Sins of the father

On Biden's final act

Joe Biden has stood at the graves of two of his children.

Of course he will spare the most vulnerable one he has left.

When Joe Biden leaves office in a month, he will hand over his home to his tormentor and enemy.

He will leave behind a Washington that humiliated him and pushed him out of the presidency he thinks he could have won again.

He’ll leave behind a smoldering government, led by a maniac emboldened by a right wing legislature poised to torch everything he’d spent decades and decades and decades fighting to accomplish.

He’ll leave behind a career that once rewarded him for playing by the rules, waiting his turn, bowing to the party line, swallowing his pride, stepping aside.

As a politician and as a person, he owes the machine nothing. The machine has left him for dead.

Every critic who has clutched their pearls over the pardon and accused him of reinforcing the lawlessness of Trump’s regime is missing the point. This has very little to do with Trump’s morality and everything to do with Biden’s own.

This is a father pushed to the point of personal and professional ruin by the entire system of government doing whatever he can to save his last surviving son.

And the only justification he needed to give is:

“To hell with it.”

To hell with the pundits who have already called his legacy “irreparably tarnished” and “marred” by a half dozen decisions he made this year.

And yes, to hell with the hand-wringing by the holier-than-thou columnists and talking heads and fucking colleagues who lecture him about upholding standards of justice and setting a precedent against nepotism when Charles Kushner was just named the ambassador to France.

For so long, we have gone high when they have gone low. And now we are shouting about the dignity of the office from the bottom of a well.

In a month, the Bidens will get to Delaware and a flurry of help will unpack the boxes and the bags. They’ll sit at the dinner table in the house where they haven’t lived since Trump’s first term.

And they will think about their children, who have both suffered immeasurably in the spotlight of their father’s career. Ashley, humiliated when her diary was made public and the painful details of her romantic life were tabloid fodder. And Hunter, the wayward Prince Hal to his father’s Henry IV, a mess whose addiction overtook his ability to be a father to his own children.

And Biden has two options: He could watch Hunter spend the rest of his life squirming under the blade of Trump’s vindictive justice system, or he can give his terrifyingly unstable son a chance to find his footing.

Joe Biden, a man shouldering the regret of half a nation and the regret of a horrendous war, should not have an ounce of regret for pardoning his child.

I just hope he pardons everyone else’s.

He should feel the relief in his chest at his son’s mercy. And he should, with a few scribbles of a pen on the resolute desk he still occupies, grant clemency to every inmate on death row. To every inmate sentenced under racist Rockefeller laws and punished disproportionately by the crack-powder disparity. To every inmate whose future was stolen by three-strikes laws. The system that held his son in a chokehold is strangling a generation of sons.

When Joe Biden sponsored the 1994 crime bill, he ushered in an era of sweeping mass incarceration. In his last acts as president, he alone can make it right.

As a father who knows exactly what it’s like to have a child stolen from him, he can extend his humanity to so many victims of circumstance.

He has a month and a half. Justice is in his hands. May he use them for good.