Beg your pardon, but what’s with the liberal outrage over Joe Biden’s pardoning his son?
Finger wagging and head shaking were to be expected when Hunter Biden got his presidential pardon. But more than a week later, commentators from Fox News to The New York Times are still sputtering their indignation. Horrible precedent, we’re told. Imagine an American president behaving as if he were above the law.
I’m no lawyer, but maybe I have standing here, because I already have my presidential pardon. It’s collecting dust in a mislabeled manila folder stuffed in a file cabinet.
Mine came 58 years ago in an official envelope from the US Attorney, notifying me that, thanks to a blanket get-out-of-jail card from newly-elected President Jimmy Carter, I was being pardoned for resisting the draft.
I had lots of company: Hundreds of thousands of my fellow boomers had declined to serve during the Vietnam war. About 100,000 emigrated to Canada. Draft dodgers included political luminaries ranging from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush and Donald Trump. The difference is that they were able to wangle legal exemptions like Trump’s mysterious bone spurs (which never seemed to affect his golf swing.)
I had no such deferments, so I refused induction. Twice. My objection was not to the military, nor to the draft. I wanted nothing to do with the Vietnam war. In retrospect, I regret that decision. Resisters may or may not have helped end the war, but we also helped end the military draft, and that was a mistake with profound consequences. Had we kept the draft, we would never have fought futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But I knowingly violated the law. I expected to be prosecuted, as thousands were. At least one resister who refused induction with me was indicted, tried, convicted, and served time.
But I was not charged. I don’t know why. I went on with my life for three years, until Carter was elected and issued the pardon he had promised during the 1976 campaign.
There are differences between my crime and Hunter Biden’s. I acted out of conscience. He acted out of some combination of drug addiction and an attempt to cash in on his father’s status. But there are important similarities. We both broke the law with the knowledge that there might be consequences.
The presidential pardon is not a complicated concept. It is an idea borrowed from medieval English law, investing one person with the power to issue pardons. Motivation is not relevant. It might be forgiveness, or a personal favor, or an attempt to undo what is seen as a miscarriage of justice, or a politically motivated prosecution. It recognizes that justice is blind, so prone to error.
But ultimately, the pardon is an act of mercy, a human quality that ranks right up there with liberty and justice and equality. Abraham Lincoln pardoned former Confederate soldiers, and Harry Truman granted amnesty to some 1,500 who evaded the draft in World War II. Jimmy Carter, a Navy veteran himself, decided that prosecuting draft dodgers was not in the national interest. He hoped that the blanket pardon would help the nation move on from an ill-conceived war.
Biden’s case is even less complicated. Having suffered through the deaths of two other children, he could not face retirement while his son was imprisoned. He may also have felt that Hunter had paid dearly for his crime. Either way, he had the power to let him off the hook. So he did.
Who among us would have acted differently?
Me!
While I did not make the same choice back then Ross did, I admire the courage he (and others) demonstrated in bailing on the draft.
Nevertheless, Ross was a citizen, not the President of the United States of America.
Yes, there is a powerful case to be made, a sentimental one, for the President pardoning his son. Ross makes it well.
But, I submit, no president has the right to elevate personal preference, especially for a family member, over the good of the country. By pardoning his son, Joe Biden the father steps infant of Joe Biden the president. Just like Trump.
Of course Biden is not the same, not the equivalent of DJT. Doesn’t matter. With this pardon, we take one more step in the direction of establishing a king. I suspect Alexander Hamilton would approve.
Of course this is a tough call. Of course as a dad I can sympathize (and I do) with the president’s family history, as Ross delineates.
To me it is country first. Country before party. Country before family.
With the pardon, we are not as much a nation of laws as we were the day before the day the president pardoned his son.
Puh-leez. Several Presidents, including the incoming one, have pardoned family members for far worse crimes than Hunter’s.
To get to Ross Anderson’s primary message, “mercy”, Hunter absolutely deserves that, along with the pardon. We all know that had Hunter’s last name been Smith or Jones, he would have gotten a slap on the wrist, and perhaps mandatory drug treatment (even though it appears that he has been successfully clean and sober). It became increasingly clear that all the trumped-up outrage about Hunter’s crimes were attempts to make him relapse — to put yet another Biden offspring into the grave. Neither Hunter, nor all other people who have endured addiction and come out the right side of it deserve that.
Thank you, Joe. And thank you, Ross, for proving that you have something deep within you that we all need to see more often. It will be a few years before we might see it again!
In addition to Trump, who pardoned his son-in-law’s father, and Bill Clinton, who pardoned his brother, I am not aware of presidents pardoning family members. More generally, I don’t understand why this precedent matters very much. The rule of law matters, no?
Ross: It’s difficult to imagine anyone more different from venal Hunter Biden than you.
Feisty Brain (anonymously) makes my point.
I agree with Sperry- Biden, a decent man and a good president, tarnished his legacy. He went back on his word and put himself and his family above the country- It’s completely different than pardoning prisoners of conscience like opponents of the Viet Nam war. Biden is out and we now have 4 more years of a president who has demonstrated that he will put himself and his personal interests above all else- One of the parties has to at least try to show some integrity- Biden blew it.
In 1962 I was have a bad semester in Fullerton Jr. College. The draft was looming over any ablebodied young men. So I thought I’d get it over with and marched into my hometown recruiting office. An Army sergeant looked at me and beamed like a shopkeeper desparate for business. I started filling out forms. One question was what languages I spoke other than English. “Espanol, un poquito.” As I finished he perused my papers and looked up at me and asked, “How would you like to learn Veeyetnamese?” I shrugged, “sure.” A busload of we pinkcheeked newbies arrived at the Army’s processing center in downtown Los Angeles. All went well down to the “turn to your right, now cough.” Same procedure to the left. Then the doctor looked down at my feet. “Son, I hate to say it, but your feet look like two bags of sand.” I was born with flat feet. I walked out of there with a 1Y classification, meaning they would have to use up all the 1As before they got to me. As more news of the war filled our TV screens I felt sorrow for what our troops were suffering, and also for the Vietnamese people. And what did we learn from that war? Not so much.
Lol. You are comparing being pardoned for dodging the draft to Hunter Biden’s crimes? C’mon. So it was a grieving father who did it? Does that mean every future president can give their kids a get out of jail free card. This can’t be serious writing.
There was a plea deal that a Trumpian judge blew up in faked outrage. The case again Hunter was minimalist and should have easily led to the plea bargain originally on the table. Republicans in Congress were to eager to see Hunter publically pillowered that they really didn’t care about the merits of the case. They were in Trumpian revenge mode. But, here Portia, in Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” ….”The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven” … Such a sweet reminder of the difference between between vengeful killing and and a president using his authority to spare his only living son from the hammering of a Republican Congress acting on the orders of the Orange King to strike out against any and all enemies to his silly throne.
In that process, said president has created a precedent for the most egregious of crimes to be pardoned forevermore. Crime must carry punishment. That is the law of the land. If the worry is of being pilloried, then enact measures, laws, protections that would prevent that and serve the general public as well. When even the president is looking for the quickest possible self-serving solution, what hope do the rest of us have?
If justice means anything under our much vaunted American system of justice, the Orange King would have already been outfitted with an orange jumpsuit and on his way to a long time behind bars. For multiple crimes, including inciting revolt against the U.S. government. What Trump has pulled off is the Crime of the Century. He not only gets away with it, he is rewarded with absolute rule.