Republican House Rep. Brenda Pugh is so upset by President Joe Biden’s commutation of the prison sentence of former Luzerne County Judge Michael Conahan that she wants to rename the President Joe Biden Expressway.

“Conahan’s conduct is forever a blight on Pennsylvania and is a slap in the face to the victims and their families who deserve justice to be served for his atrocious crimes,” she said. “His clemency places complicity and a stamp of approval on his behavior. Children are among the most vulnerable Pennsylvanians. This decision is nothing short of a travesty and his clemency is a miscarriage of justice.”

For those who have forgotten, “kids for cash” took place between 2000 and 2009 when Conahan and a fellow judge conspired to close Luzerne County’s public facility for juvenile offenders in favor of a private, for-profit detention center in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from the company, PA Child Care. Once the for-profit center opened the judges continued taking kickbacks totaling almost $3 million in exchange for sentencing children to long stays at the facility for offenses as minor as jaywalking or trespassing.

In our opinion, Biden’s leniency toward Conahan is appalling. It is ludicrous that Conahan was able to serve part of his sentence under home release, a decision made by the federal court system for low-risk inmates during the COVID-19 pandemic. That home release list was then used to generate the list of presidential commutations. The problem is neither the president nor his staff gave victims or their families the basic consideration to do even a modicum of research when deciding which sentences to commute.

Pugh, in our opinion, should go even further than attempting to strip Biden’s name off the Scranton-area expressway. It should be renamed in honor of the victims of the Kids for Cash scandal.