President Joe Biden listens during a G7 Leaders’ virtual meeting Friday, Feb. 19, 2021, in the White House Situation Room. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
The talk of using the 25th Amendment to put Joe Biden into involuntary retirement is heating up among Democrats, who see Biden’s falling polls and tremble at the implications for 2022 and 2024. The only problem for Democrats is that Kamala Harris is in line to move into the White House, and all she’s done in Washington, D.C., is proving herself to be incapable of basic speech delivery. At Spectator World, Peter Van Beuren discusses the increasing chatter about booting Biden from the White House. He writes:
The New York Times and the Washington Post sent up flares last weekend: one way or another, they said, Joe Biden is on borrowed time. The last man standing who ended up the answer to Anyone But Trump turned out so inadequate for the job that Deep State media gave him a vote of no confidence and said he should go.
The Times wrote a scathing summary of What Everyone Knows: that Biden at 79 is a wreck. In their words, the man “is testing the boundaries of age and the presidency.” He can barely walk unassisted. He has zombie moments on stage. He is fully dependent on wife Jill to nudge him onward, redirect him, get him back on the TelePrompTer — and even then he will read anything there, including stage directions, Ron Burgundy-like.
Not a pretty picture. It is also not a new picture, given the pass on campaigning the MSM granted Biden, which helped hide all this back in 2020. That’s why the critical articles are so noteworthy: they denote a change. From here to 2024, it is okay to (finally) talk about how old and 25th Amendment-ready Biden is. The Times has already published its first follow-up.
The 25th Amendment got a bad name during the Trump years, being invoked as the handy-dandy alternative to multiple failed impeachments and prosecutions, a kind of last chance to dump a seated president when all else fails. In fact, the amendment, written after the Kennedy assassination exposed the problems of no clear line of deep succession in the Constitution in the nuclear age, provides precisely the mechanism needed in Joe Biden’s case.
Biden’s wacky gaffes have strayed over the line. His clumsy and chaotic policy killed innocents in Afghanistan and embarrassed the United States globally. His claim that “Putin cannot remain in power” in response to the Ukraine war, and that the US would absolutely defend Taiwan, threatened relations with two superpowers. Aides rushed to blurt out that nothing had changed and gently correct the president. Falling off a standing bike is a problem for Joe; falling off a nuclear policy is a problem for America. Biden either needs to resign for “personal reasons” (the timing set so it does not appear tied to the latest Hunter revelations) or face the judgment of the 25th and reality. He is medically no longer fit to carry out his role as Anyone But Trump.
There’s no need for a specific trigger, though the outstanding defeat expected for Democrats in the midterms could readily serve. Or the latest polls that show Joe’s approval rating at a Nixonian 33 percent, with 64 percent of Democratic voters saying they would prefer a new presidential candidate for the 2024 presidential campaign. Only 13 percent of American voters said the nation was on the right track — the lowest point since the depths of the financial crisis more than a decade ago. There’s no need for a reason to invoke the 25th Amendment; Joe is the reason. Biden is a good egg and a loyalist. He’ll go as quietly in 2022 as he did in 2016 when he was likely told by Barack Obama that he was going to have to sit out the election to pay off the party’s blood chit and allow Hillary to run unprimaried.
Biden leaving is the easy part. What happens next?
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