Senate confirmation of as many federal judges as possible, given the potential impact of the judiciary in challenging Trump administration policies. The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organisation, noted: “Federal judges restricted hundreds of Trump administration policies during his first term, and will likely play a significant role in determining the trajectory of his second.”Senate Republicans forced numerous procedural votes and late-night sessions this week in attempt to stall confirmations. Eventually a deal was struck that will bring Biden within striking distance of the 234 judicial confirmations that occurred in Trump’s first term – but four of Biden’s appellate court nominees will not be considered.The outgoing president could also engage with Democratic-led states and localities to bolster protections and establish “firewalls” against Trump’s agenda, particularly in areas such as immigration. These collaborations could involve reinforcing sanctuary city policies and providing resources to states that are likely to face pressure from the Trump administration.Chris Scott, former coalitions director for Harris, said: “What will be interesting is how or what can President Biden to work with states, especially where we have Democratic leadership in place, to be able to brace themselves and arm themselves with more protection. We already have places like a Michigan or Illinois where you have governors vowing to make sure that they have protections – even in the Trump presidency.”As Barack Obama discovered before handing Trump the keys to the Oval Office in 2017, however, lame duck presidents can only do so much. Trump will come into office with a flurry of executive orders, a supportive Congress and fewer guardrails than the first time around.Bill Galston, a former adviser in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “On January 20 Donald Trump will control all the instruments of government and, at that point, it’ll be up to the courts – and public opinion – to restrain him.” More

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      Five actions Biden can take to protect civil liberties before Trump’s presidency

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      In less than two months, Donald Trump will take office, threatening several areas of American life and international policy. The president-elect has pledged to take aim at LGBTQ+ rights, specifically for transgender and gender-non-conforming people. He has promised to conduct mass deportations and raids as a part of a far-right approach to US immigration. And he is expected to roll back data collection practices on police misconduct and stifle any hope of passing police reform in Congress – specifically the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.Trump will largely be able to roll out his agenda, outlined in the 900-plus-page Project 2025 document, as Republicans took control of Congress during the 2024 general election. Joe Biden’s actions in his remaining time in office could be a crucial buttress against the expected impacts of the next four years.Six experts spoke with the Guardian about what the US president could do in his remaining time to protect the most vulnerable people:1. LGBTQ+ rights: fulfill executive order initiatives and confirm judgesAmong Trump’s collection of anti-LGBTQ+ initiatives, his administration’s plans to redefine sex are of particular concern, said Elana Redfield, the federal policy director at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy.  Sex would be redefined “in such a manner that actually eradicates trans people”, said Redfield, and would not allow for “self-identification”. “The definition of sex that they would propose is that sex is defined based on anatomical characteristics at birth and is unchangeable.” The definition of sex is “at the core of some of the biggest civil rights conversations we’re having in the LGBTQ+ context”, said Redfield. The Biden administration has interpreted the definition of “sex” to include sexual orientation and gender identity. But with Trump, redefining sex could rollback protections and cause issues for transgender people attempting to access federal programs such as social security benefits, especially as many programs ask for participants to enroll with a gender identification. A redefinition of sex could also result in people being investigated for fraud if their gender doesn’t match across all federal identification documents, said Redfield. Many of these questions around the federal government’s ability to define sex will face legal challenges. So Biden, in tandem with Democrats, should continue to confirm federal judges who will probably hear legal cases about gender, Redfield said. Congressional Democrats have managed to confirm several and are only 15 short of the 234 judicial confirmations needed to match the record set by Trump during his first term. Biden should also complete everything outlined in his Executive Order 14075, including checking in with federal agencies to make sure they are well equipped to handle increased needs from LGBTQ+ people amid Trump’s presidency. “For example,” Redfield said, “if everyone’s changing their passports right now, they need to make sure they have enough staffing for that.”2. Police reform: make sure data on policing is publicly availableThrough executive orders, Biden largely increased data collection on patterns and practices of police departments, said Patrice Willoughby, the chief of policy and legislative affairs at the NAACP. But such data, which tracks police actions including traffic stops, arrests and use of force, will probably come to a “complete stop” under Trump’s administration, likely to boost “the narrative of Black violence” cited by conservatives. Willoughby added that Trump will not provide an opportunity to continue reform efforts seen under Biden, especially given past comments supporting a “violent day” of policing to end perceived increases in crime. With his remaining term, Biden must make sure that data on policing is “available publicly for advocacy organizations, state and local governments” and disseminated so it does not “disappear during a second Trump presidency”. Additionally, the Biden administration should ensure that the “methodology of collecting data” is available to state and local municipalities so it can be “replicated across different ecosystems”, said Willoughby. “States and localities that are interested in police reform [can] have the path forward in order to continue to collect data and apply it in their individual communities.”It’s also important for Biden to direct federal agencies to use funding that has already been earmarked by Congress to address police reform, especially, she said, as conservatives will probably “claw back” funding allocated towards equity and communities of color.3. Immigration: close detention centers and slow rate of detentions Biden should close the estimated 200 US detention sites that will be used by Trump to carry out mass deportation and slow down the current rate of detention for undocumented people, said Naureen Shah, deputy director of government affairs at the ACLU.“When I think about the Trump presidency, I’m anticipating an avalanche of anti-immigrant action from day one, from within hours of inauguration,” said Shah. She added that Ice will probably conduct raids using state and local law enforcement, targeting of undocumented students and attacks on birthright citizenship. The biggest issue is that the Biden administration has left “intact the infrastructure for abuse”, Shah said, including the US detention sites that will be used during Trump’s mass deportation. “We urged the Biden administration early on to close detention facilities across the country,” she said. “We argued that they needed to close the facilities so that another administration couldn’t come in and fill them up.”But instead, the number of detentions has increased throughout the Biden administration, now reaching approximately 37,000 a day, said Shah, with Trump planning to increase that amount. Shah warned that Trump would now have “the empty beds to fill” because “the Biden administration left it all there”. Biden also left in place 287(g) agreements, which allow Ice to tap local law enforcement to identify and place immigrants in the deportation pipeline. Requests for the Biden administration to end said agreements have gone unfulfilled, said Shah.“At this point, we’re calling on the Biden administration to at least slow down the expansion that is planned of Ice detention and to close facilities run by abusive sheriffs and private prison companies,” Shah said, naming the Baker county detention center as a site that advocates have been flagging for years.4. Gaza: end arms sales to Israel Biden could withdraw US military assistance and arms sales as well as allowing for an “honest assessment of Israel’s conduct”, said Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch. “It’s not too late for Biden to invoke that leverage as US law requires and even in recognizing that Trump would probably reverse it, it still would be an extremely important statement,” Roth said. Allowing for a review of Israel’s actions, including the restriction of humanitarian aid and bombing shelters housing civilians, would make clear that such conduct “[are] war crimes”. “It would be more than just an important rebuke of how the Israeli government is fighting this war. It would help to lay the groundwork for potential international criminal charges,” Roth said, adding that Trump could later face charges for “aiding and abetting war crimes” if the war is still conducted in this manner. But such actions are unlikely. The Biden administration could have allowed the United Nations security council to insist on a ceasefire with “no political cost”, Roth said, comparing the moment to when Barack Obama allowed a security council resolution on the illegality of Israel’s West Bank settlements to go through before Trump’s inauguration in 2016. “[But] Biden wouldn’t do it. He vetoed it … [He] would not do the comparable thing, even though the stakes are much higher. “Biden has said all the right things. He’s pressed for a ceasefire, he’s urged greater attention to civilian casualties, he’s pressed for food and humanitarian aid to come into Gaza,” Roth said. “He’s done nothing to use his leverage to back up those pleas.”5. Education: broadly expand DEI effortsTrump’s plans to rescind diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) efforts from the Biden administration could embolden states that are already targeting such initiatives in education, through anti-CRT (critical race theory) laws, which often restrict classroom material and curriculum on topics including race, sexual orientation and gender identity, said Jordan Nellums, a higher education senior policy associate at the Century Foundation, a progressive thinktank. “The problem that we’ve seen in some states like Texas is that now faculty are looking at their syllabi for classes and realizing that they can’t even use the word ‘race’ or any type of word that may indicate that there’s going to be a discussion on race in certain classes,” he said.With the Department of Education potentially being dismantled, it could also pause its work at making sure that students facing discrimination have a means of reporting it, specifically through the Office of Civil Rights within the education department. Education is largely a “state issue”, said Nellums, but the Biden administration could sign executive actions to mandate that agencies protect DEI efforts more broadly. In terms of student debt, an issue disproportionately affecting people of color and low-income people, Biden could also make sure that those who are eligible for student loan forgiveness, specifically with public servant loan forgiveness and individuals who were defrauded by their college, said Aissa Canchola-Bañez, policy director for the Student Borrower Protection Center. “The Biden-Harris administration has done so much great work in trying to  fix some of the programs that were broken under the last Trump administration, fixing the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program and fixing Income Driven Repayment program,” said Canchola-Bañez. But many people are still waiting to get debt relief due to bureaucratic backlogs, said Canchola-Bañez. “The Biden administration can also work to make sure that all those folks who were promised relief actually see it happen.” More