Marijuana laws are wrong. But Biden’s mass pardon isn’t right.

It’s tough in politics, as in life, when someone does the wrong thing for the right reason. So when President Joe Biden announced earlier this month that he would issue blanket pardons for anyone convicted of simple possession of marijuana under federal law, many who support legalizing marijuana cheered.

In some ways, they are right to do so. Biden’s statement that “no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana” enjoys widespread support across party lines. The war on drugs has been fought for 50 years without greatly reducing the number of people using drugs. What it has done: locked a lot of people up for a youthful mistake, giving otherwise law-abiding people the stigma of a federal conviction.

» READ MORE: Biden announced marijuana pardons. How many people will it help?

With all that being the case, it can feel pedantic to point out that laws should be changed by Congress, not the president, and that pardoning entire classes of offenders — while technically legal — truly strains the general understanding of the purpose of the pardoning power.

No one wants to confront the precedents set by their own side or how they can lead to bad outcomes when the other guys are in power again, but that exercise is an essential test of the rule of law. And it is one that Biden’s actions fail.

As with much of our Constitution, understanding the pardoning power requires an understanding of what came before it. Hundreds of years before the Constitution, English kings used “prerogative powers” to limit the effect of laws they didn’t like. One of these was the pardoning power. They also claimed powers of “dispensing” and “suspending” the law: the former meant a sort of preemptive pardon, saying the law did not apply to certain persons. The latter went a step further and just put the entire law on hold for everyone.

The English did not like this arrangement — it is part of what led them to overthrow their king in 1688 — and a century later, Americans writing our new Constitution wanted to be sure those same prerogative powers did not creep back into the new executive branch they were creating. They strictly limited the president’s powers, but did grant the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

Fast forward 235 years and those powers hardly seem limited anymore. Federal drug laws reach into people’s lives in ways our founders never dreamed of. But the way to change that is through challenging them in court or repealing them in Congress, not unilateral action by the person charged with enforcing them.

Those other methods, such as court challenges to existing drug laws, haven’t yielded much so far. (I agree with Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in 2005′s Gonzales v. Raich, in which he argued that Congress does not have the power to ban the consumption or possession of drugs, but a majority of the Supreme Court disagreed.) Bills in Congress to change or repeal drug laws have at times passed one chamber but fallen short in the other. Even within the administrative state, Biden and his predecessors could have reduced the severity of drug laws on marijuana users by encouraging Congress and federal agencies to reschedule the drug under the Controlled Substances Act to make it more accessible. (Right now, marijuana is a Schedule I substance, alongside heroin and LSD.) They have not done so.

The laws against the possession of marijuana are still on the books, even if an emerging consensus in America says they should not be. So no matter how many pardons Biden issues — the estimate is about 6,500 — federal prosecutors could continue to file charges against new violators. Biden can’t stop that: The Constitution gives him a pardoning power, not a suspending power. So we have the bizarre spectacle of the executive being required to execute a law while pardoning everyone convicted under it.

This sweeping action is a poor fit for the pardoning power. Generally, the idea behind it is to apply mercy when a law doesn’t seem just in one person’s case but still works generally. That is not what Biden is doing here: His complaint is with the law itself, although he voted to strengthen anti-drug laws many times in his long career.

This sweeping action is a poor fit for the pardoning power.

There have been sweeping pardons before — most recently when President Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers in 1977. But by then, the war was over and the draft was ended. The country had moved on legislatively, and the pardons just brought the rest of the system into line.

Biden and Congress could do the same here. He could direct Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to reschedule marijuana. He could ask Congress to change the law or even repeal it. He could even have his administration support court challenges to its constitutionality.

Instead, he took the easy way out and degraded the rule of law itself. Everyone who says “Who cares?” should remember that this action will make it easier for future presidents to effectively suspend securities laws, tax laws, gun control laws, or any other thing that strikes their fancy.

Laws and neutral principles matter. Biden should ease marijuana laws, but he should do it the right way.

Kyle Sammin is editor-at-large at Broad + Liberty.