There's Gonna Be A Two-Shoe Drop

Back in 1973, when Spiro Agnew resigned as vice president in the midst of the growing Watergate crisis, I read a commentator who predicted Angew's resignation would be "the first shoe of a two-shoe drop". I think we're looking at a similar situation now.

We're beginning to see congressional Democrats calling for Biden to be replaced as the party's presidential candidate in November, but little is being said about what that means -- except that, as one panelist said on Fox he other day, "We all know what it means to recognize we have to take grandpa's car keys away. But what if grandpa is the commander in chief?"

The New York Post gets closer to the point when it says, "There’s no way to restore the illusion that Biden is fit for the presidency", but it never quite follows up with the next step, and it never says directly that he needs to resign. Jamie Barnett, an Obama liberal, goes there in an op-ed at The Hill:

President Joe Biden should not just leave the presidential race. He should resign the presidency. Now.

But this brings up the obvious question -- what do we do with Kamala as his successor? Barnett basically says embrace the suck:

He will create the first female president, the first African American female, the first multi-racial female president in history. In one fell swoop, he will have enlivened many of the constituencies that the media have claimed are disaffected. Kamala Harris will have the first first gentleman in history, one who is Jewish. She will be able to unite the party with a strong running mate.

The Wall Street Journal looks at the problem with a level of good sense I haven't seen from them since the Reagan years:

Our colleagues in the Journal news department headlined the post-Biden prospects this way on Tuesday: “Why Kamala Harris Would Be Biden’s Likeliest Replacement.” The story quoted the chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party Black Caucus as saying, “I would be angry if you try to leapfrog over a vice president.” Talk about a scare tactic.

Who would have thought Mr. Biden chose a Vice President who would be so unpopular that she would be used as insurance against Mr. Biden being forced out of a second term?

. . . The odds are high that at some point in his second term he’d resign as President, turning the White House over to Vice President Harris.

In that scenario she’d get the job by default, rather than having to earn it herself with the respect that comes from having beaten competitors for the job. That’s what she’d have to do now if Mr. Biden announced he won’t seek re-election. It’s a more honorable way to proceed than trying to scare Democrats that it’s the Biden way or the Harris highway.

But while even the Wall Street Journal is at least implicitly acknowledging that Kamala is no more fit for the presidency than Joe -- and couldn't be elected in a regular campaign -- it isn't looking very clearly at where we wind up if Joe simply resigns as president, and this is as big a scare tactic as the threat to withdraw as a candidate.

What we would have with a President Harris coming into office in the next few weeks would be an executive carrying out the same disastrous policies, with the same cabinet members in place, but with an electorate still just as nervous and impatient to have the regime replaced.

Jamie Barnett in the link at The Hill raises another set of problems:

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would be second in line to the presidency, and the minority-controlled Senate would be unlikely to confirm a new vice president before the election.

But that's a problem only if, like Barnett, you're an Obama liberal who wants the Biden years to continue. For Republicans, and probably not a few who are in the middle, that's not a bug, it's a feature. The problem for now is that the closest election precedent we have is 1972 -- but McGovern, the sure loser, wan't even the clear candidate until the Democrat convention in mid-July, and the Eagleton fiasco that put the election away was even later that month. And Nixon, whose policies were widely supported, was the incumbent.

Right now, what we're starting to see is the whole second tier of swing states from New Jersey to New Mexico trending for Trump even before either party's convention, with the likelihood of either the hugely unpopular Harris or the clearly incompetent Biden remaining in the presidency for another seven months. Like it or not, the voters' preference for having either of them gone will be clear well before next January.

A Biden resignation alone won't fix this, since we'll just get Harris. Not only that, but the best guess now is that Biden won't go voluntarily, and it's doubtful if Harris or the cabinet would cooperate with removing him via the 25th amendment -- and if Joe weren't on board, you'd have a dubious battle in Congress even if Harris and the cabinet were able to start the process.

How could you bring about the two-shoe drop? My guess is that there could be a combinaion of carrots and sticks. This could include a threat from Trump to investigate and prosecute Biden and Garland for actions in the lawfare campaign outside the core of presidential duties as outlined in the latest Supreme Court decision, combined with a promise not to do this and to pardon Hunter on top of it if Joe resigns.

On the Harris side, my instinct says the Secret Service, the FBI, the DC police, and whoever else know, for instance, whose baggie of coke was in the cubby outside the White House Sit Room last summer, and it wasn't Hunter's. Frankly, Kamala's speech is just a little too nasal for it not to have been hers. I would guess the deep state is sitting on quite a bit that could be used as leverage to get her to resign within days of Joe's own resignation.

If needful, I also assume money could be found to soothe both of their hurt feelings and ease their transitions to private life without the threat of prosecutions. At that point, Speaker Johnson becomes president until next January 20, and as Ludwig Wittgenstein would put it, the solution to the problem is seen in the disappearance of the problem.

I strongly suspect there are discussions more or less to this effect going on behind the scenes now.