Constitutional Crisis

It seems like I've been ruminating over the past year about an ongoing unspoken constitutional crisis, for instance, here, the day after the June 27 debate debacle, where I compared the apparent coverup of Biden's decline to the final months of FDR's presidency:

Roosevelt could pass away at any time after the 1945 inaugural and have Truman succeed him, although had he passed away before that date, his successor would have been Henry Wallace. As it happened, the country got lucky. The problem right now is that if Joe Biden leaves the presidency for any reason before next January 20, his successor is Kamala Harris.

So right now, it looks as if congressional leadership got together and cobbled up a business-as-usual continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown. They assumed that the congressional uniparty could be stampeded into passing it at the last minute to avvoid said shutdown, Biden as lame duck president would sign it, and the boodle would proceed uninterrupted.

The problem is that a complete outsider with no elected position, Elon Musk, who has apparently been camped out at Mar-a-Lago with the president-elect's ear, has thrown those comfortable assumpitons into confusion:

Yesterday, Trump ally Elon Musk banded with conservatives in the House and outside influencers to effectively tank a bipartisan government funding deal that included disaster aid and billions in farm assistance.

Yesterday, Trump ally Elon Musk banded with conservatives in the House and outside influencers to effectively tank a bipartisan government funding deal that included disaster aid and billions in farm assistance.

The complaint? That Uncle Sam was spending like a drunken sailor and needed to tighten the purse strings quickly.

But then Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance dumped gasoline on the fire. In a lengthy post on X, they criticized Johnson’s continuing resolution deal as “a betrayal of our country,” and demanded that Johnson raise the debt ceiling or eliminate it entirely.

Right now, neither Musk, Trump, nor Vance has any constitutional authority. Nevertheess, they can clearly act to prevent congress from passing a continuing resolution.

As these events unfolded, the two people with actual constitutional authority to negotiate a resolution to the problem, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, abruptly changed their holiday plans and decided to remain in Washington, although by all indications, neither has the mental capacity to make any serious progress:

Vice President Kamala Harris abruptly canceled her plans to travel to Los Angeles on Thursday evening, according to an announcement from her office.

. . . However, around midday, her office stated that she would "not travel to Los Angeles, CA, and will remain in Washington, D.C."

The news comes after reports that President Joe Biden had also arrived back at the White House after cancelling his upcoming holiday in Delaware.

Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment outside of normal working hours.

. . . It also remains unclear whether her decision to return to Washington D.C. was tied to the looming threat of a partial government shutdown as Congress struggles to reach an agreement on a funding bill.

But as long as Joe remains president, Kamala's role in any solution to the standoff would be purely advisory or as some sort of intermediary. Under such circumstances, given her record of incompetence, any such involvement on her part would be ineffective. (UPDATE: She's there purely as a potential tie-breaking vote in the Senate.) But this also comes in the context of belated recogniton that Joe has essentially been checked out for his entire term:

Two bombshell reports out this week, in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, depict a president thoroughly out to lunch for his entire term: Top cabinet members unable reach him. Staff regularly taking his place at official events. Biden refusing to hold morning meetings but clocking out at 4pm — even though he naps every day and, in July, announced that he'd no longer hold events after 8pm.

How many hours has Joe Biden actually spent working? How was the 25th amendment not invoked? Was the danger of a President Kamala Harris — who the liberal media also tried to sell as viable — truly that unthinkable?

So, why the need to have Kamala on hand in Washington now? Has Dr Jill decided it's time for Joe to duck out of this last crisis and dump it on Kamala to work out some kind of Hail-Mary deal? I wouldn't rule it out. But nobody's been using the words "constitutional crisis" all year, when we've clearly been in one.