A presidential pardon, and a very bad choice

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/12/2024 (367 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The language in the explanation that came with U.S. President Joe Biden’s presidential pardon for his son, Hunter Biden, was clear enough.

“For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice — and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a president would come to this decision.”

Hunter Biden has faced charges — and convictions — for tax fraud and for putting false information on documentation needed to buy a gun, and attacking Hunter has been a regular feature of Republican politics.

You can certainly understand Biden’s motivation for the pardon: an 82-year-old man, with a lifetime of service to his country and now arguably the most powerful person on the planet, who wanted to protect his son from a clearly-articulated threat of political retribution.

He had the tools at his hands and chose to use them.

But it was a bad choice, and one that has been condemned by scores of senior Democrats.

It was a bad choice because it will be used to justify everything that comes next.

It will be used to justify wholesale pardons of men and women convicted for their roles in the attempt to overthrow an election that even Donald Trump has now admitted he lost.

It will be used to justify laundering the records of others who facilitated that attack and were convicted for those roles. It will be used to argue that a vast range of contemptible behaviour can be forgiven with something as simple as a stroke of the pen.

It’s bad for the administration of justice, because it indicates that what’s important when you face consequences under the law is not what you’ve done, but who you know.

And it adds fuel to the belief that the U.S. justice system is so politicized the law is being unfairly used as a weapon: Joe Biden said exactly that in his statement justifying the pardon, arguing, “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”

The rule of law, the pardon suggests, has been replaced by majority rule.

It lends credence to Donald Trump’s constant claims his convictions by American juries were solely a matter of “lawfare,” despite being proven in court. And the pardon serves, obliquely, to throw the administration of justice into disrepute.

Nothing good will come of that.

It’s all the worse because Biden has steadfastly maintained he would not pardon his son, before abruptly changing directions over the U.S. Thanksgiving weekend.

More than anything else, the decision to issue the pardon will be used to further erode faith in government and politicians.

It’s an erosion that damages democracy by discouraging voters from coming out to cast their ballots, and, in the process, running the risk of handing political control to small, dedicated groups whose interests don’t represent the majority of Americans but who can be counted on to get out and vote.

It is understandable a father would do his utmost to protect his son, especially when a newly elected government has said it plans retribution for all slights, real or imagined, as one of its first orders of business.

But supposedly Biden’s job is to put America first.

A bad choice, Mr. President. A critically bad choice.