Hi there, Matter of Opinion listeners. It's Ross Douthad. My co-hosts and I will be back next week with a little holiday gift. But for today, I wanted to share a series of audio essays from some of our fellow opinion writers about what President Biden should do with his final weeks in office. The world that's full of crises and interesting challenges presents many more opportunities

for late-breaking action.

So you'll hear a lot of suggestions from my colleagues about how the Biden administration

could still act on issues like Ukraine, Gaza, judicial nominations, and yes, even more pardons. So enjoy

and have a very happy holiday season and a Merry Christmas.

My name is Michelle Goldberg and I'm an opinion columnist at the New York Times.

Lame duck presidents are limited in what they're able to do, but one power they do have is the power

of the pardon, as well as the power to commute criminal sentences. And typically, they use this to pardon individuals,

but you can also use it to pardon whole classes of people.

And that's something that I hope that Joe Biden will consider.

Biden should pardon everyone who could be prosecuted under the Comstock Act by the Trump administration.

The Comstock Act is an 1873 anti-vice law that, among other things, banned the mailing of contraceptives and tools used to perform abortion.

And for decades now, the Comstock Act was considered a dead letter, but it was never fully repealed. When Roe versus Wade was overturned,

you started to see conservatives agitating for its enforcement, especially around the mailing of abortion pills. So last year,

J.D. Vance and about 40 other Republicans signed a letter demanding that the Justice Department

start enforcing Comstock. While Donald Trump has said that he's not interested in enforcing Comstock,

it's not very clear, A, whether he really knows what it is,

and whether he would notice if people in the Justice Department decided to take it up.

So there's a fair amount of fear that this could be used to prosecute, not just doctors in blue states who were sending abortion

pills to women in states with abortion bans, but also abortion funds, pharmacists, many other

people who are involved with the distribution and provision of abortion through the mail.

And so one of the ways that Joe Biden could not just protect people that could be threatened

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