How Fast Are Events Moving?

If you want an indication of how fast events are moving, it was just two weeks ago that Real Clear Politics updated its list of "battleground" states by adding Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Virginia, but then, incongruouously, also added Ohio, Florida, and Colorado -- but by now, with new polls sugesting New Jersey, New Mexico, Maine, and even Colorado are in play, they're going to have to update their list again.

As of today, the White House appears to be expecting an ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos to reestablish an impression that Joe is competent and focused, but after a series of July 4 gaffes, it's hard to imagine that he can do this. In an intervieew broadcast yesterday, he appeared to misspeak when he characterized himself as a “Black woman” on a Philadelphia-based radio station.

“By the way I’m proud to be, as I said the first vice president, the first Black woman served with a Black president,” Biden said. “Proud of the first Black woman, the Supreme Court. There’s just so much that we can do because together we, there’s nothing. Look, this is the United States, America.”

According to the New York Post, this wasn't the only gaffe in the interview:

At one point, he made the bizarre claim that he was the “first president that got elected statewide in the state of Delaware, when I was a kid.”

Also yesterday,

President Joe Biden’s team faced another embarrassing episode when the President appeared on live television during Independence Day celebrations with a noticeable stain on his suit. The stain, which many speculated to be either poop or food, quickly became the focal point of the broadcast, overshadowing the patriotic festivities.

The stain is illustrated in the photo at the top of this post. But then there was the main event of the day:

“One last thing, and I used to think when I was a senator, there were always congestion on the highways. There’s no congestion anymore. We go on the highway, there’s no congestion,” Biden said.

“And so what? The way they get me to stop talking, they’ll say, ‘We just shut down all the roads, Mr. President, you’re gonna lose all the votes if you don’t get in. But anyway, I’ll be back out,” he nonsensically added.

And then there's yesterday's story by Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine. Speaking of Washington insiders she'd chatted with since the beginning of this year, she writes,

Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”

. . . Saying hello to one Democratic mega donor and family friend at the White House recently, the president stared blankly and nodded his head. The First Lady intervened to whisper in her husband’s ear, telling him to say hello to the donor by name and to thank them for their recent generosity. The president repeated the words his wife had fed him. “It hasn’t been good for a long time but it’s gotten so, so much worse,” a witness to the exchange told me. “So much worse!”

I don't think the outlook for the Stephanopoulos interview is good. There's an emerging consensus that if Joe isn't fit to be a candidate in November, he really isn't fit to be in office at all, which increases the likelihood that we'll see President Harris -- but this leaves open the question of how much Kamala knew about Joe's condition and how much she enabled or participated in the cover-up. I have a feeling events are going to move quickly.

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.

Still Working Toward Acceptance

Two big items turned up in yesterday's news that tell me last week's debate wasn't all that much of a game changer for the election. The first was Politico's report of a call from Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to Jen O'Malley Dixon, Joe's campaign chair:

She used the call to reiterate her commitment and willingness to help the president but also voiced her concern about how much more difficult the campaign would be now for Biden, I’m told by a person familiar with the call.

Even more revealing is how word of the call reached me: from someone close to a potential 2028 Whitmer rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. This person said Whitmer had phoned O’Malley Dillon with more of an unambiguous SOS: to relay that Michigan, in the wake of the debate, was no longer winnable for Biden.

Whitmer herself has walked back the SOS attributed to her that Michigan is no longer in play, but it rings true to me. First, she says she won't be a candidate to replace Joe if he withdraws, because this is actually a realistic view, a little like Ted Kennedy turning down George McGovern's offer to be his 1972 running mate. Kennedy saw there was no route for that ticket to win that election, and it would lose badly and brand him as a loser for any future run.

By the same token, Whitmer understands that by trying to push Joe out, she'll simply be on the top of a losing ticket while burning a lot of bridges in the party with people whom she might need in a future run. And she knows it's a losing ticket, because she's just told Joe's campaign chair he isn't going to carry Michigan.

Let's put this in context: last week, the day before the debate, Nate Silver said:

[I]f Biden loses Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — and he trails badly in each — he’ll need to win all three of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and not just one of them.

In other words, if we assume Whitmer is a halfway savvy politician, she knows that if the ticket, any Democrat ticket in 2024 including one with her on it, loses Michigan alone, it's probably all over, and the orange man is going to call her a loser. In fact, he'll call her a loser months before the election, he'll turn out to be right, and that will end her career. This morning's Real Clear Politics aggregate for Michigan has Trump up 1.2, and that probably understates things by maybe 3%.

As David Strom wrote this morning at Red State,

Now Whitmer is walking back, or rather outright denying, the claim that Michigan is lost to Democrats if Biden remains on the ballot.

. . . The problem with Whitmer's denial is that it is transparently false. There is zero doubt that she would have called the White House to reassure the campaign that she wasn't lobbying for the job because openly doing so is political death.

But there's a whole 'nother cloud on the horizon, which I pointed out the morning before the debate: the movement in the polls was already away from any augury this is going to be a close election. Nate Silver pointed out last week,

Biden also has to hold on to states like New Hampshire and Virginia (and New Mexico and Minnesota and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District) in the Blue Wall-saves-the-day scenario, and that’s not quite a sure thing given Biden’s mediocre polling elsewhere in the Northeast.

Even before the debate, the conventional wisdom, like the states considered to be "battlegrounds", had already begun to acknolwedge that Minnesota and Virginia are in play, making even the least optimistic estimate, that Biden might still barely win an Electoral College vote of 270-268 by holding onto Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, less and less likely. Adding to the list of states in play as of late last week is New Jersey:

A new poll released on Thursday conducted by co/Efficient shows Trump leading Biden in New Jersey with 41 percent versus Biden's 40 percent, with 13 percent undecided and 7 percent supporting independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or another third party candidate. The poll, with a sample of 810 likely general election voters in New Jersey, was conducted from June 26 to 27 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.42 percent.

And as of yesterday, New Hampshire:

A new poll shows President Joe Biden trailing former President Donald Trump among New Hampshire registered voters by two points.

The Saint Anselm College Survey Center polled more than 1,700 registered voters in the first two days after the recent presidential debate.

In the poll, 44% said they support Trump, compared to 42% who said Biden was their choice. Another 4% said they planned to vote for independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

There have been few campaigns in the modern era of polling where the eventual loser was so consistently behind in the polls. The 1972 election seems at this point to be the closest parallel, when George McGovern didn't have the delegates to secure his nomination before the Democrat convention, leading to extensive floor battles, which he eventually won -- but this left the vice presidential nomination still open:

Most polls showed McGovern running well behind incumbent President Richard Nixon, except when McGovern was paired with Ted Kennedy. McGovern and his campaign brain trust lobbied Senator Kennedy heavily to accept the bid to be McGovern's running mate. Much to their surprise, he continually refused their advances[.]

. . . Thereafter, a number of high-profile Democrats, including Kennedy, Senator Walter Mondale, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Senator Edmund Muskie, Senator Abe Ribicoff and Senator Birch Bayh turned down offers to run on the ticket.

It's plain that the political instincts of all these figures, from Kennedy on down, told them to avoid the slightest association with McGovern, who was marked as a loser from the start. This makes me skeptical of current estimates that potential replacements for Joe like Governors Whitmer and Newsom are actually all that anxious to step up -- like the prominent Democrats who turned McGovern down, they don't want to turn themselves into sure losers.

Whitmer's dilemma on one hand was that she didn't want to become a loser, but on the other, she now doesn't want to have the imputation that she doesn't want to be a loser. She can't win for losing.

But again, McGovern hadn't even secured the delegates for his nomination by the time of the convention, July 10–13, 1972, and it took more than two weeks for the Eagleton debacle to work itself through, culminating in his withdrawal on August 1. This slow-motion train wreck, however, took place in the current scheme of things over a month after this Biden debacle, which is taking place in the context of a very early first presidential debate and almost two months prior to the Democrat convention.

Nevertheless, it involves a very similar controversy centered on a candidate's medical fitness in the middle of the party's bleak prospects for the November election. And not since 1972 have Democrat prospects been so bad so early in the game -- but that this is all playing out so early creates its own set of extra problems.

People Are Getting Nervous

There are two aspects to the current crisis. The first, which strikes me as unreaistic, is just about what the Democrats should do with Joe as the nominee, when no course of action is very good -- his potential replacements would likely lose bigger than Joe if he stays on the ticket. The second, which is what actually has people nervous, is that Joe is commander in chief, but he's generally acknowledged not to be available for the proverbial 3 AM phone call:

• The time of day is important as to which of the two Bidens will appear.
• From 10am to 4pm, Biden is dependably engaged — and many of his public events in front of cameras are held within those hours.
• Outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued, aides told Axios.

And that's apparently from insiders putting the best possible face on things. Again according to Axios, which has had the most insightful current reporting from the White House,

Joe Biden's close aides have carefully shielded him from people inside and outside the White House since the beginning of his presidency.

. . . The intermittent access has resulted in many current and former White House aides being shocked at the 81-year-old president's limitations at the debate Thursday night.

. . . Current and former White House aides are feeling whiplash — and now questioning whether Biden could fulfill a second term.

The issue isn't the short-term problem of whether Joe had a bad night and whether he can recover, the issue is what is his real condition, and is he fit not just to run for another term, but should he be in his position now at all?

Yesterday I linked to a report from NBC News that Joe was going to meet with his family to discusss the future of his campaign. Reports as of this morning are that the family insisted he continue, and indeed, some knowledgeable people insisted it wasn't really a meeting:

Camp David: Biden family spent morning not having a summit but in hair and makeup for a shoot with Annie Leibovitz, Vogue photog who shot Biden/Obama/Clinton in March then suggested doing something informal with the Bidens. Family suggested this week, bc Hunter & family in town.

— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) June 30, 2024

If this is correct -- and it certrainly has the ring of truth -- Joe's family is remarkably shallow, self-absorbed, and utterly without situational awareness. But even given the reports that the family is behind Joe, Axios suggests this may not be final:

We're told Democratic congressional leaders are one outside force that could bring pressure on Biden.

. . . "This is no longer about Joe Biden's family or his emotions," said an adviser in constant touch with the West Wing. "This is about our country. It's an utter f***ing disaster that has to be addressed."

It'll take a while for the oligarchy to process the stakes, this adviser argued, "but there will be a reckoning."

. . . "They need to tell him the absolute truth about where he is," said a well-known Democrat who often talks to the president. "Loyalty doesn't mean blind loyalty."

"Candidates for House, Senate, governor, state legislature are going to be in survival mode," the well-known Democrat added. "They're not going to go down with the ship. And the ship is in a bad place."

Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin suggested something like this is under way:

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Sunday on “Velshi” that discussions are taking place about President Joe Biden’s future as the party’s presidential nominee.

Raskin said, “This is what a real political party looks like and this is what a real politcal p[arty does. Obviously, there was a big problem with Joe Biden’s debate performance, and there is also just a tremendous reservoir of love for Joe Biden in our party. So this makes it a difficult situation for everybody, but there are very honest and serious and rigorous conversations happening at every level of our party, because it is a political party and we have differences in point of view.”

Reports from inside the Camp David photo shoot or family meeting, whatever it was, suggest the family isn't entirely in touch with reality:

Members of Joe Biden’s family privately trashed his top campaign advisers at Camp David this weekend, blaming them for the president’s flop in Thursday’s debate and urging Biden to fire or demote people in his political high command.

There is no immediate expectation that Biden will follow through on that advice, according to three people briefed on the family conversations but not directly involved. The three people were granted anonymity to discuss the matter.

. . . The blame was cast widely on staffers, including: Anita Dunn, the senior adviser who frequently has the president’s ear; her husband, Bob Bauer, the president’s attorney who played Trump in rehearsals at Camp David; and Ron Klain, the former chief of staff who ran point on the debate prep and previous cycles’ sessions.

Dunn and Bauer are former close Obama advisers, although Klain is a longtime Biden retainer. Although the White House is distancing itself from those reports, most of the senior people running the Biden 2024 campaign are former Obama staffers, some of whom are reported to have been put on the Biden re-election campaign at Obama's urging. The family's complaints likely reflect a growing rift between the Bidens and the Obamas, reflected as well in this morning's tweet from Tucker Carlson:

From an unusually good source: Obama’s tweet supporting Joe Biden was disingenuous. In private, Obama is telling people Biden can’t win, and he is therefore in favor of an open convention. Obama will not say whom he supports, nor as of yesterday afternoon had he met personally…

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) July 1, 2024

This suggests that the messages of support from Obama and Bill Clinton on Friday were less than wholehearted:

Both of the former Democrat presidents took a long time to speak up for their guy, Joe Biden, after the debate. While the major freak-out played out at its most intense, they were quiet.

Bill Clinton waited until early evening to post on social media.

. . . Obama's reaction was the important one, though. Many elected officials were waiting to take guidance from Obama. Obama and Clinton hesitated to get into the fray but when they did, they offered Biden a lifeline. The two former presidents knew Biden was too stubborn and egocentric to realize that it was time to leave the race.

Axios has a lengthy piece on the Biden family's strategy that concludes,

Biden's kitchen cabinet sees a recipe for a narrow victory that includes a grand-slam speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago + a strong showing in the next second debate + positive economic news in the fall (maybe a Fed rate cut).

. . . Biden's camp believes voters will give more weight to Biden's judgment and record than to his grandpa gait or fading debate dexterity. It's one of the greatest gambles in the history of politics. Once again, Biden's team is telling Democratic voters: You just have to believe.

The problem is that so far, nothing in the Biden re-election strategy has worked -- in fact, just about everything has backfired, from the lawfare strategy, to the promised comeback after the State of the Union, to what I believe was a plan to look presidential on the world stage in early June, followed by a strong debate performance in Atlanta. They aren't going to sell any strong speech at the convention or a strong performance at the next debate. Those promises aren't going to convince anyone.

The problem is immediate. The failures in the June trips and then the debate show a deeply flawed presidential judgment that goes beyond just Joe's chances for re-election. People are nervous about more than just that.

"I’m Behind Him 1000%"

Tryng to make sense of the current crisis, I've looked at two 20th century constitutional crises, the 1936 UK crisis that led to Edward VIII's abdication, and the 1944 crisis of FDR's perilous state of health leading into the November election and his death the following year only months after his inauguration. Both were resolved largely behind the scenes. But I think a closer and more recent parallel is the problem that was posed by Thomas Eagleton, who was the 1972 Democrat vice presidential nominee who was forced to withdraw his candicacy when information surfaced about his medical history.

George McGovern's nomination for president at the 1972 Democrat convention wasn't assured, and his chances against Nixon in November were never bright. Thomas Eagleton, a US senator from Missouri, wasn't on McGovern's short list for vice president, but after Ted Kennedy and Abraham Ribicoff both turned him down, he had to find a willing substitute quickly. He fell back on Eagleton, and McGovern probably didn't even want to ask too many questions of anyone at that point.

According to NPR, after Eagleton was named McGovern's running mate and nominated by the convention,

Within a few days, rumors started to circulate, beginning with a call to McGovern's headquarters in South Dakota.

"The anonymous caller had said, 'Check into Sen. Eagleton's background; he has a complicated medical background,' " Hart says.

. . . Within hours, the McGovern campaign was getting those details. On three occasions in the 1960s, Eagleton was hospitalized for depression and had undergone electroshock treatment.

. . . McGovern, under increasing pressure, asked to speak to Eagleton's psychiatrists. Eagleton agreed to have McGovern speak with two of his doctors.

"McGovern, based on those conversations, makes the medical decision that Eagleton was too much of a risk to have his finger potentially on the metaphorical button," [historian Joshua] Glasser says.

But according to Wikipedia, before he made that decision,

In response to intense pressure from the media and party leaders that Eagleton be replaced, McGovern announced that he was "1000 percent behind Tom Eagleton, and I have no intention of dropping him from the ticket".

Wikipedia's comment is,

It backfired badly and became a byword for foolish and insincere exaggeration, and today is often used in irony or sarcasm.

There are several parallels between the Eagleton crisis of 1972 and the current calls for Joe Biden to step aside as this year's Democrat presidential candidate. The first is the conundrum that it was expected, up to Thursday's debate, that Biden would be nominated by an online process prior to the Democrat convention August 19-22, and this would be a purely pro forma event. In effect, Joe was already as good as nominated, so this is a very close parallel to Eagleton's position in 1972, potentially forced to withdraw from a ticket after being nominated.

The second parallel is that questions arose about both candidates' medical fitness for office -- as McGovern apparently put it, whether Eagleton should have his finger on the nuclear button. Nobody's put it specifically that way about Joe, but I cited several links yesterday questioning Joe's capability to deal with Putin, Xi, Kim, or the Ayatollahs given what we saw in the debate.

The third parallel is that the critical medical information for both men had or has been concealed. The NPR account makes it plain that Eagleton and his doctors relied on medical confidentialty to withhold specific data until McGovern insisted that Eagleton authorize its release. In Joe's case, it seems very likely that critical medical information about his condition, his medications, and his prognosis is still being withheld, and it's uncertain whether we'll ever get it.

Certainly one aspect of the current scandal is that staff, advisers, cabinet secretaries, and colleagues over recent months have insisted thst Joe is "fine", when it seems less and less likely that this is the case. But even if what we can assess now from Joe's debate performance is all we'll ever learn, we have the incredibly awkward situation that important papers like the New York Times, the Phildelphia Inquirer, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, as well as important television commentators on CNN and elsewhere, have already called for Joe to step aside -- I'm not aware of anyone mentioning Eagleton, at least not yet, but the parallel is implicit.

If Joe continues his candidacy, it will be with a good part of even the Democrat-aligned legacy commentariat against him, which will be damaging even if they all eventually recant. In that context, we have this report from NBC News, which the Biden campaign so far denies:

President Joe Biden is expected to discuss the future of his re-election campaign with family at Camp David on Sunday, following a nationally televised debate Thursday that left many fellow Democrats worried about his ability to beat former President Donald Trump in November, according to five people familiar with the matter.

Biden’s trip was planned before Thursday’s debate. He and first lady Jill Biden are scheduled to join their children and grandchildren there late Saturday.

So far, the party’s top leaders have offered public support for Biden, including in tweets posted by former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Senior congressional Democrats, including Reps. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Nancy Pelosi of California, have privately expressed concerns about his viability, said two sources apprised of those discussions, even as they all publicly back the president.

The piece goes on to say that there's a cautious wait-and-see attitude, but in the days after the debate, it's hard to avoid thinking everyone is stunned. and the consequences haven't been fully thought through. Among the considerations, though, must surely be that the campaign, in the end a likely loser, has four months still to go, while there will be increasing demands for the release of Joe's full medical records, neither of which developments will be good for Joe or his family. My bet, though, is that right now, everyone is 1000% behind him.

The 25th Amendment?

Let's delve a little farther into the 25th Amendment, or at least the part that's most applicable to the current crisis, Section 4:

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[.]

It goes on to provide that should there be a continued disagreement between the president and the vice president-plus-cabinet-majority, it's to be resolved by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. This is an even higher standard than required to impeach a president, which requires just a simple majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. As a practical matter, the 25th Amendment can't be invoked unless it's in the most extreme cases, for which at least for now, Joe's infirmities likely don't qualify.

This didn't stop House Speaker Johnson from trying to start the process:

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday that high-level discussions should be taking place in President Biden’s cabinet about invoking the 25th Amendment to make him step down after a disastrous debate performance the night before.

“There’s a lot of people asking about invoking the 25th Amendment right now, because this is an alarming situation,” Johnson (R-La.) told reporters. “Our adversaries see the weakness in this White House, as we all do.”

For now, this is just kabuki, but there's nevertheless legitimate reason for concern:

Joe fell apart last night, and he was only facing his American opponent for president armed with nothing but insults. Putin, Xi, Kim, the Ayatollahs, and all our adversaries have real weapons and a desire not just to take away Joe's nice home, helicopter, and the best private jet in the world. They want to reshape the map of the world and are willing to kill thousands or millions to accomplish that task.

Or this:

Put yourself in Xi Jinping's head. Or the Ayatollahs'. Or any adversary of the United States.

What did you see? Did you see an American president that you should beware of? A united America capably led? A country to respect?

Or this:

If I’m China, I’m taking off the shelf the war plans to invade Taiwan. If I’m Iran, I’m breaking out towards a nuclear weapon. If I’m Putin, I’m doubling down on Ukraine and possibly other former Soviet satellites. Can you imagine an emergency situation where immediate military decisions that only a president can make need to be made in seconds or minutes, and the military having to go to diminished Joe for a decision?

This is serious stuff. This is no joke. Biden’s cognitive decline is a national security threat of the highest order.

It doesn't necessarily follow that if Joe isn't fit to run for another term, he isn't fit to continue as president now, but the two issues are nevertheless hard to separate, although either scenario, Joe just drops out of the race, or he quits the presidency now, is pretty much wishful thinking. He won't do either voluntarily, and the possibilities of either selecting a replacement candidate at the Democrat convention or invoking the 25th Amendment are far distant.

In addition, following yesterday's media calls for Joe to drop out of the race, both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have announced their support for Joe, which indicates that at least for now, there won't be any delegations of power players heading to the Oval Office to tell him how it's gonna be.

The reason the establishment is holding off is that the alternatives are still worse. If Joe voluntarily withdraws as a candidate in November but serves out his term, it simply resurrects the problem Joe's nomination in 2020 was meant to solve: I hold with the view that the Democrat establishment allowed his nomination then because the alternative was Bernie Sanders. Sanders's nomination would have split the party, which has been increasingly dominated by the far left, and ensured Trump's reelection.

The problem for the Democrats is that nothing has changed, Joe is still the only figure who can conceivably keep the party, such as it's become, more or less united. If he withdraws as a candidate but serves out his term, the big problem is how they replace Kamala, his presumptive successor, with anyone who isn't at least notionally a person of color. Any attempt to nominate someone who isn't would permanently split the party, and any nominee who is would almost certainly lose.

If Joe leaves the presidency before his term ends, Kamala automatically becomes president, and replacing her as the nominee becomes all the more difficult, so as a practical matter, as long as Joe hasn't literally flatlined, he's going to stay on as president. But all either contingency accomplishes is to defer the bigger questions for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months. Even if Joe manages to be reelected, the Democrats still have the basic problem that the far left is their dominant faction, and Joe is the last figurehead who can conceal that.

It does look as if, now that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have publicly supported Joe, the current panic will subside. But let's keep in mind that, as I've been pointing out all along, this year's campaign is many months longer than usual. The crisis for the Trump campaign in 2016, the Access Hollywood tape, was a classic October surprise that in fact took place in early October. There were calls for Trump to withdraw and be replaced by his running mate, Mike Pence. But however reluctantly, the Republican establishment closed ranks, re-expressed support for Trump, and he went on to win the 2016 election.

But that was October 2016. This is June 2024. Trump was able to overcome one October surprise with too little time left in the campaign for the Democrats to find another one. Now, Biden is struggling to overcome a serious setback of his own making with four full months left in the campaign. It's hard not to recognize that he's already tired, but he has many more months to go in a campaign that's going to do nothing but tire him out more.

He's going to have more bad days, and the campaign is going to have to address each one as it arises -- but at least for now, he isn't going to do anything voluntarily, and the Democrat establishment is unlikely to force him out. For both sides, the alternative is worse.

Should an actual crisis arise, conditions might change, but in fact, there's only four months until the election, and any foreign bad actor would need to contend with, first, the likelihood that any Pearl Harbor-style attack would ensure Trump's election, followed by a response from the awakened US sleeping giant; and second, that Biden's remaining term, irrespective of his weakened state, is too short to let the bad actor consolidate any initial victory, and again, all it would do is ensure Trump's election, now looking more likely in any case, and make him mad. I don't think anyone is going to tickle the dragon's tail at this stage.

As I've Been Saying, We're In A Constitutional Crisis

Back on June 7, I posted about the unspoken constitutional crisis during FDR's third term in which the White House, according to Dr Steven Lomazow, concealed the president's metastasized cancer and severe cardiopulmonary disease that made his death inevitable early in his fourth term. Enough insiders anticipated this that they forced him to drop Henry Wallace and choose Harry Truman as his running mate for the 1944 election. I said in that post,

[I]t was a de facto constitutional crisis that under the circumstances could only be resolved by Roosevelt's death, which insiders fully understood to be imminent in any case.

It's hard to avoid thinking we're heading for an equivalent crisis before the next election, but the additional complication is Vice President Harris. . . . Biden is bad enough, but it's less and less likely he can last another four years, and we'd get Harris sooner than anyone expects.

By at least his final year in office, according to Dr Lomazow, Roosevelt was working a schedule from noon to 4:00 PM weekdays, although this included a 90-minute nap, which according to cabinet members simply wasn't adequate to do a president's job. The saving grace was that insiders had quietly planned for a succession, something they and Truman fully recognized at the time. From what we hear, Joe's schedule is similar now, which doesn't augur well, but as of now, there's no contingency as there was in 1944.

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.

There can be no disagreement that Joe's physical appearance alone in last night's debate was frail, pale, and almost cadaverous. His voice was hoarse. He seemed at various times to be fighting down the urge to cough. This leaves aside any question about his cognitive abilities, although at least some observers noticed a strange stare -- that suggests to me that he was under some type of strong medication, whether or not it was a performance-enhancing drug of some sort.

The first issue is a no-brainer. As Mark Leibovich writes in The Atlantic,

President Joe Biden needs to end his campaign. The first presidential debate, held last night, was a disaster. It was clear from the outset that Biden looked old, sounded old, and yes, is in fact very, very old.

This has been rumored for a while. Last night, it was confirmed.

But that's not the real question. Scott Jennings came closer to the point on CNN after the debate:

WATCH: @ScottJenningsKY on Joe Biden's debate performance:

"It is a fair question to ask right now, 'What is going on inside the White House every day?' Is [Kamala Harris] currently making more decisions in the White House than we know? Who is making decisions in the White… pic.twitter.com/mK5628i4DU

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) June 28, 2024

"Let me just take the other side of this Kamala Harris debate. It is a fair question to ask right now, 'What is going on inside the White House every day?' Is she currently making more decisions in the White House than we know? Who is making decisions in the White House right now? We‘re talking about this in terms of can Joe Biden win an election and serve for four years. I want to know I want to know what‘s happening on a day-to-day basis. To me, she is the big story tonight because her position in this administration, in this campaign, has become magnified by 1,000 right now."

Whether Joe continues his campaign is really irrelevant -- the question isn't even who's running the country, the question is who's been running the country, and who'll be running it until next January 20, because even if the 25th Amendment is invoked, either through Joe's resignation or his removal, the same people will be implementing the same disastrous policies, and they'll likely be doing all they can to keep them in place after either Joe or Kamala leaves office next year.

At minimum, I think it's time for the adults in the room to force the White House to reveal more about Joe's physical condition and begin to ask seriously if he's up to the job. What we saw last night was not a well man. Then I think some serious discussion needs to take place about how we're going to proceed for the next eight months.