In the final months of the Trump administration, House Democrats universally voted to demand the unconstitutional use of the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office.
The 25th Amendment was meant to remove presidents who were unable to discharge their duties. President Trump was clearly able to do so, but Biden may be exactly the disastrous scenario that the 25th Amendment was created to avoid. And he may be its worst test case.
A basic problem with the Biden administration is that there really isn’t one. Like most journalists I use the term as a formality, but the White House site calls it the Biden-Harris Administration. It’s not unheard of for younger presidents like George W. Bush to lean on more experienced vice presidents, but a politician who spent 46 years in public office letting a newbie like Kamala Harris handle most of the phone calls with foreign leaders is the opposite of that scenario.
The Biden campaign has been open about Kamala Harris being trained to step into Biden’s shoes because it doesn’t expect him to run for reelection or even make it through one term.
Except that presidents aren’t supposed to run for office as figureheads or stalking horses.
Kamala Harris isn’t talking to foreign leaders because she has more experience, but because the guy whose job it is to do it isn’t up to anything challenging beyond some photo ops, stumbling through a teleprompter speech, and then a trip back home over the weekend.
Don’t ask him to hold a press conference or pull off an actual State of the Union address.
Obama was the teleprompter-in-chief, but Biden is also the telecommuter-in-chief.
Biden’s face is everywhere, but there’s no real sign that he’s actually running anything. Instead the Biden administration seems to be exactly the kind of mess that the 25th Amendment was designed to prevent in which a non-functional president is the figurehead for the cabinet members and the special interests who are actually calling all the shots.
The Potemkin village that is the Biden administration was built in two tiers with establishment cabinet members who appear more moderate presented for Senate approval while extremists were being placed in key positions to set policy on everything from civil rights to Iran.
The big policy momentum though isn’t coming from the Biden administration, but from Pelosi.
The Obama administration called the shots, not Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. The Biden administration is filled with Obama’s old people, but there’s no leader in the White House to push forward an agenda. That’s why the most powerful elected official in the country isn’t Joe Biden or Kamala Harris: Nancy Pelosi has become the closest thing to POTUS.
Pelosi may not have all her marbles, but she’s got enough of them to advance an agenda. And she can also perform incredible feats like remember the name of the Secretary of Defense.
That’s more than Biden can do.
The issue isn’t just mental capacity. Biden can obviously be prepped to perform in public. He may have yet to hold a press conference, which even with softball questions might be daunting, and there’s no actual State of the Union in sight, but leading the country is a lot more than speechifying. It requires a focus and drive that Biden didn’t have during the campaign.
And that he very clearly still lacks.
What the guy in the Oval Office does, more than anything else, is exercise his judgement.
The President of the United States has to sort through national and international problems, get input from his appointees and advisers, pick and choose between the different factions around him, and make the final decision about a course of action. That is actually how the president runs the country and there’s no sign that Biden is doing that or is even capable of doing it.
The role of the Chief Executive exists because one person needs to make those decisions.
In Biden’s mental absence, various appointees chosen by his cronies, think tanks, and donors are making their own policy and their own decisions for a figurehead government. It’s the “I’m In Control” moment from the Reagan assassination writ large and with no end in sight.
Biden’s term will test the question of whether it’s better to have a bad president or no president.
The 25th Amendment was created to protect the presidential transition. The Biden administration is giving us a field test of what would happen with no presidential transition. Instead an inexperienced VP, various cabinet members and appointees, carve out their own territories, and run parts of the government in their own way while trying to avoid clashes.
The only man who can decisively settle the clashes when they come is out to lunch.
Monarchies have functioned with insane and senile kings, but America doesn’t have a prime minister. Instead, the Biden administration is there to sign off on anything Pelosi proposes and Schumer manages to pass, while its cabinet officials flail and the radicals behind the scenes wreck the country making this a farcical rerun of the Obama administration without Obama.
Biden’s old boss could have tried to dominate the administration, but he despised Biden too much to come on board until the very last second. Obama’s own chosen candidates, including a hilarious failure by Deval Patrick, crashed and burned, giving him very little sway. The Left had coalesced around Bernie and no one is giving Obama any credit for swinging the election.
That role instead went to Stacey Abrams.
The only way that Obama could have kept his central role would have been to pull a Clinton and hold out hope that Michelle was going to run. But Michelle didn’t want to run, and without a potential presidential candidate in his pocket, there was no reason for anyone to listen to Obama. Deals with Netflix and Spotify are the perfect sinecures for the laziest man in the White House since Jimmy Carter, but it’s not enough money to duplicate the old Clinton machine.
The Biden administration was built out of the wreckage of the Obama and Sanders campaigns, but staffers and appointees are only loyal to whoever can get them their next job. That’s not Obama and it’s not Biden who can’t name his own Secretary of Defense. It’s the think tanks and non-profits who built the Obama administration and built an even more radical Biden admin.
But non-profits and think tanks can’t actually run a government. Neither can Biden.
That’s why there isn’t a Biden administration. There’s an ongoing Netroots conference on government property. That’s why Jen Psaki can’t answer any real questions. The press secretary is supposed to speak for the White House, but there’s no one to speak for. Like a plane with no airport, she keeps circling back because there’s no administration position.
It’s also why the Biden administration keeps wading into culture wars. They’re comfortable territory and a good distraction from the fact that the lights are on, but nobody’s home. Picking a fight with Tucker Carlson or extending the D.C. military occupation buys a little more time for everyone to figure how an administration can function with no final decision maker at the top.
Forget Harry Truman’s ‘The Buck Stops Here’. There’s nowhere for the buck to stop.
The military occupation of Washington D.C. would be bad under any administration, but deploying the military indefinitely when there isn’t a functional chain of command is ominous. Power-sharing arrangements, like those of the Soviet Union’s Troikas, are the likeliest to break down and descend into violence. And then the military becomes the ultimate power play.
Combine a looming 25th Amendment, a military occupation of Washington D.C., and a leadership that, despite appearances is actually deeply at odds, and the situation is explosive.
Outwardly, if you watch the media, everything appears normal. But it usually does.
The old journalism has been mostly replaced by reporters who only know how to cover social justice issues. They can cover the Biden administration through the lens of race or sex, but don’t ask them to do basic things like figure out who’s making the decisions in the White House.
The facade of normalcy that readers get from the New York Times or that viewers get from CNN comes apart in a crisis. A divided government can run its own spheres of influence, but when faced with something bigger, whether it’s the pandemic, or the border crisis, it all falls apart.
The Biden administration is the equivalent of one of those cartoons of a bunch of kids standing on each other’s shoulders while draped in a trenchcoat so they can all pretend to be one adult.
The illusion holds up until they try to walk.
The Biden illusion holds up as long as all the various parts of the administration are busy dealing with their own problems, but when there’s a national or international crisis, then it becomes obvious that no one is making the overall decisions and no one knows how to do it.
Biden’s people are doing plenty of damage by commission, but if an actual crisis breaks out, such as a war or an economic collapse, they’ll do even more damage by omission. And that’s the ticking time bomb in this administration that the 25th Amendment was designed for.
But it is a Biden-Harris administration. The Biden part of it is running things more or less in Biden’s mental absence. And that inner circle of Biden’s D.C. advisers and loyalists is going to resist ceding power to Kamala’s sister and the California crowd. That’s a major reason why Biden’s leading cabinet members are more moderate than many of their subordinates.
A key role of Biden’s cabinet appointees is stalemating a 25th Amendment coup by Kamala.
Any attempt to invoke the 25th Amendment would lead to legal challenges that would require defining, among other things, which cabinet members can legally vote on Biden’s removal.
Sending the question to the Roberts Court would just stalemate it further. The same court that was unwilling to take a stand on the election is not about to decide who should be president.
Faced with an irresolvable legal battle, there’s always all those soldiers deployed in D.C.
The Biden administration is a disaster because it restores the rule of a radicalized leftist machine. But it could potentially be an even bigger disaster because it’s got a figurehead at the top of a house of cards that could easily collapse or trigger a civil war in a major crisis.
That’s another urgent reason why the military occupation of Washington D.C. needs to end.
If the Biden administration’s power-sharing arrangement catastrophically breaks down in a 25th Amendment scenario, none of the factions should have an easy recourse to armed force in a government town where using the military to deal with a political crisis has become the answer.
The media spent the Trump administration hypocritically lecturing the country about the violation of political norms. Now there are soldiers in D.C. and no functioning commander-in-chief.
The real violation of political norms is going to be spectacular.
The 25th Amendment was meant to remove presidents who were unable to discharge their duties. President Trump was clearly able to do so, but Biden may be exactly the disastrous scenario that the 25th Amendment was created to avoid. And he may be its worst test case.
The Biden campaign has been open about Kamala Harris being trained to step into Biden’s shoes because it doesn’t expect him to run for reelection or even make it through one term.
Except that presidents aren’t supposed to run for office as figureheads or stalking horses.
Kamala Harris isn’t talking to foreign leaders because she has more experience, but because the guy whose job it is to do it isn’t up to anything challenging beyond some photo ops, stumbling through a teleprompter speech, and then a trip back home over the weekend.
Don’t ask him to hold a press conference or pull off an actual State of the Union address.
Obama was the teleprompter-in-chief, but Biden is also the telecommuter-in-chief.
Biden’s face is everywhere, but there’s no real sign that he’s actually running anything. Instead the Biden administration seems to be exactly the kind of mess that the 25th Amendment was designed to prevent in which a non-functional president is the figurehead for the cabinet members and the special interests who are actually calling all the shots.
The Potemkin village that is the Biden administration was built in two tiers with establishment cabinet members who appear more moderate presented for Senate approval while extremists were being placed in key positions to set policy on everything from civil rights to Iran.
The big policy momentum though isn’t coming from the Biden administration, but from Pelosi.
The Obama administration called the shots, not Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. The Biden administration is filled with Obama’s old people, but there’s no leader in the White House to push forward an agenda. That’s why the most powerful elected official in the country isn’t Joe Biden or Kamala Harris: Nancy Pelosi has become the closest thing to POTUS.
Pelosi may not have all her marbles, but she’s got enough of them to advance an agenda. And she can also perform incredible feats like remember the name of the Secretary of Defense.
That’s more than Biden can do.
The issue isn’t just mental capacity. Biden can obviously be prepped to perform in public. He may have yet to hold a press conference, which even with softball questions might be daunting, and there’s no actual State of the Union in sight, but leading the country is a lot more than speechifying. It requires a focus and drive that Biden didn’t have during the campaign.
And that he very clearly still lacks.
What the guy in the Oval Office does, more than anything else, is exercise his judgement.
The President of the United States has to sort through national and international problems, get input from his appointees and advisers, pick and choose between the different factions around him, and make the final decision about a course of action. That is actually how the president runs the country and there’s no sign that Biden is doing that or is even capable of doing it.
The role of the Chief Executive exists because one person needs to make those decisions.
In Biden’s mental absence, various appointees chosen by his cronies, think tanks, and donors are making their own policy and their own decisions for a figurehead government. It’s the “I’m In Control” moment from the Reagan assassination writ large and with no end in sight.
Biden’s term will test the question of whether it’s better to have a bad president or no president.
The 25th Amendment was created to protect the presidential transition. The Biden administration is giving us a field test of what would happen with no presidential transition. Instead an inexperienced VP, various cabinet members and appointees, carve out their own territories, and run parts of the government in their own way while trying to avoid clashes.
The only man who can decisively settle the clashes when they come is out to lunch.
Monarchies have functioned with insane and senile kings, but America doesn’t have a prime minister. Instead, the Biden administration is there to sign off on anything Pelosi proposes and Schumer manages to pass, while its cabinet officials flail and the radicals behind the scenes wreck the country making this a farcical rerun of the Obama administration without Obama.
Biden’s old boss could have tried to dominate the administration, but he despised Biden too much to come on board until the very last second. Obama’s own chosen candidates, including a hilarious failure by Deval Patrick, crashed and burned, giving him very little sway. The Left had coalesced around Bernie and no one is giving Obama any credit for swinging the election.
That role instead went to Stacey Abrams.
The only way that Obama could have kept his central role would have been to pull a Clinton and hold out hope that Michelle was going to run. But Michelle didn’t want to run, and without a potential presidential candidate in his pocket, there was no reason for anyone to listen to Obama. Deals with Netflix and Spotify are the perfect sinecures for the laziest man in the White House since Jimmy Carter, but it’s not enough money to duplicate the old Clinton machine.
The Biden administration was built out of the wreckage of the Obama and Sanders campaigns, but staffers and appointees are only loyal to whoever can get them their next job. That’s not Obama and it’s not Biden who can’t name his own Secretary of Defense. It’s the think tanks and non-profits who built the Obama administration and built an even more radical Biden admin.
But non-profits and think tanks can’t actually run a government. Neither can Biden.
That’s why there isn’t a Biden administration. There’s an ongoing Netroots conference on government property. That’s why Jen Psaki can’t answer any real questions. The press secretary is supposed to speak for the White House, but there’s no one to speak for. Like a plane with no airport, she keeps circling back because there’s no administration position.
It’s also why the Biden administration keeps wading into culture wars. They’re comfortable territory and a good distraction from the fact that the lights are on, but nobody’s home. Picking a fight with Tucker Carlson or extending the D.C. military occupation buys a little more time for everyone to figure how an administration can function with no final decision maker at the top.
Forget Harry Truman’s ‘The Buck Stops Here’. There’s nowhere for the buck to stop.
The military occupation of Washington D.C. would be bad under any administration, but deploying the military indefinitely when there isn’t a functional chain of command is ominous. Power-sharing arrangements, like those of the Soviet Union’s Troikas, are the likeliest to break down and descend into violence. And then the military becomes the ultimate power play.
Combine a looming 25th Amendment, a military occupation of Washington D.C., and a leadership that, despite appearances is actually deeply at odds, and the situation is explosive.
Outwardly, if you watch the media, everything appears normal. But it usually does.
The old journalism has been mostly replaced by reporters who only know how to cover social justice issues. They can cover the Biden administration through the lens of race or sex, but don’t ask them to do basic things like figure out who’s making the decisions in the White House.
The facade of normalcy that readers get from the New York Times or that viewers get from CNN comes apart in a crisis. A divided government can run its own spheres of influence, but when faced with something bigger, whether it’s the pandemic, or the border crisis, it all falls apart.
The Biden administration is the equivalent of one of those cartoons of a bunch of kids standing on each other’s shoulders while draped in a trenchcoat so they can all pretend to be one adult.
The illusion holds up until they try to walk.
The Biden illusion holds up as long as all the various parts of the administration are busy dealing with their own problems, but when there’s a national or international crisis, then it becomes obvious that no one is making the overall decisions and no one knows how to do it.
Biden’s people are doing plenty of damage by commission, but if an actual crisis breaks out, such as a war or an economic collapse, they’ll do even more damage by omission. And that’s the ticking time bomb in this administration that the 25th Amendment was designed for.
But it is a Biden-Harris administration. The Biden part of it is running things more or less in Biden’s mental absence. And that inner circle of Biden’s D.C. advisers and loyalists is going to resist ceding power to Kamala’s sister and the California crowd. That’s a major reason why Biden’s leading cabinet members are more moderate than many of their subordinates.
A key role of Biden’s cabinet appointees is stalemating a 25th Amendment coup by Kamala.
Any attempt to invoke the 25th Amendment would lead to legal challenges that would require defining, among other things, which cabinet members can legally vote on Biden’s removal.
Sending the question to the Roberts Court would just stalemate it further. The same court that was unwilling to take a stand on the election is not about to decide who should be president.
Faced with an irresolvable legal battle, there’s always all those soldiers deployed in D.C.
The Biden administration is a disaster because it restores the rule of a radicalized leftist machine. But it could potentially be an even bigger disaster because it’s got a figurehead at the top of a house of cards that could easily collapse or trigger a civil war in a major crisis.
That’s another urgent reason why the military occupation of Washington D.C. needs to end.
If the Biden administration’s power-sharing arrangement catastrophically breaks down in a 25th Amendment scenario, none of the factions should have an easy recourse to armed force in a government town where using the military to deal with a political crisis has become the answer.
The media spent the Trump administration hypocritically lecturing the country about the violation of political norms. Now there are soldiers in D.C. and no functioning commander-in-chief.
The real violation of political norms is going to be spectacular.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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Comments
The Left, as it has devolved over the last couple of decades, only seems to know how to criticize and tear down. And knows nothing about actual leadership and vision. It's hard work to lead a country upward. Now it's 'their turn' they are displaying in full view their ineptitude and pettiness. God help us all.
ReplyDeleteBumbling incompetents. One self-inflicted disaster after disaster on the scale of the Obamacare Rollout. Ford moves to Mexico, Blinken humiliated by China, the border in crisis, the loss of oil dominance and tens of thousands of energy sector jobs. And many more to come.
ReplyDeleteMr SPRAGUE POND, please be accurate, because while the thrust of your post is well done, the part implying that "Ford moves to Mexico" is inaccurate: Ford has had a factory for many years before the filthy, ugly, Obama seduced the Democrats, the weaklings, the guilt-ridden whites, the "moderates," the "independents" to vote for the first black president--and we know he was only half-black, maybe as long ago as 1925.
DeleteWe love any criticism of Biden's incompetence, any, all--he is a champion jackass, of course--but it should be appropriately based.
I would suggest that susan rice is actually the person managing the Oval Office, not pelosi, in her position as director of the domestic policy council. Lack of capitalization is deliberate pre and post. Given her breadth of experience, she has more knowledge than harris and more influence than pelosi or schumer regarding international "diplomacy" (gag) so her perspective of socialism will be easier to implement, given the dislike that so many politicians have for the people who voted them into office and for the country they claim to represent, whilst fleecing the same people and telling them this is "for the public good". Which is another reason for the NG staying in DC, these people are greedy and venal, but not stupid, they know what they are about and do not want to be held accountable.
ReplyDeleteDaniel
DeleteI count it all joy to read/listen to your genius opinion.
My heart is heavy, knowing this administrations' intent, has always been, one of ill regard, towards Americans. Singling out white, MAGA, Americans as supremists and terrorists. Does that not speak to.... racism. Do they need to be shown, admit to and retract their comments?
So, what is the state of a 'serial' mind. Surely it is broader than the term, 'serial killer', with some like components. It is usually diabolical and holds a place within the psychological community as a severe, psychotic mental condition. This admin is crushing the livlihoods of millions without concern. Maybe, sociopathic.
What did biden lay his hand on when he took the oath? I wonder. When I see him it looks as though he is playing president.
I know, my hope is in CHRIST, but I would like to have, hope, in our admin that they would act on behalf of America and her people and they are not. Please explain how this is not treason. If you are not for me...
Again, I thank you for sharing your knowledge and keen genius insight.
Be well!
What a bunch of BS.
ReplyDeleteYour post is not explicit about the reference--do you mean the thrust of the article that Biden is incompetence? Or something else?
DeleteBrilliant analysis!
ReplyDeleteCorrupt cliques vying for power, and damaging the economic viability of the state and its military, was the precursor for the fall of the Byzantine state after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. Then as now, a corrupt elite was more concerned with controlling the court and the wealth of the imperial City even as it ignored the growing threats on the border of the empire. It reached its apogee in 1025 yet within 45 years it became vulnerable to attack by Turkish invaders coming off of the plains of Eurasia. Today America faces the same crisis. Coming off of a period of unchallenged power, the elite who manage the imperial city are busy bankrupting the entire nation for their own personal gain. They are focused on power politics, and divide and conquer even as the economic political and military threats are increasing not only from China, but also from Islam, and from demographic collapse within the United States middle class.
ReplyDeleteNothing good can come from this. We have a cultural elite based in New York City, Washington DC, and California that no longer identifies with the nation or its people. But these elites are fools, for they are setting the stage for a catastrophe, which they themselves may not survive.
fascinating analysis
DeleteBrilliant foresight. I believe you have seen our future, imitating the past. Do we never learn?
DeleteChina and Russia will be picking over the remains like vultures.
I think the word describing the confident and comfortable elite class is "hubris." Sure Biden is a figurehead but we've got a solid bureaucracy and career administrators running the government. What could possibly go wrong?
DeleteThat was the whole point of getting rid of Trump -- he wasn't part of the governing tribe and that was upsetting people who run things in their own way.
This is brilliant analysis! Thank you, MICHIGAN!
DeleteI envison 0bama stalking the halls of his residence/shadow White House, wringing his hands in distress...O, if not for that Pelosi and Schumer I'd be calling the shots again. But maybe he is. Time will tell.
ReplyDeleteAll in all, I'm reminded of Judges 21:25 - "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes."
Correct, J3:16; such a biblical definition of moral-relativism life at its best! Heaven help us in these prolonged days of Isaiah 5:20:
DeleteWoe to those who call evil good and good evil,
Who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
Who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
Makes sense; the Dems’ Trump hatred was so intense
ReplyDeletethat four years of treason and massive vote cheats
were warranted. The fractious Dem goofy groups
picked the “least offensive” primary candidate and
80 Million fake votes poured in to crush Orange Man.
The Dem Agenda was/is: Undo Trump, Free Stuff, My
Tribe First. Xi, Putin, Iran watch closely and
lick their chops.
Two enigmas nag me:
How could the masterfully evil Obama have fumbled
getting his hands on the Biden puppet strings?
How could Trump and the good Republicans not have
foreseen and mounted a better defense against the
election steal of 2020?
Charlie
Good republicans? All five or six of them?
DeleteI don't think for a New York second that Obama has gone anywhere. He's still the head of the party, and he's still running the show. Just because they're incompetent, doesn't mean they're totally disorganized. After all, they were able to get their act together enough to take over the government---and they still are.
DeleteCharlie, sadly there weren't enough good republicans in positions of power to stop this and even the Dems were surprised at how successful their election 'fortifying' was. Incidentally, it was so successful that they need to carefully calculate how to win the next nationals without winning too much to make it obvious that the GOP cannot win again although the 'For the People Act' will elections a foregone conclusion hereon in.
ReplyDeleteThe senior staff have all the power in a situation like this. They want to hold onto their power so they will do as much as they can to keep Biden in office. This has happened in Congress too, though a power vacuum there is not as treacherous. Does anyone think that Denny Hastert was really in charge? His weak abilities as a leader made it possible for the committee chairs to have more power.
ReplyDeleteSlow Joe was only elected because of democrat voter fraud
ReplyDeleteYou are right.
ReplyDeleteThe stolen election is the heart of the matter.
.... It’s the “I’m In Control” moment from the Reagan assassination attempt, writ large -- and with no end in sight .....
ReplyDeleteBig difference, though, in that the former NATO commander, Secretary Haig was speaking: efficaciously, as it turned out; directly to Brezhnev and to the Kremlin -- and when no other among the normal White House pack of puerile parasites, political pukes and crap-heads could even spell, "The Kremlin." Nor any of them grasp the urgent need, with Vice President G H W Bush on an airplane and hours away from DC -- and the Soviets mobilizing their forces -- that Secretary Haig said precisely what needed to be said and said it at precisely the right time.
And the Soviets stood down.
My father, may he rest in peace, would have said of Biden: "He doesn't know whether he's on foot or horseback".
ReplyDeleteWe've been watching Biden perform for over 40 years. Even before his senility began to set in, he was an empty suit who thought he was the smartest guy in the room. He usually was the dumbest.
Now he is going senile, and he is President of the United States. Go figure.
This is shameful and choreographed, make no mistake
ReplyDeleteSo, Biden is content with this vile rounding of his legacy. How embarrassing and shocking his family allows the humiliation...
ReplyDeleteall in the name of GREED 🤦
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