A Practical Wish List For Joe Biden

Some doable libertarian ideas for the new President

- By Katherine Mangu-Ward

IN HIS VICTORY speech, Joe Biden promised to be “a healer, a uniter, a tested and steady hand.” If the new president wants to make good on his word, Reason staffers have some ideas for a few items to add to his policy agenda. These are suggestions that Biden might plausibly heed. We’re still gunning for the legalization of heroin, but we’d settle for descheduling marijuana. We’d love to see an end to all foreign adventurism, but just getting out of Afghanistan would be a good start. A robust private market in health insurance would be ideal, but the new administration could at least allow a larger variety of plans. No one expects Biden to be a libertarian president, but here are a few things he could do to make the nation a little bit more hospitable to free minds and free markets.

—KATHERINE MANGU-WARD

REFORM THE CLEMENCY PROCESS

C. J. CIAR A MELLA

If the Biden administration wants to make substantive gains in criminal justice reform without having to deal with Congress, it should turn to one of the least limited tools of the presidency: the pardon power.

The last two presidents have handled the pardon power differently. Barack Obama launched an unprecedented large-scale clemency initiative aimed at nonviolent drug offenders. As a result, 1,715 federal inmates had their sentences commuted or reduced. But the process was dogged by foot-dragging and resistance from the Justice Department, and thousands of inmates were left behind.