The Democratic Party is in a bad place. Its already unpopular president has just been exposed as mentally unfit for office. The process for choosing a new candidate to replace him ended months ago. Democratic primary voters will have no say in who their next candidate is if President Joe Biden resigns.
There is a nominating convention scheduled for next month, but most of the delegates have already been hand-picked by the Biden-Harris campaign. The delegates are not neutral Democratic primary voters. Democrats can stage all the debates they want with Vice President Kamala Harris and other candidates, but the fix would be in. It would not be an honest process.
As bad as the situation is for Democrats going forward, the country is arguably in a worse place now. For months, conservatives have been arguing, including these pages, that Biden was not all there — that he had lost more than one step, that he was not making all the decisions in the White House, and that a coterie of close aides was controlling the president.
Now we know that is all true. And many in the Democratic Party, including Harris, have known all along. “The country saw [at the debate] what those of us who have had personal interactions with him have all known for the last 2 1/2 years,” one senator said anonymously. White House staff “create a protective bubble around POTUS,” a former Biden aide admitted. “He’s staffed so closely that he’s lost all independence.”
Many Democrats are alarmed by these revelations. And many of them are bravely calling for Biden to step aside. But many others are acting like nothing is wrong, that allowing an obviously infirm man to act as some sort of puppet is fine as long as he has supportive Democratic ideologues around him to run the country.
“A presidency is more than just one man,” Obama Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson recently said on television. “I would take Joe Biden at his worst day at age 86 so long as he has people around him like Avril Haines, Sam Power, Gina Raimondo supporting him over Trump any day.”
The Democratic Party’s faith in unelected staff running the country for an incompetent president might not be as alarming if the Democratic Party did not also have such an expansive view of the powers of the Executive Branch. Biden may have said after the Supreme Court’s recent presidential immunity ruling, “I know I will respect the limits of the presidential power, as I have for 3 1/2 years,” but that is simply not true. When the Supreme Court found Biden’s college debt amnesty plan illegal, Biden bragged, “The Supreme Court blocked me from relieving student debt but they didn’t stop me!”
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And debt amnesties are far from the only area where Biden has exceeded his power. Not only has he released millions of illegal immigrants into the country on parole when the law specifically says he must detain them or return them to another country but Biden is actively flying in tens of thousands more illegal immigrants every month through an entirely separate and completely illegal parole program. He has abused the powers of the Clean Air Act to outlaw the sale of gas-powered cars, he has abused the Higher Education Act to force men into women’s dorms, and he has used the Department of Justice to persecute pro-life activists.
If Democrats do lose to former President Donald Trump this November, a big reason will be their continued effort to take as many decisions out of the hands of voters as possible.