More Dribbles Out On Joe Biden's Decline

Speaker Mike Johnson reveals just how out of the loop and cognitively impaired Joe Biden was as President after meeting with Biden and discussing his LNG Executive Order:

“Biden was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he had signed.”

Scary.
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— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 18, 2025

All of a sudden, Speaker Mike Johnson and Democrat Leader Schumer are getting in line to say they knew all along that Joe wasn't running on all cylinders. This suggests to me that even more will be coming out as Trump's staff gains access to White House records, but it's nevertheless significant that the House Speaker and then-Senate Majority Leader were aware of serious problems with Joe's ability to perform his duties but nevertheless did nothing, at least partly because they currently have no constitutional ability to initiate any sort of action.

Sen Schumer is now trying to cover himself by claiming he met with Joe on July 13 of last year, just before the failed assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, PA, but after the problem had become clear to the whole country in the June 27 debate:

Schumer told Joe Biden that top Democrats in the House and Senate had lost faith in him and warned if he lost to Trump, Democrats would lose the Senate and wouldn’t take back the House.

“If you run and you lose to Trump, and we lose the Senate, and we don’t get back the House, that 50 years of amazing, beautiful work goes out the window,” Schumer said, according to The Times. “But worse — you go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.”

“If I were you,” Mr. Schumer said to Biden around 5 o’clock in the evening on July 13, “I wouldn’t run, and I’m urging you not to run.”

But it's transparently clear that the big confab with the top congressional Democrats came only in the wake of the June 27 debate and the episodes in Europe. The problem wasn't that Joe was losing it; the problem was that they could no longer cover it up. This is clear from Speaker Johnson's account of his experience the previous January, as quoted from the interview embedded at the top of this post:

They wouldn't let me meet with him, and his staff kept giving me excuses. This went on for like eight or nine weeks, "I'm sorry Mr. Speaker, he doesn't have time." What are you talking about? I'm second in line to the presidency, he has time. I need to talk to him. We had, I can't say the classified parts, but we had some big national concerns at the time that I was losing sleep over. Finally, I just went to the whole press corps and said the president is not being allowed to meet with the speaker so they start putting pressure on him.

Long story short, they finally relented, they invited me to the White House, I show up and I realize it's actually an ambush because it's not just me and the president. It's actually Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem, the CIA Director, and everybody, and then so I walk into the Oval, and I say, "Ah, I know what this is. . ."

This is consistent with reports from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in prior weeks that Biden's inner circle worked to minimize his contacts with outsiders:

At least one Cabinet member stopped asking for calls with Biden "because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome," a source told the Wall Street Journal. Cabinet members with particularly infrequent access to Biden reportedly included Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Donors also noticed how staffers worked to mask signs of Biden's "decline," the Wall Street Journal reported.

Johnson continued in the interview,

We sit down, we're in the midst of it and I'm saying, "We don't need to have this conversation." The president reaches over, just like this, we were sitting right next to the fireplace in the Oval, and he says, "The Speaker and I just need a couple minutes together. We y'all just leave us alone?" And I looked up on the faces of some of staff standing around the wall, and they were like, "No, he did it."

He called it, he's the commander in chief, so everybody leaves, and he and I are standing awkwardly in the middle of the Oval Office right over the rug by that coffee table, and I said, "Mr. President, thanks for the moments, you know, this is very important, I've got some big national security things I need to talk to you about that I've heard, and I think you know, but first, real quickly, Mr. President, can I ask you a question?"

"I can't answer this for my constituents in Louisiana. Sir, why did you pause LNG exports? Liquified natural gas is in great demand by our allies, why would you do that? Cause you understand, we just talked about Ukraine, you understand you're fueling Putin's war machine?" And he looked at me, stunned, and he said, "I didn't do that." And I said, "Mr. President, yes you did, it was an executive order like three weeks ago." He said, "No, I didn't do that," he was arguing with me.

As best anyone could tell, Biden was told that what he was signing only authorized some sort of LNG study, not a pause in LNG exports:

I said, "No you're not sir, you paused it, I have the terminal, the export terminal in our state, I talked to those people this morning. This is doing massive damage to our economy, to our national security."

I thought, "We are in serious trouble." Who's running the country?" I don't know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn't know.

Given the circumstances, it would be perfectly reasonable for Speaker Johnson to conclude the country's in "serious trouble" -- but, er, given that, what did he do? And this was in late January 2024, five months before the June 27 debate that finally convinced Leader Schumer and Speaker Emerita Pelosi that they couldn't cover Joe's condition up any longer -- so they resorted to extraconstitutional means to push him out as a presidential candidate. Let's recall that Section 4 of the 25th Amendment provides:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.

Let's recall that the House Speaker in the first half of 2024 was Mike Johnson; the President pro tempore of the Senate was Patty Murray. But they would have had a completely passive role in removing Biden under the 25th Amendment; the reponsibility was on the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet simply to notify Johnson and Murray of Biden's inability. But neither Johnson, Murray, Harris, nor anyone in the cabinet was involved in sidelining Joe, at least from the self-serving accounts we've had so far from Schumer and Pelosi.

So, exactly what happened? One part of the question hasn't been answered at all, which is who was actually running the country? Whose decision was it, for instance, to write an executive order pausing LNG exports but to tell Joe he was signing something else? Were any laws broken?

But then there's a whole set of additional questions. The 25th Amendment was written and ratified principally to solve the problem of how to replace a vice president who succeeds to the presidency and leaves the vice presidency vacant until the next presidential election. But its provisions for removing an incapacitated president are apparently not workable; the vice president and the cabinet clearly have too much interest in keeping an incapacitated president in office as long as possible. There need to be additional checks and balances.

This is just one more on a long list of items Trump and Congress will need to address in the new term.