By Noah Rothman
Monday, December 02, 2024
Those of us who write about politics for a living spend a
lot of time searching for the animating principles that motivate actors in
American public life. A cynical sort would call that a fool’s errand. It is
truer than it should be that politicians often respond to more atavistic
impulses, and their rationales can often be parochial or even base. But it does
violence to the civic compact when Americans come to expect that their elected
representatives will, of course, prioritize themselves and their families over
the country. The pageant surrounding Hunter Biden’s indictment, conviction, and
pardon cements that pernicious impression.
When it came to Hunter’s sordid conduct, the voting
public never believed the president. Despite the administration’s protests in
its defense and Hunter’s, staggeringly large majorities believed the president’s son
was guilty of the charges against him. A majority said they thought the
government had provided Hunter with more favorable treatment than a less
well-connected figure would receive from the Justice Department (because he was). And when a jury convicted Hunter Biden of
the charges against him despite the government’s best efforts, most voters approved of that outcome. They told pollsters they believed that the president had
benefited from his son’s indiscretions and that his interventions on his son’s
behalf were inappropriate.
It’s reasonable to presume that voters never believed the
president or his allies when they repeatedly assured their critics that Hunter
Biden would never receive a presidential pardon. But that didn’t prevent Biden
administration officials from saying, over and over again, that Hunter would
receive fair justice.
“No,” the president said plainly when asked last year if he would
commute his son’s sentence. “Yes,” he later added after David Muir inquired
whether he had “ruled out a pardon.” His first press secretary refused to even “entertain” the
“hypothetical” reporters kept asking about. His second couldn’t deny the contention enough, perhaps because the
White House’s denials were so unsatisfying. “It’s still a no. It will be a no.
It is a no, and I don’t have anything else to add,” an exasperated Karine
Jean-Pierre said as late as September. “’Will he pardon his son?’ ‘No.’”
Democrats insisted Biden would not do what he did last
night, not just because it was so unseemly. They did so because it was
politically advantageous and because the president’s action on his son’s
behalf would betray the degree to which this administration had pulled on
strings behind the scenes to secure Hunter Biden’s future all along. Indeed,
the “full and unconditional” clemency granted to the president’s
son, which immunizes him from any future prosecutions by Donald Trump’s DOJ,
are reflective of the corrupt “sweetheart deal” Hunter was offered from the start.
Voters cannot be surprised by the fact that Democratic
denials proved hollow. They watched Joe Biden sacrifice whatever political
self-preservation instincts he possessed as he kept his last surviving son so
close regardless of Hunter’s myriad liabilities. The president’s failure to
successfully shield Hunter from the consequences of his own actions, Democrats argued, was a display of Joe Biden’s commitment to the rule of law. But now that the inevitable
has occurred, Democrats are compelled to retreat to negative partisanship’s
unsatisfying shibboleths to keep the party’s dispirited troops in line.
President Biden had no choice but to pardon his son, what
with Donald Trump’s “intention to weaponize the FBI and the Justice
Department,” the Bulwark’s Kim Wehle wrote. If the pardon isn’t indicative of the
extent to which Joe Biden is a better public servant than Trump, it is at least
evidence that he’s no worse than Trump. The “vast majority” of Trump’s pardons
were granted to personal acquaintances or those of his allies, New York
Times correspondent Peter Baker wrote, including Jared Kushner’s father,
Charles. And if all that fails to grab you, at least the MAGA movement’s
leading lights are rending garments this morning.
Perhaps the Daily Beast’s readers take some solace
in seeing their adversaries properly owned, but there’s little comfort here
available to anyone else. Voters may conclude that the use of the president’s
absolute pardon power is less a check on other competing articles in the
Constitution but a tool to insulate the great house to which the executive
branch has been entrusted. If it comes to be seen as an instrument of
corruption, voters will come to regard it — and those who wield it — with
contempt. They may have reached that conclusion already.
The Hunter Biden saga has been an exercise in
dissimulation of the worst sort — the kind that everyone recognizes is a farce.
Joe Biden, his aides, and his allies all knew they were retailing a fiction
when they promised Americans Hunter Biden would not receive special treatment,
and their audiences knew they were being sold a bill of goods. The rote
performance of it all is a sad coda to the Biden era. The outgoing president
marketed himself as a remedy for what Democrats insisted was the corruption that
prevailed in the Trump years. All he succeeded in doing was convincing the
public that the misuse of presidential authority is the bipartisan status quo.
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