“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” – Abraham Lincoln

It is always an exciting time whenever you have a transition from one president to another after an election.

The most often it happens is every four years, and when a president is reelected, moments like this only occur after eight years. When it comes to media attention during these times, the outgoing administration is usually swept aside without a second thought.

Yet, President Joe Biden bucked that trend last week when he announced he was providing a presidential pardon to his son, Hunter Biden.

Earlier this year the younger Biden was convicted on federal firearm violations and later pleaded guilty on charges involving income tax violations. He was awaiting sentencing for both sets of charges before he was pardoned.

President Biden’s pardon was interesting not only because he and his press secretary were on the record multiple times stating the president would not pardon his son but also because of how broad the pardon was.

The pardon forgives the crimes for which Hunter Biden was about to be sentenced as well as prevents federal criminal charges from being filed against him for any action he took between 2014 and the present.

The power of pardons was provided to the president in the U.S. Constitution as a check on the power of the judicial branch. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper 74 that he believed it was proper to give the president this power to protect citizens from courts handing out sentences that were overly severe or cruel based on the crime itself.

President Biden wrote in his official public statement accompanying the pardon that he believed the charges against his son were politically motivated and political pressure caused an earlier plea deal to fall apart.

Of course President Biden himself appoints the attorney general who leads the U.S. Justice Department that brought the charges. His statement creates a strange argument that his own political appointees unfairly singled out his son for prosecution.

Near the end of his statement, President Biden wrote, “Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice. …”

Some version of this sentiment has been a familiar refrain among President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters amidst Trump’s ongoing legal battles, especially this spring when Trump was convicted of breaking New York state laws by allegedly falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments related to his 2016 presidential campaign.

The sad and somewhat frightening implication of Biden’s and Trump’s rhetoric is we now have the leaders of both major political parties calling the legitimacy of the country’s legal system into question.

By no means is the court system perfect, but it is our best hope at least one institution in government can remain above the bottomless pit of partisan bickering and can make fair and unimpassioned decisions about how the law should be applied.

Biden’s words say he believes in the justice system, but his actions proved those words untrue.

There is little doubt Trump’s Justice Department would look under every rock and into every cranny of Hunter Biden’s checkered past in an effort to bring about more criminal charges against him, and any father would want to protect his son. Nonetheless, if Hunter Biden is innocent and the justice system works, he should be exonerated in the end.

Trump has already shown his strategy is to attack any person, place or thing that attacks or could attack him first – including courts. He recently said he plans to pardon anyone convicted of participating in the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, often referring to those convicted as political hostages.

If the justice system is truly as broken as Trump and Biden say, maybe we should consider some kind of overhaul.

However, my suspicion is the justice system is under attack because our culture is deeply under the spell of “if you ain’t with us, you’re against us” syndrome. This attitude makes life especially difficult for the branch of government the framers of the Constitution tried to inoculate from political pressures as best they knew how.

If pardons continue to flow freely for the politically well-connected and for those who are willing to subvert the law in service to their political party’s benefit, maybe the reform to consider should actually be removing the presidential pardon. Otherwise, my advice to anyone who ends up in the hoosegow is to claim political persecution.