By Rich
Lowry
Wednesday,
April 26, 2023
Joe
Biden’s video announcing his reelection bid makes much of his supposed
defense of democracy.
If it
weren’t for that, it strongly implies, he’d be happy to decamp to Rehoboth
Beach to a contented retirement rather than stay on the job until age 86,
guarding against threats to the republic.
There is
no doubt that Donald Trump’s conduct after the election was a disgrace, his
attempt to get Mike Pence to distort the counting of the electoral votes was a
grotesque dereliction of his duty (among others on that day), and, if he’d
gotten his way, he would have dragged the country into an unprecedented
constitutional crisis, even if he was very unlikely to succeed in his ultimate
objective of overturning the election result.
That all
of this is a matter of record is a large part of the reason that Biden would
have to be heavily favored in a rematch against Trump, although nothing is
guaranteed.
Trump’s
failings don’t excuse Biden’s lapses, though. One would think posing as a
defender of our system would force Biden to be more fastidious about his own
relationship to our institutions and norms, but that doesn’t seem to have
occurred to him.
It bears
noting, by the way, that Biden’s suggestion in the video that Republicans are
bent on taking away people’s right to vote is a rank lie. This poisonous
talking point should have died with the results of the 2022 election in Georgia,
which served as a stark rebuttal of the claims from Stacey Abrams and the rest
of her party that the Georgia election law was a Jim Crow (or, Jim Eagle)
exercise in disenfranchisement.
Is it
too much to ask some of the self-appointed information cops to whistle Biden
for basing a pillar of his reelection message on a provable piece of
disinformation? Why, yes, it is.
More
fundamentally, Joe Biden has shown himself to be a determined enemy of the rule
of law and constitutional constraints on the power of the executive branch.
This,
too, is almost never noted in the press but is one of the most consequential
aspects of his presidency.
Put
aside the big kahuna, the student-debt forgiveness, which has no plausible
basis in law, and the ongoing treatment of immigration law as a mere
suggestion. Just consider the acts that have been in the news the last
couple of weeks: the frank defiance of the Comstock Act prohibition on sending
abortion-inducing substances through the mail; the rewriting of Title IX on the
fly to include gender identity and to impose new nationwide rules on schools
regarding males in women’s sports; and the distortion of the rules to make
illegal immigrants covered under DACA — itself the product of an edict with no
basis in the law about a decade ago — eligible for Obamacare.
All of
this alone would be a pretty good record of lawlessness. None of it rates, but
it should.
First,
in a nation of laws, denying, ignoring, or defying the law is simply wrong,
period, full stop.
Second,
by further untethering the executive from lawful bounds, Biden is doing his
part to reverse one of the foremost achievements of Anglo-America. Through a
couple of centuries of political struggle, bloodshed, constitutional thought,
and trial and error, we neutered the monarchy in England and created a chief
executive in America embedded in a constitutional system designed to keep the
position in check.
Third,
in a two-party system, any action is going to create a reaction. The more Biden
governs by willful edict and pretextual legal reasoning, the more incentive it
creates for a Republican to do the same.
Fourth,
ends-justifies-the-means reasoning, which undergirds all these acts, is
inherently dangerous and can take you to unexpected places. (One reason
that Trump couldn’t get his way after the 2020 election is that numerous
Republican officials put the rules over their partisan interests and preferences.)
Fifth,
government by administrative edict is itself a form of indirect
disenfranchisement by taking power away from senators and representatives who
were elected from a dizzying array of states and districts to sit in Congress
and actually write the nation’s laws.
Finally,
there is no substitute for presidents and other elected officials who take
their constitutional oaths seriously. We have grown used to the courts as the
sole arbiter of constitutional matters and the backstop against lawlessness. But
they don’t always fulfill this function — bad judging and procedural questions
such as standing take a hand (and the Biden administration has, in some
instances, gamed the system to try to keep the courts from checking it). If the
political actors are faithful to our system, the responsibility for preserving
it doesn’t fall entirely on the courts.
Now,
clearly the attitude of the Biden administration and the press is that a little
bit of lawlessness in behalf of a good cause isn’t so bad. And so long as Biden
isn’t trying to undermine an election result (although his side did that in
2017) or gin up a mob outside Congress, what’s the harm? But our democracy
depends on more than simply holding a vote every four years. Lots of countries
have votes; fewer have a system that balances and distributes power so you have
elected officials beholden to a system bigger and more important than they are,
rather than autocrats.
The
republic would be safer with Biden enjoying Rehoboth Beach.
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