After Hunter’s Pardon, Joe Biden Should Support De-Weaponizing Government Power

It’s good to know that people who are usually political foes can agree on at least one important point: The authority of the federal government has been corruptly misused for partisan purposes. After years of arguing over the weaponization of the FBI and the biases of long-serving government officials, Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters and Democratic President Joe Biden concur that government power is often abused to achieve political goals outside normal processes.

Full Government Control Through Regulation

“We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings I’ve ever been in, where [government regulators] were taking us through their plans and it was basically just full government control,” Marc Andreessen, the developer of the first web browser and now a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, told Joe Rogan last week. “There will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government. They just said, ‘Don’t even start startups, like don’t even bother. There’s no way that they can succeed, there’s no way we that we’re going to permit that to happen….It’s going to be two or three companies and we’re just going to control them.'”

Andreessen spoke in the context of government regulators’ intentions toward artificial intelligence businesses. But he also added, more broadly, “this Administration freaked us out so much…because it felt like they were trying to become way more like China” where everything is under state control.

In his complaints about abuse of government power, Andreessen sounds much like Donald Trump and his close supporters. They’ve voiced similar concerns about the FBI, Justice Department, and other agencies and officials. Unsurprisingly, the tech investor has arrived at similar conclusions.

“When you leave a meeting like that, what do you do?” Rogan asked Andreessen.

“You go endorse Donald Trump,” Andreessen answered.

But you don’t have to be a Trump supporter to see government power warped and corrupted. President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, this week on tax and gun charges after making similar claims.

‘Politics Infected the Process’

“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Biden insisted in his pardoning statement. “There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre doubled down, telling the media that “politics infected the pro

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Article from Reason.com

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