Realism From Nate Silver

In a remarkably long and insightful essay, Nate Silver writes It's time for the White House to put up or shut up.

[E]ven the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him. Biden is probably a below-replacement-level candidate at this point because Americans have a lot of extremely rational concerns about the prospect of a Commander-in-Chief who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying. The fact that Trump also has a number of disqualifying features is not a good reason to nominate Biden. It is a reason for Democrats to be the adults in the room and acknowledge that someone who can't sit through a Super Bowl interview isn't someone the public can trust to have the physical and mental stamina to handle an international crisis, terrorist attack or some other unforseen threat when he'll be in his mid-80s.

Biden has had two truly awful weeks, starting with the Hur report and his failed attempt to refute it by giving a focused press conference, followed by the Fani Willis sideshow that made it plain yet again that Biden's main reelection strategy, obtaining one or more criminal convictions for Trump before the election, is faltering. Silver has serious doubts Biden can turn this around.

A lot of commentators that I respect have pointed out that Biden ought to do more public events that would help to allay public doubts about his mental sharpness. The problem is, one can infer the reason that Biden is not doing them — namely that the White House comms team is rational and has inferred that the cost of doing them outweighs the benefits because Biden is too likely to come across poorly.

Let’s abstract this for a moment. Say that, in any given period of time — maybe over the course of a couple months — Biden has 20 opportunities to do what you might call Improvisational Public Appearances (IPAs). We can define these as events where Biden is not merely making pre-scripted remarks and instead faces sustained questioning from the media, voters or other public figures.

. . . It’s also why the press conference from two weeks ago was worrying. This was an IPA that Biden basically couldn’t avoid. You can’t respond to your own Justice Department’s claim that your memory is failing by not saying anything at all. And yet when forced to make this appearance, Biden’s performance was poor.

Silver offers this prescription if Biden does actually want to turn things around:

Over the course of the next several weeks, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives.

. . . This really isn't too much to ask. These are the sorts of interviews that every other recent president has done. I admit that I'm asking Biden to pack in several in a row, but he has to make up for lost time. And the timing is urgent because he and his inner circle have to make sure that he's really up for a second term and that this is the best option for Democrats. If Biden was willing to take five hours to speak with Hur, he ought to to take five hours for this. And if he can't, it's awfully audacious to ask Americans to make him president for another four years.

Except that this is almost certainly too much to ask, and Silver basically knows this. He doesn't even mention the upcoming State of the Union speech; I suspect it will be hard for Joe to last an hour without stumbling, slurring, hypercorrecting, and misspeaking. It's hard to avoid thinking Joe is basically checked out and working a minimal schedule. He's being enabled and protected by his staff and, apparently, his wife:

Douglas Brinkley, author of “The Unfinished Presidency,” told CBS News’ “Face The Nation” on Sunday that Jill Biden has done the exact opposite of what other first ladies have done.

He noted that both former Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson decided to leave office because their wives told them they didn’t want to serve a second term.

. . . “That’s not the case with Jill Biden. She likes power. She wants to stay. She wants some sense of revenge,” he continued. “She teaches in Virginia Community College. This milieu around our building here, this is her home. And the idea of relinquishing it all after you’ve taken the slings and arrows of the last years of attacks, and at the last minute, just when you get all the delegates you’re going to say, I’m going to open it up to a bunch of people — it’s very childish when you read those kind of reports.”

So the narrative is beginning to change. People like Nate Silver and Ezra Klein are saying Joe should step aside. Klein says,

This is the question Democrats keep wanting to answer, the question the Biden administration keeps pretending only to hear: Can Biden do the job of president? But that is not the question of the 2024 campaign. The insistence that Biden is capable of being president is being used to shut down discussion of whether he’s capable of running for president.

. . . We had to wait till this year — till now, really — to see Biden even begin to show what he’d be like on the campaign trail. And what I think we’re seeing is that he is not up for this. He is not the campaigner he was, even five years ago.

. . . That was why that news conference mattered. That news conference had a point. It had a purpose. The purpose was to reassure voters of Biden’s cognitive fitness, particularly his memory. And Biden couldn’t do that, not for one night, not for fewer than 15 minutes.

. . . So yes, I think Biden, as painful as this is, should find his way to stepping down as a hero. That the party should help him find his way to that, to being the thing he said he would be in 2020, the bridge to the next generation of Democrats.

Klein concludes that since it's too late for a primary campaign, the Democrats should work it all out at the convention, which is basically just a way of saying there's no Plan B, except that Plan A just isn't going to work.

The Incompetence Problem And The Assassinate Hitler Conundrum

Michael Lebron, a YouTube commentator who goes by the name Lionel, brought into focus a key question that hadn't been fully formed at the back of my mind. I kept returning to the puzzle that Winston Churchill and British intelligence pondered during World War II: was it worth going in to assassinate Hitler? Apparently they concluded not, because there was a chance that if they succeeded, the Germans might replace him with a comptent general and change the whole calculation.

Lionel raises this question over the Trump strategy, which so far has endorsed his co-defendant Michael Roman's motion via his counsel Ashleigh Merchant to disqualify Fulton County DA Fani Willis for conflict of interest. Lionel raises this assassinate-Hitler coundrum at 16:52:

Let's say you represent Donald Trump. And you're saying, let's assume, that Fani Willis is involved in some kind of behavior. How does this affect, negatively, Donald Trump? Well, the first question you've gotta ask is very simply this: who is Mr Wade? It appears that there may be a conflict of interest here regarding prosecutors. Now, that may or may not affect this case. Now remember, the bottom line is this, and I want you to be very, very, very very careful I want you to understand something.

How does this affect Donald Trump? This is not a bar grievance. This is not an ethical grievance. This is not a trial about her per se or her sex life or her love life or her financials. The question is should she, or really, her office, be disqualified for what is being said. She apparently hired her lover -- level number one -- hired her lover -- which, OK -- incompetent -- OK -- remember, how does this affect Donald Trump?

May I stop right now? Do you understand something? That this might be -- let me rephrase this. I might want to ask Donald Trump, "Now listen. This might be the best thing you've ever had going for you. They're going to end up giving this case to somebody else. Do you want a good prosecutor, or do you want Fani Willis?

"Because what you're doing now, what you're basically doing, believe it or not, you're saying, hey, we want a new prosecutor. You sure about this? You sure. You've got some of the most incompetent people handling one of the most complicated cases, a racketeering case, predicate acts, and to be able to explain it -- nobody wants this piece of dog crap, nobody wants it. So, President Trump, you sure about this?"

I reflected on this at some length, especially because Lionel helped me clarify my internal version of the assassinate-Hitler conundrum as it applies to this case. The first reply I have is that the strategy of moving to disqualify Willis wasn't Trump's, it was Ashleigh Merchant's on behalf of her client, Michael Roman. Trump's attorneys joined the strategy some days later after presumably reviewing how this did affect Trump.

My second reply is that Trump, his political advisors, and his attorneys appear to be well settled on a strategy of delaying the most important cases until after the election, while leveraging the joke cases -- basically the New York civil and criminal trials -- to his advantage when they go against him, by playing to the free news coverage and the bizarre public personae of his judges and accusers. Yes, the cases can be appealed, but that's down the road, after the election.

I suspect Trump's original strategy had all along been to treat the Fulton County case the same way as the New York cases, using Fani Willis as a foil equivalent to Letitia James, E Jean Carroll, and Judge Engeron. Recall that the Fulton County case was the origin of the famous Trump mugshot.

The Ashleigh Merchant strategy of moving to disqualify Willis came out of the blue, and as far as it affects Trump, it's entirely serendipitous. His primary strategy in all the cases has been, insofar as possible, to delay them until after the election. Lionel thinks it might be a bad strategy in effect to ask for a new prosecutor, but this wasn't Trump's initial idea, and even if Judge McAfee removes Willis and puts the wheels in motion to name a new prosecutor, this won't be a quick process.

And as Alan Dershowitz has pointed out, the defendants who'd originally pleaded guilty will likely withdraw their guilty pleas, which will set a new prosecutor back, but it's by no means certain that a new prosecutor can be found who'd take the case, and it could well be prosecuted in a friendlier county. The balance of uncertainties probably favors Trump -- but he's scored two short-term successes. First, he's created yet another highly effective foil with Fani Willis, who's played into Trump's hands in her testimony. Second, he's unquestionably begun an indefinite process of delaying that trial, which is and has been his overriding objective irrespective of the prosecutor.

As they say, it's better to be lucky than good. A lot of commentators expect Trump just to be good, which he's never been.

Fani Agonistes

This utter'd, straining all his nerves he bow'd,
As with the force of winds and waters pent,
When Mountains tremble, those two massie Pillars
With horrible convulsion to and fro,
He tugg'd, he shook, till down thy came and drew
The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder
Upon the heads of all who sate beneath,

I haven't thought about Milton's Samson Agonistes in quite a while. This is a poetic drama based on the story in the book of Judges that culminates in Samson, a great warrior captured, enslaved, and blinded by the Philistines, gaining revenge on them by pulling down their temple around them.

What reminded me of this was the YouTuber Viva Frei's commentary on yesterday's continuing testimony at the evidentiary hearing on Fani Willis's conflicts of interest in the Fulton County Trump RICO case, especially in regard to their bringing an accusation of sexual assault against Terrence Bradley, a witness who was trying to invoke attorney-client privilege to protect Willis and Wade:

At 21:00, he explains,

They took Terrence Bradley, threw him under the bus, destroyed him, ruined his life, and it's not because I'm steel manning [giving the strongest interpretation of] the reason, I can't understand why. Some people are saying, "Look, the judge is going to take in camera, confidentially, behind closed doors, uh, secretly, he's going to look at what was argued to be solicitor-client protected, uh, information, and he's going to see that it's not, and he's going to then consider it as evidence.

So they need to destroy Terrence Bradley's credibility by, uh, depicting him as a sexual assaulter, such that, you know, when he said that the affadavit contained accurate information, the judge won't believe him there, but even if that's the steel manning of the argument, it makes no sense. What they've basically done now is opened the box, the Pandora's box, {to Terrence] Bradley breaching whatever solicitor-client privilege he'd been invoking.

When Anna Cross [counsel for the state defending Willis] says, "You guys were friends, right?" and he says, "Yeah," well, there you go! You were friends, so you had discussions as friends and not just as solicitor-client, tell us about those! When did he tell you that he first boned Fani Willis? When did he brag about it?

I mean, for goodness sake, it opens that door. But it also opens the door to the fact that they basically just made enemies with the only guy who was just sitting there defending Nathan Wade by invoking privilege. It makes no sense, uh, and some people are suggesting like it's an ultra super double mega cross, I don't know, throw the case under the bus so it doesn't go to trial so that it doesn't reveal actual election fraud in Georgia, I don't know.

Other people are suggesting that this is how vindictive Fani Willis and Nathan Wade are by mere virtue of the fact that Terrence Bradley ever even talked to Ashleigh Merchant, they were going to destroy him from the beginning.

There's little question that at least on reflection after Day 1, Fani Willis began to recognize at some level that everything was a smoking ruin. Most commentators had begun to characterize the evidentiary hearing as an "embarrassment", while others like Alan Dershowitz simply said, "What a mess. What a mess." The best outcome for Willis and Wade is likely to be just disqualification as prosecutors, but they could still at least keep their law licenses.

But the Georgia Senate has opened an investigation, the county auditor is on the case, and they could well face disbarment, as well as tax problems. Even if we take the utterly best possible outcome, that Judge McAfee says, "Nothing to see here, Ms Willis and Mr Wade are fully vindicated," the RICO defendants, Trump and the others, will simply appeal the judge's ruling, and the whole Fulton County RICO case will be out of reach, impossible to take to trial before the election.

But why, precisely, would Ms Willis be so angry as to pull the case down around her a la Samson Agonistes? Here's the deal as I think she saw it. Her job was to bring down Trump and a couple dozen others, come hell or high water. Her reward was to live high on the hog on that budget. The expectation, at least as she saw it, was that this would be no diffferent from the New York joke prosecutions, the machine would back her up, no questions would be asked, and in fact, she'd be a celebrity. She wouldn't even need to break a sweat.

For whatever reason, the machine didn't back her up. In other words, they didn't keep that part of the tacit bargain, so just as happened with Hunter Biden last summer in Delaware, the whole sweetheart deal was off. So like Samson, she grabbed the columns and pulled down the whole temple on everyone -- I think Viva Frei is right, she's thrown the whole Fulton County RICO case under the bus in revenge.

Day 1

The evidentiary hearing on the ethical conflicts between Fulton County DA Fani Willis and her lead prosecutor is turning out to be the best TV since Watergate. Fani Willis is comparable to combative figures like John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, or Jeb Stuart Magruder. Nathan Wade, whose habitual expressions all involve something sheepish, is a clown equivalent to G Gordon Liddy.

A lot of Fox commentators have focused on Judge McAfee indulging Willis, but some YouTubers like Robert Gouveia and Viva Frei think Ashleigh Merchant has deliberately been setting Ms Willis up to go on embarrassing, rambling, often hysterical rants. And if this is deliberate, the judge is effectively enabling it.

So far, the case reinforces my impression of the astonishing incompetence of the people behind the White House lawfare stratagy. One of the obvious questions to come out of yestefday's testimony was how Willis and Wade could manage trial preparations if they took five vacations in six months. Another was the cavalier estmates of what these vacations cost -- each cruise or trip to someplace like Napa, CA amounted to charges of less than $2000 on Wade's part, with Willis testifying she'd reimbursed Wade in cash amounts from $500 to $2500.

But this goes to the complete absence of receipts, with other testimony that's simply hard to believe, such as Willis's insistence that she doesn't use checks. Does she pay her mortgage in cash? Her car insurance? Het utilities?

But round trip air fare, for instance from Atlanta to Sacramento, which is the closest airport for Napa, is at least $200 per person. Hotels are at least $300 per night. Wine tasting tours, of which Willis testified they took three, are at least $100 per person. Meals, airport limo, and other incidentals are probably $100-$300 per person per day. We don't know how many days they stayed, but an estimate of $2000 for the two of them on such a trip seems unreasonably low, especially considering the likelihood that they preferred higher-level accommodations.

So the show is ongoing, we'll have to see how things shake out. The current prognostication seems to be that she will be disqualified as prosecutor, but there are other estimates that both she and Wade could find themselves in tax difficulties as well.

More Questions About The Lawfare Strategy

I posted yet again yesterday about my reservations on the White House Lawfare strategy over Trump and the 2024 election, if for no other reason than timing. The plan, as best we can tell, was to indict Trump on several highly complex cases in mid-2023 with the aim of bringing him to trial, ideally with convictions, before the 2024 general election. In fact, the Fulton County RICO case was to start on March 4, the day before the Super Tuesday primaries.

A new report gives more insight into the White House's apparent intent in timing the indictments.

The first indictment [the New York Stormy Daniels case] occurred on April 4, 2023. . . .

On March 17, 2023, Bragg asked for a meeting with federal law enforcement ahead of the Trump indictment Trump, a court source told Fox News. A year earlier, Bragg’s office hired a former senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Matthew Colangelo, who spent years targeting Trump at the Justice Department. He also attacked Trump in his role in the New York Attorney General’s office.

The second indictment was the Florida federal classified documents case:

Smith filed the second indictment on June 8, 2023. . . .

Months prior, in March, a member of Biden’s counsel’s office met with a top member of Smith’s team, just nine weeks before he indicted Trump in the classified document case, Breitbart News reported.

The third case is the Fulton County RICO case:

Willis filed the third indictment against Trump on August 14, 2023. The official court website of Fulton County, Georgia, published what appeared to be an indictment against Trump before deleting it.

Months before the indictment, Willis’ top county prosecutor met twice with Biden’s White House counsel on May 23 and November 18, 2022, a year before Trump’s August indictment, Breitbart News reported.

The Breitbart report has no information on any White House meetings prior to the fourth indictment, the District of Columbia federal January 6 case, although Jack Smith is the prosecutor in both federal cases.

What strikes me is how little thought, planning, or coordination seems actually to have taken place in the White House regarding these cases. In particular, the ability of any defense to delay any trial, much less highly complex cases of first impression involving issues like presidential immunity on which higher courts have never ruled, makes these proposed schedules absurdly short.

The Breitbart report takes the position that these meetings were improper, but proper or not, they seem to reflect rank incompetence among both White House counsel and the prosecutors in planning out how quickly these cases would proceed and the various appeals, contingencies, and opportunities for delay available to the defense.

The most advance planning that seems to have taken place between White House meeting and indictment in the cases above is the Fulton County RICO case, from May 2022 and August 2023, a little over a year -- but the prosecutor who did the meetings was Nathan Wade, the least experienced of any, and his case is quickly collapsing as we speak.

The federal cases, although they aren't collapsing quite as decisively as the Fulton County case, seem likely to be delayed past their intended schedules. Jack Smith is insisting in the appeals of both cases that the dalays are damaging the government's case:

Smith said Trump’s emergency appeal of the D.C. Circuit’s decision “fails for two interrelated reasons.”

First, Trump “cannot show the requisite likelihood that this Court would reverse the judgment and sustain his extraordinary claim of absolute immunity; and, second, the serious harm to the government — and to the public — of postponing the resolution of the criminal charges against applicant outweighs any equities he can assert to preclude further pre-trial proceedings while he seeks certiorari,” Smith wrote.

I'm having a harder and harder time thinking the lawfare strategy was ever carefully thought out, and the increasing desperation from Jack Smith to keep the slapdash preparations on track strongly suggests this.

And it's hard for me to imagine a lawyer with any sort of experience who wouldn't anticipate Trump's motions to delay the trials.

Indeed, given that, what sort of advice might such a lawyer give his client on the potential schedule for bringing the matter to trial? It looks to me as if the White House simply expected Trump and his attorneys to roll over and cooperate with the schedule they came up with on a truly slapdash and overoptimistic basis.

Reversal Of Fortune

For whatever reason, Alan Dershowitz neglected to put the best possible title on the YouTube post above -- he should have borrowed it from his 1986 book Reversal of Fortune: Inside the Von Bulow Case, on wbhich the 1990 film Reversal of Fortune was based. Think about it: some big part of the Democrat 2024 strategy was to use a series of indictments to focus on Trump, yet by the middle of February, the trials under the federal indictments are likely to be delayed past the election, while at least in Dershowitz's view, the Fulton County RICO trial is on life support, with national attention focused on the DA and Nathan's Famous Hot Dog.

At 16:30, he says,

I think this case sounds like it's -- it's beyond repair and redemption. And, um, you can say who's the beneficiary of it, is it Donald Trump? Well, if he's guilty, it's Donald Trump, if he's innocent, uh, he's not the beneficiary, um, Fulton County is largely Democrat but not as overewhelmingly, for example, as New York and the District of Columbia, so it's possible he and his codefendants could get a fair trial.

Already they have been prejudiced by the fact that some of the codefendants have pleaded guilty, including lawyers. They're going to withdraw their pleas if the judge finds there was, um, a disqualification here or a violation of ethical rules. So, Fani Willis may lose her guilty pleas as well. Now, with the guilty pleas often comes a promise to cooperate, so does that weaken the case even more if she loses not only her convictions that she's already obtained through her guilty pleas? But if she loses the willingness of codefendants to cooperate, they're usually the best or among the best, uh, witnesses, although their credibility can be questioned too if they were given a benefit for their testimony.

But what a mess, what a mess! And a mess based solely on, on, on -- you know, what's going on, CNN is about to do a series, i don't know if it's been on yet, I'm not big watcher of CNN, about scandals in America, the United States of Scandal with Jake Tapper. Obviously they include all the obvious ones of elected officials who've had to leave office based on scandal -- wow, what about this one? . . . I can tell you one thing, I have never seen a DA, uh, screw up as badly as Fani Willis . . . there's no way she comes out of this thing looking like a legitimate prosecutor.

The problem for Joe and the Democrats is that now, with the holidays pretty much over, the big news stories are focusing on Joe's mental state, Fani Willis, and Nathan's Hot Dog, building nevertheless on last year's background of Judge Engoron and E Jean Carroll. The electorate, after eight years of repetitious attempts to dig up new dirt on Trump, is desensitized to Trump scandal reruns -- after E Jean, we're supposed to get Stormy Daniels yet again this spring:

Trump last April pleaded not guilty to a 34-count indictment charging him with falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 presidential election.

If last year's patterns hold true, all this will do is drive Trump higher in the polls, while it appears that the classified documents case in Florida is also likely to be delayed along with the January 6 trial in Washington:

What’s also unclear is when this case will go to trial. While Judge Cannon has set a date for May, she has indicated that it is likely to be delayed.

The former president’s legal team has requested that some deadlines in the case be postponed indefinitely.

On Thursday, prosecutors also asked Judge Cannon to reject that request, writing that: “The defendants move this Court to indefinitely postpone their deadline for unspecified legal motions—their fourth attempt to adjourn different pretrial trial deadlines or the trial itself. Their objective is plain—to delay trial as long as possible”.

Jack Smith is clearly working to get Judge Cannon removed from the case, but it's hard to imagine how this would speed things along. The difficulty overall is that the lawfare strategy wasn't fully rolled out until the indictments in the middle of last year, which left Trump's attorneys ample opportunity to use ordinary legal procedure to delay the highly complex trials until after the election. Face it, ordinary murder trials are routinely delayed for years.

Meanwhile, the headlines are focused on the 25th Amendment and Joe's financial deals. Nobody at the White House seems able to turn this around, but the staff is apparently preoccupied with its internal squabbles:

Amidst reports of internal tension, John Kirby is said to be frustrated with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s involvement in his press briefings, particularly her role in selecting reporters for questions.

The New York Times reported, citing sources, that “Mr. Kirby had privately acknowledged, when asked, that he would one day like to be named press secretary, and he has expressed frustration that Ms. Jean-Pierre picked the reporters who ask him questions at briefings,” a role currently filled by Karine Jean-Pierre.

Recently promoted to White House national security advisor, Kirby’s new position elevates his responsibility in coordinating communications across several agencies, marking a significant step up from his previous role.

Joe's handlers will never allow a cis white male to get into a position where he could actually help Joe out. Somebody else has been calling the shots all along -- as Dershowitz says, what a mess.

Am I Missing Something Here?

Recent headlines have the New York Times and other Democrat outlets starting to suggest Joe step aside in favor of another Democrat candidate and decline to run in the fall. What seems to go unmentioned so far is the possibility of him relinquishing the presidency, or being forced out, under the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. The big problem with either scenario is Kamala Harris.

Although she poses a potential problem if all Joe does is withdraw from the race but continue as president for the rest of his term, Kamala is a bigger problem under the 25th Amendment. She herself sees no obstacle to this contingency:

Vice President Harris said she’s ready for the presidency in an interview last week, amid concerns about President Biden’s age.

“I am ready to serve. There’s no question about that,” Harris told the Wall Street Journal when asked about the challenge of convincing voters she’s up for the job.

Those who see her work are “fully aware” of her “capacity to lead,” Harris said in the interview, just days before a special counsel report stoked renewed questions about Biden’s age and mental aptitude.

The particular difficulty if Biden were to be forced out of the presidency before January 20, as opposed to simply declaring he wouldn't run in the fall but remaining in office, would be the vice presidential provision in the 25th Amendment:

SECTION 1. In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

SECTION 2. Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

The difficulty this year would be timing as it relates to the potential for Kamala succeeding to the office. The opinion has already been put out that Kamala is so visibly inept that she amounts to 25th Amendment insurance for Joe: she's even less popular than Joe, so she'd almost certainly lose to any Republican in November, but even if she were to succeed to the presidency before then, there's a general perception that she'd be no more effective than a severely limited Joe in the office.

The people who actually ran the country had an equivalent problem with Spiro Agnew in 1973, although Agnew as vice president was certainly no worse than many of his predecessors or successors, like John Garner, Alben Barkley, or Dan Quayle. Nevertheless, it was apparently felt necessary to remove Agnew as potential 25th Amendment insurance and replace him with a figure who had more gravitas -- who turned out to be Gerald Ford -- before the real job of removing Nixon could be undertaken.

But even there, as I noted Sunday, it took from October 10 to December 6, 1973 to nominate Ford and secure his confirmation, more than two months. It took even longer for Ford to secure confirmatiom for Nelson Rockefeller, his own nominee for vice president, from August 20, 1974 to December 19, 1974, four months. According to Wikipedia at the link,

Rockefeller underwent extended hearings before Congress, suffering embarrassment when it was revealed he made massive gifts to senior aides, such as Henry Kissinger, and used his personal fortune to finance a scurrilous biography of political opponent Arthur Goldberg. He had also taken debatable deductions on his federal income taxes, and ultimately agreed to pay nearly one million dollars to settle the issue, but no illegalities were uncovered, and he was confirmed.

It's worth noting that Agnew resigned, setting the vice presidential succession procedures into motion, with more than three years left in his second term. When Nixon resigned a year later, there were still more than two years left in his term. Even so, in both cases, it took two to four months to confirm the vice presidential successors. This year, if Biden were to leave the presidency after the primary season but before the Democrat convention, there likely wouldn't be time to confirm a successor before the election.

Not only that, but it's hard right now to imagine the House under Speaker Johnson confirming anyone nominated for the vice presidency by a President Harris, especially since Johnson as House Speaker would, without a sitting vice president, be next directly in line to succeed Harris should she herself leave the office. This would, if Harris were to leave, put a Republican in the presidency before the election.

Thus the current consitutional crisis, in which there's steadily declining confidence in the president's ability to function in office, extends beyond Biden himself to his successor. Any deal that involved Joe's resignation would also need in some way to encompass Kamala, because otherwise there's no realistic path to filling the office of vice president before the election, and there's no more confidence in Kamala's ability to function in the office than Joe's.

Even if we invoke names like John Garner, Alben Barkley, Spiro Agnew, or Dan Quayle, Kamala Harris doesn't seem to fit in even that group. We need to pray there's no national crisis between now and next January so great that it would require Biden's removal, because removing Biden wouldn't solve the bigger problem. Right now, the problem of timing alone makes a solution unlikely, but also at least for now, any deal equivalent to replacing Agnew before replacing Nixon in 1973-4 is almost certainly beyond the ability of the current movers and shakers.