Weak names this year at Prez Biden’s final turkey pardon ceremony

November 25, 2024

This new Washington Post piece reporting on today’s turkey pardon ceremony at the White House includes a little political gravy, along with an explanation for the names of the birds. Here is how the piece starts:

“They tell me there’s 2,500 people here today, looking for a pardon!” President Joe Biden stared through his aviators at the crowd on the White House’s South Lawn on Monday morning. Everyone laughed. It was a joke, right? The rows of chairs closest to the president were stuffed with Biden loyalists: Cabinet members, political appointees, staff, friends — maybe the sort of people whom President-elect Donald Trump might seek retribution against?

In the end, only a pair of turkeys, Peach and Blossom, walked free. They are the last turkeys who will be pardoned by the 46th president, and they will “join the free birds of the United States of America,” Biden said. Peach, standing on a platform to the president’s right, released an ecstatic gobble. “Peach is making a last-minute plea here,” Biden added.

The birds were raised by National Turkey Federation Chairman John Zimmerman on a farm in Northfield, Minnesota. Zimmerman and his 9-year-old son, Grant, were on hand, as was Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, less than three weeks removed from his star turn as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. This would be the closest Walz gets to the White House, at least for now.

The turkeys were named for the state flower of Delaware. “By the way,” Biden told the crowd, “Delaware has a long history of growing peaches,” and peach pie is the official state dessert. One imagines this is the last we’ll hear about Delaware for a while. Biden also said that the peach blossom flower “symbolizes resilience, which is, quite frankly, fitting for today.” The president did not explain what he meant by this.

The names given to the pardoned turkeys are never especially clever or interesting, but I was hoping for a bit more fun this year. I suppose Hunter and Donald would have been too edgy, and Martha and George a bit too opaque in its cheekiness except for those on a first-name basis with famous federal defendants.

Knowing this ceremony was sure to take place this week, I drafted and published a new Substack entry at the Sentencing Matters Substack to fill out some of my yearly griping about turkeys getting more clemency attention than people. This new entry, “Imagining better clemency traditions than turkey pardons and lame-duck frenzies,” gets started this way:

Late November 2024 augurs some traditions in the world of executive power that I do not view as a cause for holiday celebration. Every year, as Thanksgiving approaches, the President and some Governors conduct ceremonies to “pardon” a few turkeys (who are often given not-so-clever names). This year, with President Joe Biden and some Governors now in their final weeks in power and no longer accountable to the voting public, the 2024 holiday season also brings the spectacle of efforts to encourage out-going chief executives to use their clemency pens robustly to benefit a wide array of justice-involved individuals. That spectacle traditionally presages a frenzy of lame-duck clemency grants that are more predictable based on calendar dates than based on the merits of substantive pleas for justice or mercy.

Be sure to head over to the substack if you want to review my efforts to “envision a few potential new traditions in the clemency arena that would justify celebration.” I also close with some clemency thanks, including: “I am also thankful that, even in divisive political times, we typically hear only robust debates over how the clemency power should be exercised, not over whether the power should exist at all.”

In the spirit of thankfulness, it dawns on me that I have been remiss in highlighting a lot of the recent new content from the Sentencing Matters Substack thanks to my co-authors. One co-author in particular has done a particularly impressive job making sure we post new content every week, and here are some of his more recent efforts:

Espcially because I have the great joy of hosting family this week, which means blogging may be a bit lighter than usual, be sure to head over to the Sentencing Matters Substack if you want to feast on extra helpings of sentencing discussions.

Also, for those of you hungry for more clemency talk, remember to register for the online event, “President Biden’s Pardon Legacy and the Future of the Federal Clemency Power,” being hosted on December 10 by the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center (DEPC) at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. More details and a list of panelist can be found on this event page.