President Obama granted clemency to 231 federal inmates today. The most in a single day by any president in U.S. history.
Obama commuted the sentences of 153 people and pardoned 78 others, a sure indication of what’s to come in his final weeks in office. While many politicians have recently come against non-violent drug offense sentences, if Obama really believed in this, why did he wait so long?
With today’s actions, Obama has doubled the number of people he has pardoned as president, according to the White House, bringing the total to 148. He commuted the sentences of 1,176 people, including 395 serving life sentences.
Obama has now granted clemency more times than any U.S. president.
After a bipartisan effort in Congress to overhaul the nation’s sentencing laws failed (do you see the pattern Obama=failure) in 2014, the president changed tactics and started his “clemency initiative.”
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s future attorney general, called the president’s initiative “an alarming abuse of the pardon power” at the time.
Obama based his initiative on the idea that these long drug sentences have had a disproportionate effect on communities of color.
Again, if he truly believed this why did he wait until now?
Far more than setting a new record for grants of clemency, Obama, by running from his true beliefs, set a new record for weakness.
