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For a time, it looked like Hunter Biden could become an unlikely poster child for the Second Amendment. Then it looked like a moot issue in the face of an apparent plea deal.
But now, after the deal dissolved and he was indicted Thursday, one effect of the indictment against the president’s son is that prosecutors have put in play a contentious legal issue that’s far from settled. By bringing these charges, the government is effectively inviting a drawn-out fight on a subject that’s been increasingly scrutinized by the courts, following the GOP-controlled Supreme Court’s revolutionary expansion of gun rights.
And Biden’s charges come as the Supreme Court will consider whether to expand gun rights even further in its upcoming term, which starts next month.
Just last month, for example, in a cannabis user’s case that involves one of the laws Biden was just charged under — which bars drug users from possessing guns — an appeals court said the law violates the Second Amendment. And Biden’s charges come as the Supreme Court will consider whether to expand gun rights even further in its upcoming term, which starts next month.
None of this is lost on Biden’s legal team. His lawyer Abbe Lowell said after the indictment: “We believe these charges are barred by the agreement the prosecutors made with Mr. Biden, the recent rulings by several federal courts that this statute is unconstitutional, and the facts that he did not violate that law, and we plan to demonstrate all of that in court.”
As I wrote before the indictment, whether this will become a landmark Second Amendment case is far from clear. That’s still so, but one function of this new indictment is that prosecutors have put that possibility back in play.