I've Been Writing About Permission Slips All Year

Back in February, I first brought up the UK constitutional crisis of 1936, in which, although elites were fully aware of Edward VIII's intent to marry the divorcee Wallis Simpson, the UK press censored itself and didn't mention it until remarks by an obscure Church of England bishop were interpreted as giving "permission" to cover the story -- and Edward abdicated ten days later. Joe Biden's cognitive decline, on the other hand, has sparked a similar constitutional crisis, but unlike Edward's, which was resolved with remarkable speed, this one is ongoing, and it's been marked by only incremental "permission slips".

The most recent has involved Tim Walz, who's been controversial ever since his designation as Kamala's running mate -- but Kamala's own story this year has been just a sub-plot to the overall crisis, which has nominally been about Joe Biden's cognitive ability. Following Joe's June 27 debate performance -- which amounted to another "permission slip" for the press gingerly to take up the issue -- Speaker Emerita Pelosi attempted to bypass the 25th Amendment, which designates the vice president as the leader of a cabinet-based effort to declare a president incapable of serving, by personally bullying Joe into withdrawing as a candidate for reelection in favor of Kamala, which solved precisely nothing.

Tim Walz's performance in the October 1 debate has simply reignited the same consitutional crisis, which in fact isn't exclukively about Joe's cognitive abilities -- it's also about Kamala's, but the permission slip to talk about that hasn't been signed yet. As I noted the other day, Trump simply told the truth when he said there was "something missing" there, too, and respectable media has been raising the Harris-Walz question as gingerly as it can; Politico is treating it as some kind of vetting glitch:

Walz himself raised some of these issues with Harris and her team during the vice presidential vetting process, according to two people familiar with the conversations. Harris’ circle, for example, knew of Walz’s 1995 DUI arrest when he was a school teacher in Nebraska, despite Walz’s past campaign and official staff trying to downplay and in some cases outright mislead reporters about the circumstances of the arrest.

Harris’ vetting team called some of Walz’s former House colleagues and other allies to check out that episode, his drinking habits and temperament since then, according to two other people familiar with the calls at the time.

The subtext here, although Politico won't say it outright, is that Walz shouldn't have made it through the vetting process, which is another way of saying his candidacy is a big mistake. But what was the cause of this mistake? This was Harris's call, start to finish. And as someone wrote in The Hill right after his selection:

When I heard that Vice President Harris had selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, the first thought to hit me was that of revered baseball manager Casey Stengel: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

This is an ever-so-oblique reference to Kamala, of course, and it's just an early confirmation of Trump's recent assessment -- there's something missing with Kamala, and everybody knows it. So the consitutional crisis is still with us, it doesn't stop with Joe, who is still in office anyhow, but there was something wrong with how Kamala was vetted back in 2020. Look at what's been coming out about Second Dude Doug, just as an example. Something's missing there, too.

But this leads us to a question of what caused Kamala to become vice president if, as is gradually becoming clear, she's no more capable than Joe and would never have been capable of exercising her respnsibilities under the 25th Amendment. Well, she was selected by Joe as his running mate (some would say as his insurance policy), and the vetting process was just as deficient in her case as it was with Walz. Doesn't this raise the question of whether there was something wrong with the 2020 election? In other words, isn't the ongoing constitutional crisis something bigger than just Joe Biden and the 25th Amendment?

This brings us to Sen Vance, who won the October 1 debate in effect by confirming Walz's own unfitness for office:

Senator JD Vance repeated a tired Republican lie from 2020 — that Donald Trump actually won the election, despite all evidence to the contrary — and then doubled down on it during a recent recorded encounter.

On Thursday, comedian Jason Selvig posted a clip of an interaction he had with Vance on X. During their brief encounter, Selvig repeatedly asked Vance if Trump won in 2020. The settled issue of who won the 2020 election came up again after Vance told viewers who tuned into Tuesday’s vice presidential debate that he would have helped Trump carry out his “alternative electors” scheme to maintain power in the White House.

“Who won the 2020 election? Could you just answer? Did Donald Trump win?” Selvig asked.

“Yes,” Vance replied.

After asking Vance to confirm that he was saying Trump won in 2020, Vance replied “Yep.”

What Vance, who is nothing if not smart, just said there was clear: the current constitutional crisis stems from the 2020 election. The permission slip we need is the ability to open the Overton Window to talk about it.