President pardons five former NFL players for crimes including drug trafficking and perjury.

Hon. Thursday. The President of the United States, who in his second term has signed on a pardon czar, the kind of position that reasonable people in 1995 would not have believed existed, issued five pardons to five former NFL players for crimes that ranged, on the official charging documents, from perjury to cocaine trafficking conspiracy.

Joe Klecko. Pleaded guilty to perjury, lying to a federal grand jury investigating insurance fraud. He’s a Hall of Famer. Pardoned.

Nate Newton. Federal drug trafficking, after authorities found one hundred and seventy-five pounds of marijuana in a car driven alongside his pickup truck. Pardoned.

Jamal Lewis. Pleaded guilty in a drug case involving the use of a cellphone to set up a deal. Pardoned.

Travis Henry. Pleaded guilty to conspiracy to traffic cocaine, having financed a cocaine ring moving the drug between Colorado and Montana. Pardoned.

Billy Cannon, deceased. Counterfeiting. Pardoned posthumously.

Hon. The pardon power is a real power, in the Constitution, given to the President of the United States. The use of that power is, traditionally, an exercise of mercy in cases that the system got wrong or that the punishment outpaced. The use of that power, thursday afternoon, on five gentlemen whose crimes included running a cocaine operation across two states, in a year in which the same Department of Justice is prosecuting low-level drug offenders in the exact same federal courts, tells you something about the posture. The posture is that NFL fame is a category of mercy.

The pardon czar in question is Alice Marie Johnson. She herself was famously pardoned by this President in his first term, after a long sentence for cocaine conspiracy. That one I get. That one was a kindness this country needed to do for Ms. Johnson, and the President did it, and she now has a job. Fine.

But the path from that pardon to this Thursday is the part I am asking you to follow. We now have a White House office whose entire job is to figure out which famous people deserve mercy. The metric, increasingly, is did you ever play in the NFL, and did the President recognize you on TV.

You ever notice how the people who didn’t play in the NFL, on the exact same drug conspiracies, are still in.

Funny how that works.