If Biden Doesn’t Have the ‘Capacity’ to Do the Job, He Shouldn’t

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, November 13, 2023

 

In Politico, Jonathan Martin has authored a long feature titled “Here’s How Biden Can Turn It Around,” which, before it gets into the nitty-gritty of our president’s present political predicament, contains this remarkable passage:

 

2024 will be an extraordinary election, and it demands extraordinary measures.

 

That’s in part for reasons Biden refuses to accept: his capacity to do the job. The oldest president in history when he first took the oath, Biden will not be able to govern and campaign in the manner of previous incumbents. He simply does not have the capacity to do it, and his staff doesn’t trust him to even try, as they make clear by blocking him from the press. Biden’s bid will give new meaning to a Rose Garden campaign, and it requires accommodation to that unavoidable fact of life.

 

I must stop Martin right there. This is not “extraordinary”; it is disqualifying. If, as Martin proposes twice in the space of a single paragraph, Joe Biden lacks the “capacity to do the job” in a manner that allows him to “govern and campaign in the manner of previous incumbents,” then he cannot be the president of the United States. As is his wont, Martin is more focused on the “campaign” part of the equation, but, relative to the “govern” part, that doesn’t matter. If what Martin describes is true — and judging by what we can all see with our own eyes, it clearly is — then the question before us is not whether Joe Biden can win a second term, but how long it will take before he triggers a constitutional crisis.

 

Martin writes of Biden: “He simply does not have the capacity to do it, and his staff doesn’t trust him to even try, as they make clear by blocking him from the press.” I would invite you to read that line again: “His staff doesn’t trust him to even try.” In our system of government, the flow of power cannot be configured that way around. Joe Biden is the president of the United States; Joe Biden’s staff works for him. If, because Joe Biden “does not have the capacity” to be president, Joe Biden’s staff is in charge of Joe Biden, then Joe Biden is not the president of the United States, and we have a foundational problem of democratic accountability. Were Biden to win again, the considerable powers laid out in Article II would be granted to Joe Biden, not to his staff. It would be Joe Biden, not his staff, who would take the oath of office. It would be Joe Biden, not his staff, who would be expected to sign or veto legislation, issue pardons, and nominate officers and judges. It would be Joe Biden, not his staff, who would enjoy the position as sole commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States. In our partisan era, it can be tempting to think that control of the White House flits between “Republicans” and “Democrats.” But it does not. It moves between people. If, indeed, Joe Biden cannot handle the job, then he is ineligible to be among those people.

 

As a practical matter, it is difficult to guarantee this arrangement when a president who is unable to perform his duties is already in office. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a terrible stroke and, instead of resigning, encouraged his wife, Edith, to usurp both the will of the voters and the Constitution’s separation of powers and become acting president for more than a year. The White House website describes this as if it’s no big deal: “After the President suffered a severe stroke,” its page on Edith Wilson records, “she pre-screened all matters of state, functionally running the Executive branch of government for the remainder of Wilson’s second term.” PBS, by contrast, makes clear what actually happened: “Protective of both her husband’s reputation and power,” the outlet relates, “Edith shielded Woodrow from interlopers and embarked on a bedside government that essentially excluded Wilson’s staff, the Cabinet and the Congress.” Were Joe Biden to be so afflicted, it would be tough to prevent a repeat. But that is a wholly separate question from whether Americans ought to reelect the man for another term. When Martin describes “how Biden can turn it around,” he is not addressing the remaining 14 months of Biden’s first term, but outlining how Biden can win reelection and remain president for the next five years, two months, and seven days.

 

Stop and look at those numbers: Five years, two months, and seven days. That’s 1,895 days. It’s 62 months. It’s 270 weeks. It’s 45,480 hours, or 2,728,800 minutes, or 163,728,000 seconds. If Joe Biden is not trusted by his staff now, how do we think things are going to be as those years, months, weeks, days, minutes, and seconds count down? What sort of pieces will be written in Politico two years from now, in November 2025? How will Biden be described in 2027? What level of autonomy and drive can we expect from him in 2028? If it wishes to, the American public can return Joe Biden to office in November 2024. He ought not to be asking it to do so. Jonathan Martin proposes that, to be successful, Biden’s campaign must “accommodate” the president’s enfeebled state, but he never quite follows that conceit through to its logical conclusion, which is that if Biden’s campaign is too much for the man, then so, quite obviously, is the presidency. Unencumbered by the professional responsibility to ignore what sits directly in front of us, the rest of us should refuse to make the same mistake. The demand that Joe Biden is now making of the American citizenry is not reasonable, and there is no good cause for any of us to pretend otherwise.