Abetting the Harris Narrative

In case you haven’t already thought of it, there is still stuff going on in DC that is not selling well. Still unanswered are questions that demand answers. For example, was Joe Biden fit for command while he held the world’s most important job? Questions also arise about the people who had the power to address the problem and seem to have done nothing at all—even after the Biden Justice Department’s special counsel deemed the president too forgetful to prosecute, reports James Freeman in the WSJ.

Cowardice

As former VP Kamala Harris is preparing for her speaking tour preceding her book launch, Freeman examines how this is turning into a challenge for the Biden administration.

Ms. Harris continues to make the dubious assertion that Mr. Biden was “able to discharge the duties of president” but now also concedes that his decision to run again “wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition… It should have been more than a personal decision.”

Recently, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has decided to sing an accompanying tune—admitting now what he was unwilling to say when it mattered, lamenting the Biden decision, and presenting himself as powerless to do anything about it.

Grace or Recklessness

From NBC’s Sunday edition of “Meet the Press,” Kristen Welker interviews Buttigieg:

… I have to ask you about this new book, Vice President Kamala Harris, we are starting to see some excerpts. She writes about President Biden’s decision to run for re-election, and she says this, quote, “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision,” we all said that like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace or was it recklessness?

In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.” You were in the president’s cabinet, of course. Do you believe it was recklessness for President Biden’s inner circle not to intervene sooner?

SEC. PETE BUTTIGIEG answers:

He (Joe Biden) should not have run. And if he had made that decision sooner, we might have been better off. But it literally was his decision. Nobody else was able to make that decision. 

Morally Obliged

Au contraire, argues Freeman. Our Constitution states that “Ms. Harris and Mr. Buttigieg and the other members of the Biden cabinet were able to decide whether Mr. Biden should continue performing his duties as president. They were free—and one could reasonably argue, duty-bound—to intervene immediately.”

From Section 4 of the 25th Amendment:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

The former transportation secretary is now portraying himself as a hapless outsider. I was not included in the process of deciding whether the president should run again, Buttigieg contends.

Is he being honest in saying he was “not alone in believing” that Mr. Biden “should have made the decision not to run sooner”? If he is referring to other officers of the executive branch of the Biden administration, who were they?

America deserves to know who was trying to snooker voters.