Whenever I'm with my mom, she'll usually ask me what I think about some cultural or political thing that's going on, and generally speaking, I refuse to venture an opinion. There are lots of reasons for this, whether some deep-seated thing about being criticized later for my answer, or because I honestly don't care - when she asked me over Thanksgiving about the prospect of President Biden pardoning his son Hunter, it was primarily the second one.
I haven't followed that case a ton, beyond reading a couple of articles here and there, as well as listening to Hunter's interview on Marc Maron's WTF podcast a few years ago. So I don't know the ins and outs, beyond whatever's filtered out through osmosis into the wider culture. Based on that, my read is that Hunter probably is a bit dodgy, but that his dad probably isn't... or isn't dodgy for the same reasons.
When President Biden announced this week that he'd be pardoning his son for any crimes he may have committed between 2014 and 2024, I thought about that conversation with my mom, and then decided that I was okay with it. Part of it is probably that phenomenon where a party's voters agree with an action when their party's leaders do it, and disagree with it when the other party's leaders do it. But part of it is also a slightly nihilistic satisfaction at seeing the Democrats doing something that the Republicans have been happy to do forever (and make no mistake, Bill Clinton made dodgy pardons too).
Trump's been talking about pardoning the January 6th rioters forever. Some news headlines have suggested that Biden's pardon of Hunter gives Trump the "excuse", but it was always going to happen. And Trump's going to pardon himself for the January 6th thing and the missing documents case. That was going to happen regardless of what Biden did.
So the reason I'm broadly in favor is that, if Biden hadn't pardoned his son, Hunter would be at the mercy of Trump's Justice Department as of January 20th. Make no mistake, they'd have thrown the book at him, and they wouldn't have minded any of the bleating about political witch-hunts that would have ensued. At least this way, Biden's earning some of the criticism he's getting from the right, and his son is off the hook.
For the moment, anyway. When I brought it up with my mom today at dinner, she was a little less pleased with it than I was, but she also pointed out that Trump's people are going to... ahem... find some trumped-up charges to get Hunter on. Realistically speaking, laws are only effective insofar as they're enforced, so there's probably very little stopping Trump from ordering his attorney general to have Hunter thrown in jail on general principle. Especially given that the Supreme Court ruled this year that the president can commit crimes while in office.
But this pardon is a last middle finger to Trump and the whole ecosystem around him, which depends on sycophants to enthusiastically do whatever he says, as well as moderates to criticize the Democrats more severely for doing the same things that the Republicans do. The whole "when they go low, we go high" thing has been totally invalidated - and if it's bad for democracy and the rule of law that certain pardons are skirting dangerously close to dodgy territory, then too bad. I'm sick of Democrats getting steamrolled by Republican gamesmanship (cf. Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court in 2016).
Anyway, what's bad for democracy and the rule of law isn't so much a father pardoning his wayward son, shady as he may or may not be, as a convicted felon and known insurrectionist getting voted into office on promises of being a dictator on day one and of prosecuting his political rivals. I wish the pearl-clutching brigade had spent more time criticizing that for the past eight years, rather than enabling Trump's worst instincts.
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