The Quiet Constitutional Crisis

The heretofore unmentioned circumstance is entering public discourse:

Vice President Harris asserted that Joe Biden is president — not Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — during a tense exchange on Charlamagne Tha God's Comedy Central show.

Charlamagne asked Harris to name the country's "real president."

"It's Joe Biden. And don't start talking like a Republican about asking whether or not he's president," Harris told the host of "Tha God's Honest Truth" on Friday in an interview on the weekly late-night program.

More remarkable is an op-ed in The Hill that suggests -- for the first time I'm aware in polite discussion -- that the Spiro Agnew option is potentially on the table.

The last vice president of the United States to resign was Spiro Agnew in October 1973. Should Vice President Harris be the next?

. . . Ironically, as more and more Republicans hope that Harris remains on the ticket — especially as the candidate for president — a growing number of Democrats are publicly vocalizing their concerns about President Biden and Harris as viable candidates three years from now.

Agnew, Richard Nixon’s vice president, resigned after pleading no contest to a felony count of tax evasion. His resignation came just 10 months before Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace. Their resignations set off a “musical chairs” version of appointed vice presidents, and soon after, Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller assumed the country’s two highest offices.

I first mentioned the Agnew scenario here back on July 3 as I noted the increasing chatter about Harris's poor performance. but nobody polite at that point mentioned Agnew or any potential two-shoe drop. The implication in the link above is that influential people are thinking past a likely 2022 midterm defeat and are beginning to worry that neither Biden nor Harris is a viable 2024 candidate, while Donald Trump hasn't gone away and is beating Biden in polls.

But I think making Biden and Harris a theoretical issue for 2024 is a polite disguise for actually saying the problem is much more immediate. The two people now in the presidential line of succession are Vice President Harris and Speaker Pelosi. Should Harris be coaxed into resigning, Pelosi would be second in line over a period in which a new vice president would need to be nominated and confirmed, which, with congress very narrowly divided and few obvious choices for her replacement, could be long and contentious.

It's increasigly plain that the problem isn't Donald Trump in 2024. The problem is Biden and his successors now, with potentialy urgent issues like a Russian invasion of Ukraine or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan on the radar. The US probably doesn't have the luxury of the 10 month interregnum it had in the Agnew-Nixon maneuver.

What's beginning to occur to me -- and I'm not sure why it's taken so long -- is that political leaders are normally well spoken. The most poorly spoken president in my lifetime other than Biden was Dubya, but his problem was in large part just that he spoke Texan, not Yale, and with a teleprompter, he was fine. Biden is never anything but a stream of misspeaks, malapropisms, stutters, slips, slurs, and hypercorrections, and the teleprompter has no effect. Harris never comes off as anything but shallow and unserious. Advice from Peggy Noonan that she should serious up and rise to her potential reponsibilty is delusional.

Pelosi is an octogenarian corrupt machine politician in a safe seat, and her communication skills are generally at a par with Biden and Harris. Her histrionic public style verges on drag queen. Leaving policy issues completely aside, none has actual leadership qualities. But considering the now certain failure of the BBB, which Pelosi had characterized as her "legacy", she's become as much a lame duck as Biden.

I think it's increasingly likely we'll be seeing an Agnew scenario, sooner rather than later. Whom will they nominate to replace Harris? I don't rule out Hillary Clinton.