With President Joe Biden granting his son Hunter such a wide and expansive pardon, it’s not surprising that people will question the wisdom of the pardon power at all.
I think the pardon power can be defended in two ways. First, in the traditional sense that for the executive to have a power of clemency and mercy is a check on the courts and the legislature, which can act like mobs themselves. The power of clemency itself is traditional for executives to have and to exercise, in light of their role as enforcers of law. While we may regret that it has been more corruptly used in the past several administrations, the check against that is for the people to elect presidents of higher character. Second, we have seen a modern form of lawfare develop, in which secondary and tertiary figures around or near the executive are prosecuted or otherwise sanctioned for process crimes in order to harm, or create scandal around, the executive. The pardon power here is used controversially but, I think, in many cases justly.
As for Hunter’s pardon, I will just say that the focus on his crimes of gun possession and negligence with a firearm do not interest me. And I don’t begrudge the old man for sparing his son from punishment for those charges. What really does bother me is that this pardon, along with a great deal of cooperation from the media and official Washington, will effectively bury any real investigation into the Biden family’s overseas business in China and Ukraine.