There’s a school of thought that says any man, given the circumstances and the wherewithal, would’ve done for Hunter Biden what his dad did for him.

But there’s another school of thought — a school with a much bigger student body — that says we’ve all got “C-H-U-M-P” tattooed on our foreheads.

That second school is composed of American taxpayers — especially those who’ve had an encounter of any kind, at any time in their lives, with the Internal Revenue Service. To that group, Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter is especially infuriating. Indeed, if ever there existed an example of two-tiered justice, this is it.

Here, we might remind ourselves of the fearsome and timeless nature of taxation. It was the landmark McCulloch v. Maryland case of 1819, after all, that caused Chief Justice John Marshall to write, “The power to tax is the power to destroy.”

The IRS is the instrument of that ability to destroy. Anyone who thinks the tales of this agency’s overreach and vindictiveness are overblown ought to peruse this collection of IRS horror stories. Did you know, for example, that the agency has been the subject of multiple wrongful death lawsuits due to the emotional distress that their raids have caused?

And yet. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son.” So said our unhinged, unburdened, unreasonable president in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable.

Okay, we’ll bite. Here’s a reasonable conclusion reached by a pair of IRS whistleblowers who testified before Congress last year specifically because they knew the opposite is true: that Hunter Biden was getting grotesquely favorable treatment, not being “singled out.” The handling of his investigation “was very different from any other case in my 14 years at the IRS,” said Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley. “At every stage, decisions were made that benefited the subject of this investigation.”

Shapley’s colleague, Special Agent Joseph Ziegler, noted Hunter’s willfulness, arguing that he’d approved allegedly false business deductions as recently as 2020, long after he’d given up the Russian hookers and the blow. “I’m a Democrat,” Ziegler said, “and I’m a person that believes in the rule of law. When you look at what he was charged with, criminal tax evasion, and what he pled guilty to, there are thousands of taxpayers who honestly file their taxes, they pay their taxes on time, and I think they should be disappointed by this because they’re held up to a standard that’s different than the political elite.”

But it’s even worse. Remember that this is the same Joe Biden whose Inflation Reduction [sic] Act included a whopping $78 billion for hiring and funding 87,000 new IRS agents and associated staff to stop scofflaws from evading taxes and reduce the so-called tax gap, which is the difference between what people pay and what they owe.

Joe Biden then: We need to crack down on these tax cheats!.

Joe Biden now: Er, except for my son.

Yesterday, a judge terminated the tax case against poor, poor, pitiful Hunter, but not before diplomatically noting that the Big Guy’s complaints about his son having been selectively prosecuted were disparaging to plenty of good people and “stand in tension with the case record.”

“The President asserts that Mr. Biden ‘was treated differently’ from others ‘who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions,’ implying that Mr. Biden was among those individuals who untimely paid taxes due to addiction,” Judge Mark Scarsi, a Trump appointee, wrote in a five-page order. “But he is not.” Scarsi continued:

Two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President. And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.

If there’s any consolation in all this, I suppose it can be found in the bipartisan nature of the opprobrium. Amid some initial silence and weak attempts at Trumpian me-tooism, a growing chorus of Democrats is lashing out. Our Nate Jackson captured a few of them yesterday: “He put his family ahead of the country,” said Colorado Governor Jared Polis. Representative Greg Stanton asserted, “He got this one wrong,” noting that it “wasn’t a politically motivated prosecution” but one in which Hunter was “convicted by a jury of his peers.” Senator Gary Peters mused, “This was an improper use of power, it erodes trust in our government, and it emboldens others to bend justice to suit their interests.” Senator Michael Bennet agreed, saying it “further erodes Americans’ faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all.”

Much of this outrage is calculated, of course. There’s no defending what Joe Biden has done, and the Democrats know it. Perhaps they’ve been shaken by the words of the usually mild-mannered Democrat polling geek, Nate Silver, who lashed out immediately after word of the pardon became public on Sunday night: “Don’t vote for any Democrat in 2028 who doesn’t repudiate the pardon within 48 hours.”

For what it’s worth, that post has been viewed a remarkable 8.3 million times. And Silver’s 48-hour clock expired last night.