Amnesty has become the political act that dare not speak its name. Nativists go wild when they hear the term. Mainstream immigrant advocates talk around it. Immigration-restriction fanatics have so poisoned and blurred the word's meaning that they see it lurking in any legislation that proposes anything less than jail time or mass deportations for illegal immigrants. But is the idea of amnesty really as outlandish and un-American as radio talk-show hosts and Republican politicians make it sound• Is it really antithetical to our sacred notion of the rule of law• Well, yes and no. The fundamental question is whether the government should ever circumvent the legal process and dispense forgiveness. Certainly, the Constitution allows the president the power to pardon all offenses except impeachment. A holdover from monarchical government, the presidential pardon has been controversial from the beginning of the republic, when some of the Framers worried about its potential for abuse. More than two centuries later, President Clinton's infamous last-minute pardon of Marc Rich, a fugitive commodities trader accused of tax evasion and of making illegal oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis, resurrected such concerns, particularly because Rich's ex-wife donated nearly half a million dollars to Clinton's presidential library fund. But not all pardons and amnesties in U.S. history have been so utterly devoid of social value. Whether you agreed with it or not, President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon did end our long, polarizing national Watergate nightmare. Historically, amnesties have served a similar purpose of social reconciliation. It is true that the failure to punish lawbreakers challenges the rule of law and our collective sense of fair play. When we abrogate that rule, we threaten to undermine the social contract. And yet the very idea of pardons and amnesties presupposes that law has its limits and that, on occasion, it is trumped by other values -- social cohesion, for one, and a larger view of justice, for another. As a means to keep the peace, in 1795 President Washington pardoned the leaders of a rebellion against the whiskey tax, a law that was later repealed. In order to "bind up our nation's wounds" during and after the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson issued more than 200,000 presidential pardons to Union deserters and Confederate soldiers. Indeed, Johnson's 1868 Christmas amnesty proclamation granted unconditional pardons to all participants in the war. In 1947, President Truman issued pardons to 1,500 World War II draft resisters. A few years later, he granted amnesty to 9,000 deserters from the Korean War. A generation later, in 1974, Ford offered a conditional amnesty to men who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War. In 1977, in one of his first acts as president, Jimmy Carter granted draft evaders a "full, complete and unconditional pardon." It's a political reality that general amnesty no longer is an option for illegal immigrants. But some form of it probably is going to be required to solve the mess of our long-delayed immigration policy and even amnesty haters have to admit that it has its purposes. Just ask those turkeys that get their necks saved by the president in the Rose Garden every year right before Thanksgiving. Gregory Rodriguez writes a column for the Los Angeles Times.

---

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)

---