The president’s troubled son, Hunter Biden, has treated the congressional inquiry into his conduct and the Justice Department’s curious response to it with disdain from Day One.

Late last year, the House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena seeking testimony from the younger Biden, compelling him to answer the committee’s questions behind closed doors. His attorneys disregarded this courtesy, treating it as an opportunity to enter into public negotiations with the committee over the terms to which their client might graciously submit to Congress’s demand.

Hunter Biden wanted to testify in public and before the cameras — a request the Republican-led committee denied. Rather than observe Congress’s authority, Hunter Biden made a theatrical show of appearing in Washington on the day he was supposed to comply with the subpoena, but only to issue a fiery condemnation of House Republicans.

“I’m here to testify at a public hearing today to answer any of the committee’s legitimate questions,” the president’s son exclaimed. “What are they afraid of? I’m here. I’m ready.” But the subject of a congressional inquiry doesn’t get to make the rules — Congress does. So, in response to Hunter’s display of contempt, Congress elected to formalize that status. “Hunter Biden today defied lawful subpoenas, and we will now initiate contempt of Congress proceedings,” House Republicans declared in mid December.

At some point during the holiday season, someone must have clarified for Hunter the legal jeopardy he had invited for himself. Today, as Congress began the process of formally holding him in contempt, the president’s son once again indulged his flare for dramatics by making a surprise appearance on Capitol Hill. His arrival threw the House Oversight Committee into chaos as Republicans objected to this “political stunt,” and they were right to do so.

Democratic members gave the game away when they insisted that Hunter’s appearance should erase the record he established in late December. When they weren’t insisting on that double standard, they pounded the table with as much scene-chewing gusto as Hunter himself. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez provided an illustrative example of the convoluted logic to which Hunter Biden’s defenders have committed themselves in the effort to spare the president’s son the consequences of his own actions:

Republican hypocrisy. “Revenge porn.” The structural inequities that plague America’s “marginalized” citizens. Americans were treated to a blizzard of non sequiturs and nonsense, all and only to advance Hunter Biden’s effort to make a mockery of Congress’s lawful authority as an investigative body.

At no point has Hunter Biden demonstrated anything other than contempt for Congress. The word’s lay definition and its legal one almost certainly apply to his behavior. Democrats insist they are standing up for the integrity of Article I by defending the actions of a figure whose every move betrays utter scorn for its proceedings. All the while, they appear to think that it’s the GOP that comes away from this spectacle looking the worse for it. Democrats are mistaken.