Weekend at Biden’s
Who’s really running the show? Following President Joe Biden’s abysmal performance at Thursday’s debate, press coverage has sought to investigate how exactly Biden’s cognitive decline got this bad without it becoming a major scandal earlier. The story Politico has offered: Biden’s public appearances are so tightly controlled by his shrinking inner circle, which has been running interference for him as his mind atrophies.
“The number of people who have access to the president has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. They’ve been digging deeper into the bunker for months now,” a Democratic strategist in a critical battleground state told Politico. Some of those people include senior adviser Anita Dunn (who advocated for the early debate, in a break with tradition) and Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff who handled the debate prep, as well as Bob Bauer, Dunn’s husband and Biden’s personal lawyer.
(“To their allies, the two are loyal and steely under fire,” says The New York Times of Dunn and Bauer. “To their critics, the couple—and Ms. Dunn in particular—are the embodiment of Mr. Biden’s affinity for revolving-door Washington operatives who move back and forth between high-powered political jobs and lucrative corporate clients.”)
“It’s the same people,” one Democratic operative told Politico. “He has not changed those people for 40 years.” Of course, it’s not uncommon for career politicians to have close advisers who have worked with them for decades, whose judgment they trust. What is confusing is that the president’s enablers seem unable to sound the alarms that Biden is a bad candidate to run, ill-suited to the job ahead, and that their inability to do so has seemingly sabotaged the Democratic party, leaving it without a nominee who can beat former President Donald Trump.
It feels like a Weekend at Bernie’s situation—advisers are the ones actually running the show, not the person we’ve elected. (Using we generously, as I certainly played no part in electing this guy.)
Immunity ruling handed down: Yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 ruling in the presidential immunity case. “A President inclined to take one course of action based on the public interest may instead opt for another, apprehensive that criminal penalties may befall him upon his departure from office,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the majority. “And if a former President’s official acts are routinely subjected to scrutiny in criminal prosecutions, ‘the independence of the Executive Branch’ may be significantly undermined.”
Do not read this as a victory for Trump, though. The ruling was a thoroughly mixed bag. “The Court held that a former president enjoys ‘absolute’ immunity for ‘actions within his exclusive constitutional power,’ ‘presumptive’ immunity for other ‘official acts,’ and no immunity for unofficial acts,” writes Reason‘s Jacob Sullum. At the same time, the Court swatted away Trump’s argument—”that former presidents can be prosecuted for ‘official acts’ only if they are first impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate based on the same conduct,” writes Sullum, f
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