As Democrats desperately try to cling to the candidacy of Joe Biden, at least in public, it is becoming clear that the one time party of Jefferson and Jackson doesn’t want to elect a president, they want to destroy the presidency.
The latest strand of spaghetti hurled against the wall by Biden’s defenders is that we don’t actually elect an individual to be president, we elect a team.
First of all, this is absurd nonsense and utterly antithetical to the Constitution which clearly does not contemplate a presidency by committee, but it is also a window into how a Democratic Party all in on leftism seeks to undermine that constitution.
The prospect of a mentally challenged commander in chief doesn’t terrify Democrats because ultimately they are fine with the deep state running everything under a kindly old figurehead.
While we were all distracted by Biden’s debate trainwreck, Donald Trump landed a solid attack saying that Joe Biden never fires anybody, crisis at the border, Afghanistan withdrawal, inflation, and nobody in his cabinet faced consequences.
That is because Joe Biden doesn’t tell his cabinet what to do, his cabinet tells him what to do, famously what not to do, and this is the very model that Democrats want to graft onto the entire federal government, with a fair amount of success thus far.
The biggest bugaboo the left has today is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 platform, which ultimately promotes the obvious and constitutionally sound idea that the President, as executive, is the boss of federal employees.
When the Democrats cackle that Trump will fire or replace thousands of civil servants, well, yeah, that is what an executive does with the consent of the voters, those jobs weren’t etched in stone next to the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai.
Because the federal bureaucracy is so hegemonically controlled by the left, Democrats want the president to have far less, not more control of their decisions and policies.
We also see this in living color with the Democrats’ complete meltdown over the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, which found Trump had total immunity for official acts, something the average 9th grader knew 25 years ago.
Again, this is an attempt to contain the power of the individual president, this time with the threat of future prosecution, in effect a judicial veto over any official act that can be brought by any court in the country.
Democrats don’t want the full power of the presidency to reside in any one person’s hands, they want decisions to be made by the artificial intelligence machine at McKinsey, or a panel of medical experts. There is nothing for a president to do but nod along.
In fairness, the incredible power of the American presidency is unique, even among other advanced democracies where parliaments dominate, but that is intended.
James Wilson, a proponent of a single executive at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, noted these advantages to placing so much control in one person, “greater accountability, vigor, decisiveness, and responsibility.”
If there are four terms more antithetical to everything the Joe Biden administration has done and stood for, I am not familiar with them.
What Wilson understood centuries ago was that if you hand that kind of power over to the faceless blob, nobody is responsible for anything, nobody can change anything, it just blobs along under its own anemic power.
We give individual presidents these swift and terrible powers so that Lincoln can raise an army, so that Roosevelt can build a Navy and Air Force, so that Reagan can stare down the Soviets.
We should also keep in mind that the constitution does provide a way to remove a president who is blatantly guilty of abusing his office - impeachment and conviction remain the remedy.
While it is true that owing to a rash of fairly silly impeachments in recent decades, the stain of the penalty is not so deep, it is still a way to remove a president from office.
In addition, as we are all immediately familiar with just at the moment, there is the 25th Amendment.
So, Democrats who want to throw away the constitution by curtailing executive power aren’t doing it out of fear of Trump or anyone else, they are doing it because they want that power in the hands of their deep state buddies.
It is a curious state of affairs here in 2024, in some ways we aren’t so much deciding who will be President of the United States, but if there will truly be a President of the United States at all.
