Month: July 2024

Michelle Cottle is perhaps not responsible for the headline of her New York Times article: The ‘Philly Girl’ Shielding Biden From the Bad News. But she is responsible for writing that “if Mr. Biden is determined to stay in this race, Jilly, as he calls her, is going to have his back,” and not to “expect appeals to the common good to impress her.”

Cottle is responsible for writing this:

Dr. Biden has seen him through enough blows to his spirit. She knows better than perhaps anyone else how public service has kept him going, through the good times and the unimaginably awful ones. After everything the two of them have been through together, she is not the person to nudge him out of the game for the greater good. She may not even be the person to raise the question of his enduring legacy.

Such abstract arguments seem better suited for someone with a bit more emotional distance…

Cottle only allows for one circumstance where the First Lady would advise her husband to end his reelection campaign.

The only argument for Mr. Biden stepping aside that feels as though it might pass muster with his wife is that staying in the race would destroy his health or well-being. In light of how stressful the presidency is and what it clearly has done to him already, that might seem like an obvious assumption.

But even here, Cottle is not inclined to give Dr. Biden much credit, writing “few spouses are cleareyed about the true toll that time is taking on the love of their life.”

I understand the impulse to write this piece. The history of the president’s career and Dr. Biden’s role in it are highly relevant to what happens now. And it’s important to know that the First Lady is a fierce defender of her husband who won’t be bullied by anyone. But it’s completely unwarranted to argue that Dr. Biden is incapable of thinking about the greater good or of having a clear-eyed view of her husband’s capacity to serve four and a half more years in the presidency. As for the headline, it’s not justified by what Cottle wrote, since she didn’t argue that Jill is keeping bad news from Joe. What she wrote is that people shouldn’t expect Jill to make an unblinkered appraisal of the situation and act accordingly. Essentially, Cottle is saying that anyone counting on the First Lady to ask Biden to bow out is going to be disappointed.

My problem isn’t that Cottle makes that prediction, which could well be correct. My problem is that she pretends to know things about the Biden’s relationship that she couldn’t possibly know, and that she is disparaging of Dr. Biden without justification. Maybe we should wait to see what the First Lady before we make absolute determinations about her capabilities?

Here’s what I think we can say with relative certainty. If Biden stays in the race, Jill will defend him with everything she has. What she advises him to do and whether he will follow that advice are unknowable, and reporters shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Today, for the first time in a long time, I read the entire Declaration of Independence. It just felt like something I needed to do. Some people feel like fleeing the country, but I’d be ashamed to give up the fight. And where could one go where the fight against fascism isn’t the number one issue. Certainly not Europe, where it is aggressively on the march, as seen by the first round of France’s parliamentary elections this past weekend. Is the fight any less urgent in Australia or Canada? Are they not just as connected to the free world as we are?

The Declaration tells us that to pursue Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. What do we do when we are no longer asked for our consent?

Our country is founded on the idea that whenever “any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” But also with the acknowledgment that “Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.”

Why, oh why, did the Supreme Court change our form of government for so light and transient a cause as keeping Donald Trump out of prison? This is the most dramatic and irredeemable result of Trump’s influence yet. To affect one presidential election, the Supreme Court has placed an unending succession of kings above us.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his ruling on Donald J. Trump v. United States, gives the president of the United States immunity to commit any crime provided that it can be argued to involve the office’s executive powers. Because the Constitution vests the president with the responsibility to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” he or she is in charge of federal law enforcement. But because the president is no longer expected to obey the law, he or she is free to use law enforcement for illegal purposes. The only possible remaining remedy is impeachment, but impeachment is reserved for bribery, high crimes, and misdemeanors. If it’s impossible for the president to commit a crime in the exercise of his power, that presents a problem even for impeachment.

Consider the issue of bribery. The Constitution gives the president the power to issue pardons. If the president takes a bribe in return for a pardon, he’s now immune because he’s exercising an official act authorized by the Constitution. Presumably, this would be one crime still clearly covered by the impeachment clause, but pardons are often done when presidents are leaving office on their own accord. There’s simply no way to disincentivize taking bribes for pardons in those cases.

Then there’s the provision of the Constitution that makes the president the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. There are obviously laws of war, but universally they no longer apply to the president. There are restrictions on how the military may be used, especially domestically, but they now only apply to those serving in the military, not their commander. The president may order the military into the streets or order assassinations, including of U.S. citizens, and we now have to rely on those orders being disobeyed as illegal. But are they still illegal?

We are supposed to consent to being governed so that we can protect our lives, liberty and happiness, but we can now be targeted by the president using both the military and law enforcement. None of us consented to this, nor would we under almost any conceivable circumstance. But what are we supposed to do about it?

The Declaration sagely notes “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” In other words, we most likely won’t do a damn thing until we personally suffer from these evils to an intolerable degree. Maybe we’ll just flee the country and leave it to others to fight for their lives and liberty.

Addressing the nation from the White House after the ruling, President Joe Biden expressed appropriate outrage, warning “For all practical purposes, today’s decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what the president can do,” and urging people to render a verdict on Trump’s criminal coup attempt that no jury can now provide before Election Day, if ever. But he said nothing about fixing the problem created by the Court.

And it is the Court that created a new Form of Government that is destructive of the ends of safeguarding our lives, liberty and happiness. Biden should immediately demand that new Justices be added to the Court. Without this, there is no peaceful remedy. No one wants violence, but the Declaration informs us that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce [us] under absolute Despotism,” that we have the “duty” to “throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

I’m in my mid-fifties. I’m supposed to be too old for throwing off despotism. But I can tell you that winning an election doesn’t solve this. Thanks to the Supreme Court, even Joe Biden is now a despot with, as he says, “virtually no limits” on what he can do. It’s not Biden that needs to be thrown off, but the six robed fascists who made him a despot against his will.

I do not consent to this. I will not consent to Trump’s or any other president’s Justice Department or military if they come after me, or you. This won’t be fixed until it’s fixed. The Supreme Court is for now the enemy of the people. When the British king did this, appeals “for Redress in the most humble terms” were to no avail, and they will be to no avail now. Repeated Petitions will be answered only by repeated injury.

As for Trump, for whom this ruling was written, the Declaration tells us, “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” It goes without saying that he must not win the election. That would leave us no peaceful solution at all.

France, the United States and the United Kingdom each have their own unique political system, but they are still pretty similar in that they all have representative forms of government and are part of the western alliance that developed in the aftermath of World War Two. They have very developed economies backed by strong and stable legal systems and operate at least partially within a variety of international organizations built on consensus postwar principles. They all have imported cheap labor from developing or Third World countries and they all have aging native populations that aren’t reproducing at replacement level. Add to this, they’ve all just come through a series of shocks, which include most prominently the financial crisis on 2008, the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and high levels of inflation.

Finally, they all have important elections occurring in 2024. In France, the first round of parliamentary elections took place on Sunday and President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party was crushed. The far right fascist party took a strong plurality of the vote. But if you think this signals a right-wing backlash in the United Kingdom, that’s not what the polls indicate. When the British go to the voting booths on Thursday, it’s expected that the Conservative Party, known as The Tories, will be slaughtered.

The Conservatives have faced one challenge after another since they took power in 2010. First there was the fallout from the global financial crisis, which swelled Britain’s debt and caused the Tories to impose years of austerity to balance the budget. They then led Britain out of the European Union, battled one of the deadliest COVID-19 outbreaks in western Europe, and saw inflation soar after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Regardless of the circumstances, many voters blame the Conservatives for the litany of problems facing Britain, from sewage spills and unreliable train service to the cost-of-living crisis, crime and the influx of migrants crossing the English Channel on inflatable boats.

On top of that, the party has been tarred by the repeated ethical lapses of government ministers, including lockdown-busting parties in government offices. The scandals chased former Prime Minister Boris Johnson from office and ultimately from Parliament after he was found to have lied to lawmakers. His successor, Liz Truss, lasted just 45 days after her economic policies cratered the economy.

The Tories currently hold 345 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, but projections show them holding fewer than a third of them and possibly as few as 61. Brits are unhappy about inflation, even though it’s now under control, slow economic growth, poor social services and immigration. It’s a very similar set of grievances to what we see in France and shares several similarities to public sentiment in the United States.

The commonality really shows through in an anti-incumbent attitude. Even the people from each country share similar concerns, we don’t see them voting for the same policies or the same ideologies, but rather they are just in favor of putting someone new in charge. The United States is in the strange position of having the incumbent president running against his predecessor. Trump isn’t an incumbent, but he’s not a fresh face and he doesn’t represent reform or change. This is probably the main reason the American people are basically split on who to elect, where the French and the Brits are clear about throwing the bums out.

What should be clear, though, is that Biden and Harris are swimming upstream against a broad anti-incumbent sentiment that is afflicting much of the western alliance. I’d argue that Trump is tapped into some of the anti-establishment resentment, like on immigration, but he’s still running for a second term. I think he also suffers from a desire for change that he can’t meet.

This is the reason why I believe that the Republican Party would benefit from a different candidate. It’s only more true because Trump is set to be sentenced for committing 34 felonies on July 11. But the same is true on the Democratic side. Almost any candidate not named Biden or Harris would probably get an immediate bump in the polls simply because they’re new.

We’d all like to think people vote on policy, but the elections in France and the U.K. demonstrate pretty clearly that they can vote simply out of frustration with how things are going, even if it’s likely to result in even worse outcomes on the policies they care about. If Biden and Trump are the candidates, one of them will win and pundits will argue that they ran a good campaign. I think the winner will just be considered the least bad choice, and that they would have lost to almost any other candidate.

In this environment, I don’t think either Trump or Biden can really make people want to elect them no matter what they do. No matter where you look, the voters want something new.