Over at RedState, Ward Clark has an interesting breakdown of some recent commentary that's been making the rounds in political circles over the past few days. With Joe Biden safely out of the way and largely confined to the sidelines, and Kamala Harris about to be confirmed as the Democrats' "official" candidate to face Donald Trump in November, the drama should be largely over and we can all settle down for the final race to the finish line, right?
But what if that's not the case? Could Kamala's party have one significantly large rabbit ready to pull out of their hat?
The party leadership already threw Biden under the bus once, but might they next try to toss him in front of a political Mack Truck? They could do it if Harris gathered together a sufficiently large group of Cabinet members and they invoked the 25th Amendment anyway, tossing Biden out on his ear and installing Harris as the historic First Female President of the United States.
But would they dare? And if they did, would it really improve their current circumstances?
The Democrats already froze befuddled Joe Biden out of the presidential campaign, and one can hardly blame them; the Biden reelection effort looked like it was going to deliver the Democrats a catastrophic loss in November. Imagine things being so bad that Kamala Harris looks to be the better alternative! That's where they were, and invoking that big vaudevillian hook from stage left to yank old Joe out of the picture was, candidly, the smart thing to do.Might they go the next step, though, and invoke the 25th Amendment to take the declining President Biden out of the picture altogether? Douglas MacKinnon, opinion contributor at The Hill, has some interesting thoughts, not least of which is that this invocation of the 25th may not be necessary.
The reason Ward says that it "may not be necessary" to invoke the 25th Amendment is that Joe Biden still has it within his power to remove the need for it. He could show up at the convention in Chicago this week, stand up behind the microphone and say, "That's it. I quit. I'm going home to Delaware." Why would he do that? Because, as Ward points out, he's always been a petty, vindictive man. (Look at how he treated Clarence Thomas.) Biden is already enraged at Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership whether he wants to admit it or not in public. His sudden resignation would throw the Democrats into a tailspin, leaving Kamala Harris in charge with the weight of the current administration's failures resting firmly on her shoulders alone.
Further, Scranton Joe's handlers have no doubt heard these rumors swirling as well. Joe's legacy has been shattered by being forcibly removed from the running when he previously swore that only God Almighty could drive him out of the race. If they invoke the 25th and force him out, the humiliation and complete rebranding of Biden as a failed president would be complete. But if he walks out voluntarily, he will be able to head into retirement claiming that at least he left under his own terms. Personally, I don't find that to be a likely scenario, but I couldn't rule it out completely.
All of this is currently based on nothing more than the rumor mill, however. Would Harris and the rest of the Cabinet players actually remove Biden at this late stage? And would such an extreme action really offer them any leverage in November? No honest observer could argue that removal would be completely inappropriate at the moment. In fact, it probably should have been done a couple of years ago because a situation such as the one we're in now is precisely why the amendment was added to the Constitution. The country is a mess and the world is on fire. Meanwhile, it's clear that Joe Biden isn't even running the country himself these days, or at least not outside the hours of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. But that doesn't mean that the Democrats couldn't allow whoever is pulling Joe's strings to keep pulling them for another four and a half months.
Further, what advantage would removing Joe deliver for Kamala? Yes, it might give the liberal base another temporary sugar-rush from having the "historic first female president" in office, despite the fact that it would be yet another office that she obtained without a single person voting for her and she would perpetually have an asterisk next to her name in the history books. But the negatives would still likely outweigh the positives by a wide margin. As noted above, Harris would have no place left to hide. She would own all of the Biden/Harris administration policies and the horrid results they produced. For the moment, she can continue to try to flip-flop on her policies and point the finger at her boss, saying she didn't want to openly defy the elected president. But as a newly enshrined president herself, she would need to turn around and reverse most of Biden's policies immediately if she wanted to show that she was serious about fixing things.
That's just not something I can envision her doing and her handlers probably don't want to see it happen either. If I had to wager tomorrow's box of donuts for the office on the final outcome here, I would say that the status quo remains in place. Biden continues to meander through the last few months of his presidency while Harris scrambles to generate some traction and find a way to fend off Donald Trump.
