So exclaims John Oliver, shaking his head over the annual tradition of presidential turkey pardoning:
“I issue this challenge to President Obama and all future presidents,” the Last Week Tonight host says in a new YouTube video [above] with his show on holiday hiatus. “If you want the world’s respect, just once, show up at a White House turkey pardoning with a cleaver and administer the justice these birds so clearly deserve.”
Obama has opted to ignore Oliver’s challenge; yesterday, he defended the pardon as an “action fully within my legal authority”. Dahlia Lithwick, tongue firmly in cheek, ponders the implications of the president’s policy, wondering if it will “start a wave of unauthorized poultry immigration”:
Obama’s Republican critics were quick to denounce presidential claims that the turkey pardon authority rests squarely within the enumerated powers of the executive branch. Sen. Ted Cruz published an op-ed in Politico titled “Obama Is Not a Monarch” in which he excoriated Obama’s plan to pardon the turkey as “lawless.” In it, Cruz posited that despite widespread popular resistance to turkey amnesty, “President Obama appears to be going forward. It is lawless. It is unconstitutional. He is defiant and angry at the American people. If he acts by executive diktat, President Obama will not be acting as a president, he will be acting as a monarch.”
Other Republicans pondered what might ensue if millions of turkeys were spontaneously granted amnesty. Some warned that a wave of unauthorized turkeys will soon flood the country, trailing illegal giblets and stuffing, and taking up space on supermarket shelves that should have been held by Americans. House Speaker John Boehner tweeted, “The president has said before that ‘he’s not a king’ & he’s ‘not an emperor,’ but he sure is acting like one.” Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum called the turkey pardon “just another in a long line of power grabs by this administration.”
Brad Plumer, taking a more serious approach to the issue, maintains the pardon is a lame tradition:
For starters, the pardoned turkeys don’t get long to enjoy their newfound freedom, because the life of the modern-day turkey is mostly pretty gruesome. The turkeys most widely consumed in America, broad-breasted whites, aren’t built for a carefree life at the farm. They’ve been bred over many years to have oversized breasts and to convert feed into tasty turkey meat as efficiently as possible. Those innovations have been great for humans — they help keep the cost of Thanksgiving dinner down — but they’re not as much fun for the turkey.
Turkeys bred for eating now grow to an average of 30 pounds, much bigger than their wild ancestors did. (The two turkeys that were pardoned in 2013, Caramel and Popcorn, weighed over 37 pounds apiece.) These domesticated turkeys are often so big that their skeletons can’t support all that weight. They frequently develop bone deformities and degenerative joint diseases and suffer heart failure or bleeding around the kidneys. Many are incapable of breeding on their own.
Popcorn, last year’s officially pardoned turkey, has already died of “natural causes” – though his understudy, Caramel, “has trimmed down quite a bit … and seems to be more active as the months go by”. Previous Dish on the sad fate of pardoned turkeys here.
The Dish 
