When Biden praised “the families across America who feed and fuel our nation” in this week’s pardon, he was papering over both the meat industry’s many abuses (of human workers as well as animals) and the decline of small family farms; as of a few years ago, 4 percent of U.S. farms controlled 58 percent of all farmland. Perhaps the closest any president has come to acknowledging the reality of the situation was Obama in 2016, saying that “I want to take a moment to recognize the brave turkeys who weren’t so lucky, who didn’t get to ride the gravy train to freedom—who met their fate with courage and sacrifice—and proved that they weren’t chicken.” But he delivered the line with a smile and it landed like a charm with the crowd.
The turkey pardon also touches on another topic that many voters and politicians wish to ignore: the way actual presidential pardons tend to serve power rather than justice. Turkeys, of course, are neither humans nor convicted criminals, meaning that the claim to pardon them is a figure of speech—their quality of life is solely driven by the cruel intersection of supply and demand curves for their meat, buoyed by cultural traditions like Thanksgiving dinners and by advertising like the turkey pardon event itself. But making a joke of the power of presidential pardon masks one of the most troubling powers of the executive. Enshrined in Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution, the power to pardon granted to the president is, as legal scholars have long argued, one of the few powers of the executive that bypasses the legislative and judicial branches; a quasi-monarchical vestige in the republic’s founding documents. It, like other pardons, is defined more than anything by its arbitrary nature.
This has led commentators to see the turkey pardon as a mockery of the country’s legal and carceral system. The philosopher Justin EH Smith has written that: “pardoning of one randomly selected bird at Thanksgiving not only carries with it an implicit validation of the slaughtering of millions of other turkeys. It also involves an implicit validation of the parallel practice for human beings, in which the occasional death-row inmate is pardoned, or given a stay by the hidden reasoning of an increasingly capricious Supreme Court, even as the majority of condemned prisoners are not so lucky. In this respect, the Thanksgiving pardon is an acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of the system of capital punishment.”