We can still hear the murmurs of pearl-clutching after Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter for petty gun and tax charges, a move that garnered more headlines than the cabal of felons, racists, hucksters and sex predators Trump’s assembling to help wreak vengeance, havoc, terror on millions. To those pleading “rule of law”: You’re kidding, right? Handed the “Immune Kingship,” Biden can do so much good – for Dreamers, inmates, students, Haitians, whistleblowers, those of good faith. Let him break more shit on his way out, please.

Biden’s unexpected reversal on Sunday came, of course, after he’d vowed not to pardon Hunter on two felony charges for minor offenses that would have typically never sparked felony charges if his name wasn’t Biden. Hunter, 54, was convicted for illegal possession of a firearm, which he owned for 11 days before throwing it away, after lying on paperwork that he was not in the throes of a paranoid drug addiction, which in fact he was; he was also convicted for failing to pay, while addicted, about $1.4 million in federal income taxes, which he has since paid in full plus interest and penalties – a common offense usually handled by the IRS with administrative or civil penalties like, say, when Roger Stone reached a similar settlement of over $2 million. After a similar plea deal negotiated by his lawyers fell apart at the hands of a Trump-appointed judge, Hunter was scheduled to be sentenced later this month. He faced up to 17 years in prison; most experts say he likely would have served about three years.

Criticism of Biden has predictably come from both sides of the aisle, with some condemning him for supposedly abandoning Democrats’ much-touted belief in the rule of law, and facilitating MAGA’s now-rampant lawlessness. Decrying the damage to revered “norms,” they’ve called his pardon “a rich gift to those who want to blow up the justice system” and an act that “will inevitably muddy the political waters.” To get real: We have to wonder where these people have been since, say, Susan Collins piously whined Trump had “learned his lesson” so ok she’d vote for the frat-boy rapist on SCOTUS; he had, after all, vowed that Roe v Wade was “established law.” Biden defended those norms for many years, and he stayed out of the way as MAGA thugs who thought those norms were “a joke” did everything in their considerable power to ransack the systems the norms were meant to protect – electoral democracy, racial equity, impartial justice, accountability before the law. He even held a photo-op at the White House to tell the ransacker-in chief, “Welcome back.”

But per his pardon statement, “Enough is enough.” Arguing Hunter was “selectively and unfairly prosecuted” on charges almost nobody else is “only because he is my son,” he asserted “raw politics has infected this process, and it led to a miscarriage of justice.” Citing years of GOP efforts “to break Hunter (and) me,” he added, “There’s no reason to believe it will stop here” – a sound argument given two of Trump’s most powerful law enforcement nominees, Patel and Bondi, are vowing to go hard after Hunter and the “Biden Crime Family.” So he saved his son. “Biden learned the right lesson,” writes Josh Marshall of “any baroque bits of reasoning” to let Hunter become “collateral damage” in a GOP war against Democrats who come to accept political malfeasance in the name of defending rules-based norms of democracy. “No one gives a fuck about ‘norms,'” especially in the face of egregious abuses. “Here’s the reality,” wrote Eric Holder. “No US Attorney would have charged this case (had) his name been Joe Smith…Pardon warranted.”

Nonetheless, MAGA fraudsters have hungrily jumped at this scrawny bit of red meat in the name of a “rule of law” they’ve long and brazenly flouted. Right-wing conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza, who just quietly apologized to a Georgia voter now suing him for falsely defaming him in D’Souza’s bogus 2000 Mules, rushed to mock and slam Biden: “No one is above the law – except my son Hunter!” A gazillion people snapped back, “You were pardoned by Trump.” House clown James Comer, who spent years hopefully digging for dirt to nail Hunter and found nothing but dick pics, brayed, “Joe Biden lies for a living” before hawking his upcoming appearance on Sean Hannity: “Tune in!” To a sleazy GOP with the chutzpah to haul out their faux indignation about “norms” they’ve been laboring for years to shred, especially now as a vindictive Trump, with the immunity of his fever dreams, sets out on an unholy Avenger’s Tour to gut democracy, deport millions, tank the economy, kill the planet (faster) and make a haul en route: Please. Spare us the vast, vile, mind-boggling hypocrisy.

Some Dems argue Hunter’s pardon will spur Trump to pardon more random scumbags. What, they don’t think he has and will again, or his lawyers haven’t already cited Hunter to seek dismissal of his hush money case? Think again. Predictably, the aspiring mob boss now gathering a viper’s nest of crooks, thugs, rapists and white supremacists pardoned or commuted, in power, a laundry list of 237 like-minded low-lifes. In keeping with his transactional approach to politics and life, many were friends, fellow felons or loyal minions who lied or stole, often for him. Among his 143 pardons and 94 commutations: Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, George Papadopoulos, Jeanine Pirro’s ex Albert to keep Fox on his side. Also, Rod Blagojevich (trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat), Sheriff Joe Arpaio (targeting immigrants), Scooter Libby (obstructng), 2 rappers (guns and drugs). three former GOP reps (stealing), and at least six war criminals, military and Blackwater (massacre and first-degree murder.)

Several of those pardoned have dutifully returned to the tacky fold. He let off Charles Kushner, Jared’s tax-evading, witness-tampering father, now en route to an ambassador’s gig in France. Michael Flynn is said to be up for a job, and Peter Navarro, newly out of prison for defying a Jan. 6 subpoena, has reportedly been offered another top trade job, even though, within the trade community, he was “long seen to be an incompetent crackpot, (and) has subsequently come to be seen as a dangerous incompetent ex-con crackpot.” And along with other scofflaws who’ve somehow remained free – see Stephen ‘Himmler’ Miller – Trump wants to put in charge of the FBI venomous, Hunter-obsessed conspiracist Kash Patel, who’s already compiled a long enemies’ list of anyone who’s ever offended The Great Orange One. Patel can’t wait to sic every law enforcement agency’s flying monkeys on all the “perps” whose “crimes” are sure to be backed up by “evidence” even as they also, in due vigilance, go after Hunter’s laptop. So sure, let’s freak out about his pardon.

It is time, many argue, for Biden to go full Dark Brandon, and use the power of his pen to save as many innocent, vulnerable, righteous people as he can from the oncoming storm – with blanket, preemptive or plain old pardons and commutations. To date, he has barely used his pardon power. In 2023, he granted clemency to about 6,000 people convicted of simple use or possession of pot; in June, he issued pardons for 2,000 veterans convicted under a now-repealed military ban on gay sex. There is much, much more good to be done. Many urge him to issue preemptive pardons to any of the many hundreds Trump has threatened to come after: Kamala, Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Jack Smith, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, Liz Cheney (“televised military tribuals”) Mark Milley (“execution for treason”), journalists, witnesses, jurists, judges. Faced with the arbitrary viciousness of a narcissistic madman who’ll do anything he can to hurt his “enemies,” Biden could issue a sort of class-action, no-name blanket pardon, like Jimmy Carter’s for Vietnam-era draft dodgers.

Amnesty International is urging Biden to “protect those seeking sanctuary from the coming deportation machine” by issuing more Temporary Protected Status, deferring departure dates, and expanding legal safeguards for farmworkers and other migrants. Several House Dems, with the support of 64 more, have asked him to “use his clemency powers in transformational new ways” to help broad classes of people: the chronically ill, women punished for defending themselves against abusers, and above all people incarcerated for nonviolent crimes who face harsh, often racist sentencing, wrongful convictions – the US has the highest rate in the world, with up to 6% or 120,000 innocent prisoners; all told, the Innocence Project estimates their clients, mostly black, have spent 3,942 years wrongfully incarcerated – and death. With 40 people on Death Row, the ACLU has asked Biden, who says he’s committed to abolishing a “morally bankrupt and inescapably racist” death penalty, to commute their sentences and make “Trump’s brutal plans for another killing spree impossible.”

Multiple calls have also come to free American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, 80, who has served over 46 years for the 1975 killing of two FBI agents in a standoff at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation during a famously fraught period of tension and violence between law enforcement and indigenous activists. For almost five decades, through long stints of solitary, indefinite lockdowns, denials of parole, COVID, diabetes, aortic aneurysm, intermittent blindness and other ills – “Prison officials gave Mr. Peltier a CPAP machine for the sleep apnea,” his lawyers note. “There is no electrical outlet to plug it into” – Peltier has maintained his innocence in a case so rife with prosecutorial misconduct his former judge and prosecutors, along with global rights advocates, have called for his release. “The way they have treated Leonard is the way they have treated Indigenous people historically throughout this country,” his lawyers charge. “We must keep Leonard alive long enough (to) get him out,” and let him go home to die.

Peltier is on Michael Moore’s “Bucket List for Joe” – “You have full immunity! No kidding!” – along with commuting Death Row sentences, canceling student and medical debt, closing Guantánamo, passing the ERA, stopping the slaughter in Gaza, and blocking liquified natural gas terminals, “the biggest greenhouse gas bomb on planet Earth.” Others want to see a pardon for Edward Snowden, who like Eugene Debs and Chelsea Manning (commuted) exposed corruption for all our sakes. Many others, meanwhile, continue committing righteous acts of protest, often paying for it with prison time in the wake of widespread crackdowns. Since the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests, at least 22 states have passed so-called critical infrastructure laws that punish climate protesters with felonies, fines and long jail sentences, the latest act in a long history of collusion between government and the oil industry even as climate crises mount. “Authorities should be listening to defenders,” says one rights expert, “but they are not.”

Amidst the criminalizing of dissent, dozens of protesters in West Virginia were charged with felonies for opposing a gas pipeline. In New York City, two climate activists, among hundreds arrested outside Citibank for urging they end financing for fossil fuels, faced contempt charges carrying a seven-year sentence; they ultimately pled guilty to mere “disorderly conduct” – for one playing the cello in public as the other sheltered him from rain with an umbrella. Those opposing genocide in Gaza at UK and U.S weapons factories run by Israel’s massive Elbit Systems have met with jail sentences and felony charges. In New Hampshire, four women now doing two months in jail initially faced felony charges, including “assault” with an egg, bearing a 37-year-sentence. All these dissenters follow in the lofty wake of the Berrigan brothers’ Plowshares Movement, whose nuns, priests and other radical Catholics, in hundreds of anti-war actions into their 80s, poured blood on draft records, nuclear warheads, Aegis destroyers, got arrested dozens of times, faced or spent decades in prison. On his desk, Biden now has over 12,000 bids for commutations and 4,000 pardon requests. May he rise to the occasion.

This post was originally published on Common Dreams.