Presidential Pardons

Presidents issue pardons sparingly through their careers, usually reserving the effort for the last 2 weeks before they leave office to insure that their supporters stay out of jail. In Obamas case he may be planning an early start. I suppose if you've already written off the Senate and are thinking that a successful presidency will be one you get to actually finish, then getting started on the pardons 2 years early makes sense.

Speculation runs wild ranging from a modest blanket pardon of the 149 or so inmates currently working on their tans in Gitmo, to a more ambitious version that involves issuing a delay of deportation and a temporary work permit for some number of illegal aliens ranging from 1 to all 11 million.

The White House won’t comment on how many undocumented immigrants could be affected. “I don’t want to put a number on it,” says a senior White House official, who says Obama’s timeline to act before the mid-term elections remains in place.

With some 22 million citizens either unemployed or underemployed, doing something like this just before an election looks to me like some kind of electoral suicide. Whatever it takes I guess, but I would think that the presidents advisers would be telling him to keep this under wraps until after the elections.