Biden & Bad Riddance To Bad Rubbish: An Editorial

Finally correcting a long series of mistakes that never should have been made, Joe Biden has belatedly dropped out of the presidential race. In a move that inadvertently illustrated one of Biden's biggest problems (and the one that has now ended his campaign), his initial press release neglected to endorse his Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor and he had to quickly issue a follow-up that said some of the same things except made that endorsement.

The decision--by whomever made it--to have Biden run for a 2nd term was criminal and just further underscores why Biden never should have been president in the first place and never should have been the 2020 Democratic nominee. Instead of acting as what he said he would be--a righter of the ship of state and a "bridge" to a new generation of leaders--he's managed only to waste over a year of everyone's time, during which a vibrant Democratic primary to pick a contender could have been held, and leave his party in a very difficult position, bearing the weight of his failed administration with a potential 2nd Donald Trump regime looming and only a few months to introduce a new standard-bearer.

Biden's very belated exit does manage to significantly increase Democrats' chances in the Fall; Biden was looking down the barrel of a terrible loss. Somewhere out there, Trump is fuming (Stephen Miller, one of Trump's pet Nazis, has already had a public meltdown on Fox).

Biden is backing Harris. Many have been pitching her in the weeks since Biden's disastrous debate performance, and there is a certain logic to it. Harris is the shortest distance between two points. Everyone understands VPs are there to take over when presidents can't continue. Harris has name-recognition, an important consideration when time is short. Because she shares the ticket with him, the war-chest of dirty money Biden has amassed from prostituting his potential 2nd term to entrenched interests can be transferred to her, which wouldn't be the case with other contenders. Because of her unique position, she could decide how beholden she is to those interests. Unfortunately, her history strongly suggests she'll cast her lot with them.

Harris isn't, to be clear, a good choice. She is, first off, extremely unpopular.--remarkably so for a VP (though most of that is probably just due to her association with this disliked administration). She's a former prosecutor, with all the baggage that entails. Her first foray into presidential politics was a corporate press invention, but even with years of that press trying to make her the next big thing, she failed miserably, displaying terrible political instincts and coming across as inept, insincere, uninformed and flighty; she washed out of the race in a single-digit 6th place before a single vote had been cast. Harris is no visionary. She's completely out of her depth, even as VP. As the 2024 Dem nominee, she would solve the problem of Biden's cognitive decline--any alternative would--but she's still a face of the same failed administration everyone had already disliked for years before Biden's impairment became too big a problem to ignore. She's also been used by the White House to help cover up Biden's condition, gaslighting the public and insisting he was a competent leaders with all of his marbles in the sack (this will likely become a point of attack by Republicans). It isn't a guarantee the party with rally behind her as the nominee--and a fight over it would be more entertaining--but it is very likely.

Harris isn't smart, but if she has some smart advisers, for a change, she will adopt a few big, progressive policies on which to run, one of them will be "fix the Supreme Court," she will hit Trump hard but avoid only running on "orange man bad" (Biden's sole 2nd-term campaign plank until Bernie Sanders convinced him--only days ago--to offer a slate of progressive reforms), she will try to separate herself from Biden, present herself as at least partly a new thing, not a continuation--"I'm Biden but younger" would be a total loser--and she won't under any circumstances, get bogged down in defending this failed and disliked administration. Those last items would be a tough needle for any politician in Harris' position, even the most talented, to thread. She's not among those "most talented."

Whatever happens next, the 2024 race just got interesting. For the moment, at least.

As for Biden, he was past his expiration date for the presidency well before he ran in 2019. He got by on a hated incumbent, a "lucky" pandemic and a nothing-to-see-here deference by party and media elites so extreme that it isn't at all inappropriate to characterize it as an ongoing cover-up. An awful presidency later and a reelection campaign, given his numbers and his own poor health, was unthinkable, yet he forged ahead, exploiting the profound dysfunction of our institutions to try to force his candidacy on a country that had made clear it didn't want it, then only conceding to the obvious at the very last minute, having to be relentlessly pressured out of a race he was going to lose but was determined to continue and leaving us to clean up the mess. Before he left the race, his only real legacy was going to be a 2nd Trump presidency. In his absence, that may yet be that legacy. Whether or not Dems win this year, history will not look kindly on him.

--j.

Biden Had A Letter Written...

Joe Biden has sent a letter to congressional Democrats. "I want you to know," writes an unnamed Biden underling in his name, "that despite all the speculation in the press and elsewhere, I am firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump." He wants to tell the legislators of his own party "clearly and unequivocally" that "I wouldn't be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024."

This is the spokesman for the Biden whose approval rating went into majority-disapproval only a few months into his regime and has stayed there.

It's the Biden who has, in an unbroken line, been losing to Trump--to Donald Trump--in the head-to-head polling averages since mid-September.

It's the Biden who has been losing nearly every swing state since last Fall and every one of them since December. Recently-leaked polling from OpenLabs, a shady Dem firm that polls for Biden's main super PAC, showed Biden not only losing across all 7 of the major swing states but also in states that he comfortably won in 2020 (including Virginia, New Mexico and New Hampshire), while other states he won are now in play for the Republicans.[1]

Supermajorities of his own party said, for years, they didn't want him to run again, didn't want the party to renominate him.[2] The same is true for even larger supermajorites of Americans.

For over a year, supermajorities of Americans have also said Biden is too old--by which they mean too cognitively impaired--to run for reelection, too old to serve another term. For something over a year, supermajorities of Biden's own party's voters said the same.[3] In fact, a supermajority of Biden's own 2020 voters say he's "just too old" to be an effective president. Only 34% of voters even believe Biden could complete a 2nd term, if reelected.

Biden has been polling at sub-Jimmy Carter levels since last year. He's in far worse shape, insofar as his standing with the public is concerned, than any first-term president at this point in his administration in the history of polling--the most disliked president in 7 decades. Every incumbent in that history who ran for reelection on comparably low numbers--although all had better numbers than Biden's--lost. Hillary Clinton, who wasn't an incumbent, had numbers significantly superior to Biden at this point in 2016 and lost.

Biden's letter-writer is insisting that Biden, this historically-unpopular candidate, who is also regarded as too impaired to even hold the office he has, is going to pull off an upset that no president in history has ever managed. If Biden had written that and sincerely believed it, it would only be a question of whether he was too stupid, too cognitively impaired or too much of both to be president.

The really obscene part comes when the letter-writer tries to wrap his boss in the flag of democracy:

"We had a Democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively. I received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process. I have nearly 3,000 delegates, making me the presumptive nominee of our party by a wide margin.

"This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run. Only three people chose to challenge me. One fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent. Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated. The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party.

"Do we now just say this process didn’t matter? That the voters don’t have a say?

"I decline to do that. I feel a deep obligation to the faith and the trust the voters of the Democratic Party have placed in me to run this year. It was their decision to make. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned. The voters--and the voters alone--decide the nominee of the Democratic Party. How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party? I cannot do that. I will not do that."

As the letter-writer knows, whenever an incumbent president decides to run for reelection, the party apparatus closes ranks around him, and that's exactly what happened in this cycle. With a large majority of Dems saying they wanted to see primary challenges to Biden, Biden and the DNC literally would not allow any meaningful primary contest to occur, and none did. In order to advantage himself (and future conservative "Democratic" candidates), Biden insisted the DNC rearrange its primary schedule to make South Carolina--a double-digit Republican state that hasn't voted Democratic in nearly 5 decades--the first Democratic contest (it was the first state Biden won in the 2020 primaries after embarrassingly losing the first 3). With 8 in 10 Dems saying they wanted to see Dem primary debates in 2024, the Democratic party said "it will support Biden's reelection, and it has no plans to sponsor primary debates." And didn't. The DNC and the Democratic parties of all 50 states and Washington DC integrated with Biden For President from the beginning of the campaign.[4] The Democratic parties of both Florida and Delaware engineered the cancellation of their states' primaries, simply giving all of those states' delegates to Biden, while in North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, Alaska and Mississippi, only Biden was allowed on the ballot. This automatically gifted Biden with 569 delegates--nearly 30% of the 1,975 delegates needed to win--before a single vote was cast; Biden only needed to take 41% of the remaining delegates from the other states to win; any competitor would have had to win 60% of the remaining delegates to beat him.

In such circumstances, no ambitious politician is going to launch a pre-doomed challenge to a sitting president, and none did. With only 3rd-stringers with no name-recognition as opposition, Biden went on to "victory," the one his writer tries to make sound like an accomplishment, running, in effect, unopposed in no-turnout "primaries," drawing only 14 million votes--significantly less than even the 19 million he did back in 2020 when he had 20 name-brand opponents splitting the vote between them.

This is the process Biden's letter-writer describes as "open to anyone who wanted to run," the one he's treating as if it's worthy of those saccharine bromides of sacred reverence toward democracy. "[W]e are standing up for American democracy," says the mouthpiece for the president who insisted on launching a destructive, democracy-ending reelection campaign when most of his own party had made clear they didn't want him to run again and hadn't for ages. It's the process by which Biden's writer is now claiming a democratic mandate for his candidacy. Here's some more on what protectors of democracy Biden and the Dems have been under his watch--among other things, spending millions of dollars to try to keep competitors off the ballots.

Biden's letter-writer doesn't have any use for democratic dialogue on how to move forward either, if it involves questioning the wisdom of making his employer the Democratic nominee:

"The question of how to move forward has been well-aired for over a week now. And it's time for it to end... Any weakening of resolve or lack of clarity about the task ahead only helps Trump and hurts us. It is time to come together, move forward as a unified party, and defeat Donald Trump."

Biden's problem is that Americans are already pretty unified on one point: they don't want Biden running for president.

--j.

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[1] Illustrating the extent to which Biden is a drag on Democratic candidates (and threatens to swamp the party), Biden is trailing--usually quite badly--the Dem Senate candidates in all 5 swing-states holding Senate races this year.

[2] Democrats have softened on this in some of the more recent polling, with only about half or sometimes just under that saying they don't want Biden back. But given the longterm nature of their opinion on this, it would be foolish to read that as growing approval of Biden's candidacy. It seems, rather, more like voters acquiescing to what many of them must feel as the inevitable after they've had a candidate they did not want rammed down their throats--a recipe for resentment, indifference and low Dem turnout.

[3] Coming to this conclusion later than most Americans, more recent polling show Dems softening on this too but the same dynamic as outlined in footnote #2 applies here too.

[4] In a Sept. 2023 interview with ABC News, Jaime Harrison, the corporate lobbyist Biden placed in charge of the Democratic National Committee, made the position of the DNC clear.

"[Biden has] said that the job is not done, that he, Kamala Harris and Democrats in the House and Senate still have more work to do, and we're gonna do everything that we can to make sure that they get that opportunity to do that work and finish the job."

ABC's Linsey Davis noted that a supermajority of Democrats didn't want their party to run Biden again and repeatedly tried, in vain, to get Harrison to address the fact that Democratic voters wanted a competitive primary process, rather than a coronation. Harrison wouldn't budge: "As it relates to the primary, listen, we are following the tradition; never have we had a debate during, when we've had an incumbent president... and so we're not starting in 2024 under my tenure as DNC chair."

King President: The Supreme Court, Trump & Nixon's Last Laugh

This editorial comes to you from a place devoid of hope;. It will offer you none. What's needed now isn't false hope but a clear-eyed assessment of where some things stand.

In ending one long tradition, the U.S. Supreme Court just ended another.

When, a few years after being driven from office by the Watergate scandal, disgraced former president Richard Nixon sat down with David Frost for a series of interviews, he made an extraordinary remark about his own view of presidential power: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." It became a very famous quote, an "I Am The Law" assertion of royal prerogative by the former president of a system of government explicitly created to repudiate such prerogatives. One could trot it out as exemplary of a particular out-of-touch criminal who'd let the height of his office go to his head, repeat it with a chill at how far gone someone can get under the corrupting influence of power or rattle it off with a mordant chuckle at a fool who, sworn to uphold a system in which no one is above the law, came to believe himself above the law. Everyone who repeated it over the years and canonized it as a classic reference-point was of one mind that what Nixon had expressed was a place we never, under any circumstances, wanted to go.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, those people don't have Nixon to kick around anymore. It can't be said that in Trump v. United States, the court just enshrined Nixon's words into U.S. law because the ruling is, by definition, a lawless one. What the court did, rather, was impose Nixon's stated principle as the status quo. In a repudiation of the entire American experiment, the court took the occasion of the nation's upcoming 248th birthday to rule that the President of the United States is now, in effect, above the law. That tradition that no one is above the law--a lot longer one than jabbing at Nixon for his failure to understand it--is now over.

Former president Donald Trump sent his comical excuses for lawyers into court to argue that presidents can order SEAL Team 6 to murder their political rivals and had "absolute immunity" from prosecution for this and any other action taken while in office, unless they were first impeached then removed from office by congress. Since the same president could then order the assassination of sufficient members of congress to prevent any such impeachment, the "absolute" in that "theory" is just that. The argument was entirely frivolous, not only without any basis in U.S. law, practice or precedent but fundamentally contrary to the entire constitutional order and Trump advanced it solely as one of many delay-tactics aimed at saving his own hide in the face of multiple prosecutions.[1] It was laughed out of the District Court, then a 3-judge panel unanimously laughed it out of the D.C. Court of Appeals. That the Supreme Court even took the case would, under any prior court, be regarded as shocking. In a sign of how badly the court has fallen, a majority of the justices, when it was argued, seemed amenable to immunity.

The final ruling was 6-3. Five of the six had been appointed to the court by presidents who, in their elections, lost the popular vote then were placed in office by the electoral college; three of those five were placed on the court by the very former president who had brought the case and who, when he'd lost his reelection bid, undertook numerous criminal actions to try to stay in power and even sicced a terrorist mob on congress to try to overthrow the results. The sixth, Clarence Thomas, has, in recent months, been exposed as a corrupt slug who, for the whole of his long tenure on the court, has been leveraging his position for a lavish lifestyle financed by right-wing billionaires; rather than facing impeachment and prosecution, he's being left to hear and rule on cases like this, stemming from Trump's efforts to undo the results of that last election--efforts in which his own wife was involved.

In the court's ruling, that majority invented an expansive presidential immunity for all "official acts." If a president is using his "official" powers, no matter how corrupt the end to which he's using them may be, he is, according to this majority, above the law. The majority ruled that presidents would be hindered in the performance of their duties if they thought they faced criminal prosecution; no concession to the fact that every president in U.S. history right up until Monday has done his job under that same "constraint." While the court rejected Trump's claim that presidents couldn't be prosecuted unless first successfully impeached and removed, the immunity it has invented is more expansive than anything even Trump requested. While it allows that "there is no immunity" for "a President's unofficial acts," it held that "in dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives... Nor may courts deem an action unofficial merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law." In short, corrupt acts by presidents are still crimes; it's just that presidents may no longer be held accountable for committing them. Trump's lawyers argued at every stage of this case that a president's use of SEAL Team 6 to murder political rivals could, in their formulation, be considered "official acts" for which the president enjoys immunity. For no other purpose than to save a protofascist dimwit from the legal consequences of his own actions,[2] the U.S. Supreme Court just agreed.[3]

That's what the Supreme Court just did to us, in a decision that instantly joins the ranks of the worst in the court's history. Everyone who, on Sunday night, went to bed as a United States citizen awakened Monday morning as, instead, the subjects of a monarch. The damage this ruling inflicts is incalculable. The narrow focus of the corporate press, which has almost entirely concerned itself only with how this negatively impacts the current prosecutions of Trump, only highlights that institution's complete failure as a bulwark of liberal democracy.

There isn't much hope of fixing it either, at least institutionally. No constitutional amendment correcting it would ever come close to passing as long as the result of reversing it would be the prosecution of the far-right's personality-cult leader. Fixing the court by expanding it should have been the Democrats' top priority after 2020, but Joe Biden opposes this. There are some other reform options but no one in Bidenworld is even talking about any of them or is ever likely to do so.[4] Biden and his presidency are spectacularly unpopular, and he has ignored the long-stated wishes of Americans and even most of his own party's voters in insisting on running for reelection. In the unlikely event he should win, that would just ensure four more years of not fixing the problem while the court continues to chainsaw civilization. But Biden's cognitive decline--papered over for five years by a systematic campaign of fraud by Dem elites and corporate press outlets but so dramatically displayed for all the world in last week's presidential debate--makes it even more likely he'll lose, and we'll be stuck with Trump while this continues and while Trump works to make it worse. Some Swiftian wags have circulated the meme-ified modest proposal that Biden immediately alert SEAL Team 6 that there's a Republican candidate and some Supreme Court justices who need to make their acquaintance. That ain't happening.

There are, at present, no good options. No way of sugar-coating it, this is as bleak a situation as the U.S. has faced in a very long time, and there isn't even any light visible at the end of this long, dark tunnel in which we're trapped. For those of us who, large and small, have been vainly ringing the alarm about all of this for so long, it's maybe an even bigger drag. The failure of our institutions to properly react to any of this just reinforces the dysfunction that leads so many to have--and rightly have--so little faith in them. If Nixon was still alive, it would only be for as long as it took him to laugh himself to death.

--j.

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[1] During Trump's 2nd impeachment trial, Trump's own lawyers had argued exactly the opposite as they were in this case.

[2] And make no mistake, had the former president being prosecuted been a Democrat, the court would have made the opposite ruling by a vote of 9-0.

[3] The majority ruled, in effect, that the constitution is unconstitutional. Article 1, Section 3 of the constitution provides that officials can be impeached for "treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors," and says that officials who are impeached and removed from office "shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law." The courts ruling means that a president who is impeached and removed for, say, taking a bribe in exchange for an "official act" can't be prosecuted for it, as that would require examining his motives for that act.

[4] On Monday, Biden roundly condemned the ruling, which could, if managed properly, be a political gift but, being Biden, he offered no proposal to fix either it or the out-of-control court, no vow to even try. Instead, he just used it as propaganda for himself, saying he should be reelected so that Trump won't have that unrestrained power.