The pantheon of problematic presidential pardons has always cut across partisan lines.

Former President Joe Biden’s pre-emptive pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, was among the most brazen examples ever of a president putting family loyalty above presidential duty. Barack Obama’s commutation of the prison sentence of Army private and document-leaker Chelsea Manning was widely condemned as a live threat to national security. Bill Clinton’s pardon of major Democratic donor Marc Green was so suspect that it spawned a federal investigation.

As is so often the case in the Trump era, our current president has managed to take one of the most historically abused elements of presidential power and turn it up to 11. Then to 12, then to 13.

President Donald Trump’s commutation last week of the priso

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