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What a ludicrous thought experiment. No president in the last 100 years would have the slightest chance of passing this test, it's not even close, and that fact is probably to their credit. Do you want your president wasting their time memorizing some first and last names?
I'd rather that they considered each case carefully that came to them, and only pardoned people who they believe deserve it, instead of those recommended by their staff. If the number of people pardoned gets to be so high that they can't remember them, then that's a sign that something is super broken with the way people are being convicted. The presidential pardon is supposed to be a tool of last resort.
I don't think group pardons like the Carter Vietnam draft dodger pardons or the Trump Jan 6th pardons reflect a broken process - in both cases they reflect a system working as advertised, followed by a retroactive decision by the person with the authority to do so that it should not have done.
In neither case would the President (or a high-level advisor) spending time looking at each individual draft dodger or Jan 6th rioter have improved the process.
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Well, not necessarily. Could also be something broken with the White House/President.
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Excuse me, what?? Regardless of how carefully considered each pardon case is, even if we just assumed that they were all personally very carefully considered by the president himself, this would still be a completely ludicrous test.
Have you ever worked in case management before in any area of law? Or really in any administrative work. Lawyers routinely are involved in hundreds and thousands of cases over their career. I dare you to go up to the lawyers in your life and tell them that because they can't remember the names of each litigant they actually did not, in fact, carefully consider any of their cases. This is a patently absurd bar that is being made up as a hurdle for Biden for political reasons, and the premise completely falls apart on its face.
How do you think the president should be informed of potential pardons if not through recommendations??? Should the president decide pardons based on who he sees on the news that night? Do you want him to personally comb through the lists of convictions every week or month? Once again, this would be an absurd waste of the president's time for little (no?) gain.
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