I don’t think the sons of presidents should get off lightly, even if Daddy is convinced that the prosecution of his baby boy was purely political. If they break the law, they should be held accountable. In fact, even if most people wouldn’t be prosecuted for a violation, it’s imperative that the son be prosecuted, even if only to prove that there aren’t two sets of rules.
Hunter was. He was convicted of his crimes by a jury of his peers, and despite the implication this was all political, there’s no evidence of a MAGA jury.
But I will say one thing. Hunter shouldn’t have been prosecuted.
“Wait…doesn’t that contradict what you just said?”
Well, it does, but only because I needed to explain and so I posed this question to myself because it amused me to do so.
See, Hunter shouldn’t have been prosecuted because no one should have been prosecuted for it. Many of the laws that led to his prosecution in the first place are the real problem.
Here’s what President Biden said that was at least partially correct: “Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges” related to the prohibition of gun ownership by substance abusers. The key word there is “almost.” For years, federal courts have wrestled with cases in which prosecutors actually did try to convict people for mere gun ownership unrelated to other crimes. In some of those cases, federal courts have found the statute, as applied to particular circumstances, to be an unconstitutional violation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. In a somewhat parallel case in 2019, a 7-2 Supreme Court threw out a similarly unwarranted prohibition of gun ownership.
Those court decisions make a lot of sense. For someone never convicted of a drug offense to be deprived of his ability to merely possess a gun is to deny a right without due process of law. If someone is suspected of smoking a marijuana joint, that doesn’t mean the federal authorities can forbid him from exercising his First Amendment speech rights, so why would they be able to say he can’t exercise his self-defensive Second Amendment gun ownership rights, completely unrelated to any illegal use of the gun itself?
I’ve written several times before about the case of Stephen Nodine, a former county commissioner in Alabama who, as part of a prosecutorial squeeze play related to another alleged crime that he actually did not commit, was bullied by the authorities into a guilty plea. Why? For having smoked a single marijuana joint on a beach in Florida while owning an unloaded pistol, safely in a closet 100 minutes away in Mobile, Alabama. If President Biden is serious that a pardon is due for those convicted under that statute “without aggravating factors like use in a crime,” then he should pardon Nodine and anyone else similarly situated. This is especially true since the president already has (unwisely, in my opinion) issued a blanket pardon for thousands of people convicted of simple possession of marijuana, which was Nodine’s actual misdemeanor offense. If simple marijuana possession is pardonable and simple gun possession unrelated to a crime is pardonable, surely Nodine and many others doubly deserve the forgiveness that Joe Biden showed his own son — especially since Hunter Biden’s offense, unlike Nodine’s, was a deliberate, willful transgression of the gun law.
Many Democrats have argued that Hunter’s prosecution was unfair because people are generally not prosecuted for this crime. Biden himself says charges are “almost never brought to trial.”
I could argue that they’re not brought to trial because plea bargains are nearly forced onto folks in many cases, but that’s true of most other crimes. Like author Quin Hillyer notes above, the keyword is “almost.” They’re still brought to trial some, which is why Hunter should have been brought to trial, too.
But as Hillyer also notes, they shouldn’t be because it’s basically an attempt to deny someone their gun rights without any due process at all.
At least with someone who is a felon, they went through due process to reach that status. They did something, a court decided they actually did that thing, and now they’re barred from lawfully owning a gun. I may not like it, but it’s constitutional as we currently interpret the Constitution.
But Hunter was barred from owning a gun without that, as have thousands of other people. Hillyer brings up one example, but that’s just one of many. Considering how common drug use is in this country, especially with the destigmatization of marijuana use in society as a whole, there are a lot of people who are breaking federal drug laws but have been convicted of nothing. Legally, they’re barred from owning a firearm without due process.
So yeah, I think Hunter shouldn’t have been pardoned. I think that if you’re going to have a law on the books and prosecute anyone, then the highly connected most definitely need to be prosecuted. However, I also think that this particular law needs to die in a fire and that everyone who has this conviction on their records should also get a pardon.
Somehow, I doubt old Joe is going to do that on his way out the door.
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