President Joe Biden irked his left flank by moving slowly to alter Donald Trump’s refugee cap, and he appears poised to again draw fire from liberals as he avoids issuing a federal moratorium on capital punishment.
Biden’s dithering before raising Trump’s record-low refugee cap, a campaign promise, left the president vulnerable to criticism from other Democrats. And the delay in taking action regarding federal executions, another campaign pledge, opens him up to similar scrutiny from activists who helped him win the White House last year.
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Biden’s inaction is “frustrating” liberal Democrats, according to Robert Dunham, the Death Penalty Information Center’s executive director.
While DPIC is neutral and nonpartisan, Dunham told the Washington Examiner that Biden’s problem is exacerbated by his party’s slim majorities in Congress. That is because there are “practical consequences” to exercising presidential powers, he explained.
“One of the things that I think that he must have learned from his time as vice president was, if you have an informal policy of doing nothing so that you don’t issue any execution notices and you don’t carry out any executions, all that accomplishes is kicking the can down the road so that there are more people on death row for the next president to execute,” Dunham said.
Arizona’s decision to refurbish a 1940s-era gas chamber and procure ingredients for hydrogen cyanide, the agent used by Nazi Germany at the Auschwitz concentration camp, has thrust the death penalty back into the political spotlight before the state plans to execute its first prisoner since 2014 in the fall.
Arizona’s move followed South Carolina last month voting to compensate the lethal injection drug shortage with firing squads, though a South Carolina court stepped in this week to block the killing of Brad Keith Sigmon on Friday and Freddie Owens on June 25 as the state finalizes its firing squad procedures. The executions would have been South Carolina’s first since 2011.
The White House has been asked multiple times since inauguration when Biden is going to lean on Congress to pass death penalty reforms or act unilaterally by issuing a moratorium.
In a tense exchange with a reporter, White House press secretary Jen Psaki insisted Biden is committed to ending the death penalty and that his dilly-dallying is not indicative of a policy shift.
“There’s a legal process, and a Department of Justice process that would be standard in any scenario here,” she said.
The reporter pushed: “When did he change his mind on the death penalty?”
“I did not convey he changed his mind,” Psaki replied.
At the same time, Biden’s Justice Department is seeking the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers.
The Trump administration lifted the 17-year moratorium on the death penalty for federal crimes in July 2020. The policy shift permitted the killing of eight individuals in six months, bringing the total up to 11 since 1976.
Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a member of the “Squad,” and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin are spearheading the Democratic-led legislative effort to abolish capital punishment and resentence the roughly 50 inmates on death row to life without the possibility of parole instead, including Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof. The House measure has almost 80 co-sponsors.
Pressley also circulated letters calling on Biden to commute the sentences of death row prisoners immediately and urging the president to roll back capital punishment permanently through executive order.
“I appreciate President Biden’s stated opposition to the death penalty, but people’s lives are in limbo right now,” she told CNN in May.
Yet, Aggressive Progressive podcast host and former Democratic consultant Christopher Hahn is more patient.
“Biden, like most of his predecessors with one notable exception, acts deliberately and wants all issues studied before acting,” he said. “He’s five months into his presidency, and he’s fulfilling his promises. I think that’s quick by D.C. standards.”
A Pew Research Center confirmed this month that the majority of the public supports the death penalty for murderers, though it is less popular compared to the results of the same poll fielded last August. But the study also found consensus over concerns regarding the risk of killing innocent people.
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In April, Biden kept Trump’s refugee cap in place as part of an interim presidential directive. Hours later, after the decision was condemned by the likes of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the White House released a statement saying that Biden would “set a final, increased” cap before May 15, yet it would “likely” be fewer than 62,500. He eventually hiked it to 62,500.
