When Does Biden Pardon His Son?
Now? When it gets stickier? After Joe watches his last son twist in the wind of the courts and it’s the only human thing left for him to do?
I say ASAP — as soon as possible.
Everybody wins!
1. Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s last son standing, wabbling.
2. Hunter Biden’s family.
3. Joe Biden, the father does what any father would do.
4. Joe Biden, the president goes out as a winner without the risk of growing too old and frail in office and honoring his commitment in 2020 to be a transitional president.
5. The majority of Democrats who think he is too old and want someone else.
6. The public wins because they get a younger choice, at least on the Democratic side.
7. The public wins because the House Republicans can now focus on more important things. Three committees investigating the Bidens is now moot.
President Joe Biden, Hunter’s father, has the legal authority to pardon his son at any point in time. He could have spared his son and family this added grief this summer before the indictments. Sure, it will cost Joe, but we all win: Hunter is freed from this quagmire he created and that his father exacerbated by keeping Trump appointments at the FBI and District Attorney in Delaware when he became president. It was an arrogant and naïve thing for him to have done.
Two issues here. Have other presidents pardoned family members and have other presidents pardoned anyone before they were convicted of anything? Yes, and yes. Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger. Ford pardoned Nixon. Carter pardoned over 200,000 Vietnam-era draft dodgers. George H. W. Bush pardoned Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Trump pardoned Steve Bannon.
Then there is the notion of “faith, family, country” that former Vice-President Mike Pence has popularized. Biden is a devout Catholic, and now he can put family ahead of country, as he will be accused of doing. But by coupling a pardon with a decision NOT to run for president for 20204, he is putting country in order. More than half the country doesn’t want Biden to run because of his age, so by stepping aside now he is doing the country’s bidding.
I know what it’s like for your father to put mission before family.
I was only 11 when he severed our family and shipped my brother off to the US from his little hiding village in the interior lowlands of Bolivia. I was next, the following year. That was the end of our family. My father and mother were then free to continue their fruitless effort to contact, clothe, and convert a native tribe of the Ayoré Indians — savages as they called them. For my evangelical, fundamentalist missionaries their motto was: God, mission, converts — family not factored in.
Biden is morally obligated to put family ahead of further personal ambition. Fathers and sons — of all political persuasions — will understand that he has done the right thing, putting first things first.
God speed.
