The Worst Week in Memory for Democrats Who Can Remember
Joe Biden just suffered through, politically speaking, the worst stretch of his presidency. The silver lining? Unlike most Democrats, he quickly forgets that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.
Yesterday, reporters salted their questions to White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre with such words as “disabled,” “Alzheimer’s,” and “dementia.” Jean-Pierre’s rote response to the barrage? “We all have bad nights.” (READ MORE: The Fall of Biden Portends Real Danger)
Also on Tuesday, Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas became the first Democratic Party officeholder of note to call on Joe Biden to withdraw from the race. Given donor unrest and the New York Times and other media outlets issuing the same demand, one imagines the pressure is building.
Democrats Don’t Like Presidential Immunity
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court upended the lawfare strategy intended to prevent Donald Trump from winning back the presidency. The 6-3 Trump v. the United States decision favored the former president over the government. Just as the president cannot arrest members of Congress or the Supreme Court for decisions within the context of their jobs that displease, the executive branch cannot do the same to a former president — or maybe in Venezuela they can, but not in the United States. (READ MORE: Beware of AI’s Influence on the Election)
“Although Presidential immunity is required for official actions to ensure that the President’s decisionmaking is not distorted by the threat of future litigation stemming from those actions,” the court ruled, “that concern does not support immunity for unofficial conduct.”
It outraged the court’s most partisan member. Sonia Sotomayor carted out such words as “mockery,” “baseless” “nonsensical,” “illogical,” “misguided,” “draconian,” “troubling,” “unjustifiable,” and “ahistorical” to describe the decision supported by a majority of her colleagues. The level of vitriol suggests that Sotomayor, whose retirement plans perhaps become accelerated by the prospect of a Trump presidency, took it all very personally.
The Supreme Court Defends Its Turf
A decision receiving less attention from partisans likely impacts policy to a far greater degree came down on Friday. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the high court decided — again in a 6-3 decision authored by the chief justice — that the domain of interpreting law belongs to the courts and not unelected administrators within the executive branch. This overturned the Chevron doctrine, which, as Friday’s majority opinion pointed out, “the Court did not at first treat … as the watershed decision it was fated to become.”
Unlike Congress, The Supreme Court generally dislikes when other branches usurp its role. When conservatives established a quasi-court to combat Communism in the postwar years called the Subversive Activities Control Board, the Supreme Court, for reasons beyond those articulated in Loper, eventually stripped it of its power. So, Friday’s decision seems less an ideological fusillade than a defensive turf-war maneuver undertaken by one branch against the encroachment of another. As Chief Justice Roberts says in the court’s opinion, “Chevron was a judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties.” (READ MORE: Dr. Jill Biden: Perfect Wife Amid the Panic of 2024)
Just as Trump v. United States cuts off the left’s end-around on elections, Loper cuts off the left’s end-around on unfriendly legislatures and courts. What is the court’s message common to both decisions? Respect the process of representative democracy.
That seems something beyond not Joe Biden but the panel of relatives and flunkeys who are really the president. According to a CBS News poll, nearly three-fourths of the country does not believe Joe Biden possesses the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. He nevertheless continues his run for a second term that ends with him as an 86-year-old man.
The soundbite of the president putting a “Look, if we finally beat Medicare” exclamation point on a nonsensical, disjointed rant, the image of him staring glassy-eyed, almost catatonically, at the floor as his opponent spoke, and so much more from last Thursday amounts to undoable damage. When the president spoke energetically in North Carolina on Friday, everybody watching grasped that he read from a teleprompter. When he delivered a four-minute speech sans questions on Monday night, everyone watching understood they glimpsed a human marionette.
The news may keep getting worse. The DEI mentality that compelled Biden to choose Kamala Harris hamstrings Democrats should they seek to leapfrog her in replacing Biden. Doing so possibly further demoralizes key Democratic Party constituencies. Not doing so replaces one unpopular old politician with another, possibly less popular, younger one.
Joe Biden’s presidency implodes. Does he even know it?
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