Come on, man. We all know the answer to this question — or perhaps better put, answers.
My pal Jim Geraghty raised the issue of the Biden Cabinet’s dereliction of duty regarding Joe Biden’s unfitness for office. Based on reporting in the upcoming book from Alex Thompson and CNN host Jake Tapper, the media outlet revealed that these chief officers of the executive branch knew Biden could not perform reliably as early as 2023. They also knew that White House staff had acted to exclude them from access to the President, even though the Cabinet officials reported directly to him and had Senate-confirmed positions of authority:
Some members of former President Joe Biden’s Cabinet did not believe that he could be relied upon to perform at 2 a.m. during an emergency by the final year of his presidency, according to a new book from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson.
Several secretaries told the authors that Biden’s inner circle grew so small in 2023 and 2024 that even members of his Cabinet weren’t included.
“Access dropped off considerably in 2024, and I didn’t interact with him as much,” said one Cabinet secretary, who explained that instead of briefing Biden, the secretary would brief other senior White House aides, who then briefed the president.
In fact, it got so tight that even White House aides got excluded. But before that happened, they’d also realized that Biden was no longer competent to handle the job:
Tapper and Thompson write that White House aides who once had regular access to Biden would go months without seeing him. At some meetings, others noticed that Biden “would occasionally be mumbling and not making much sense,” according to the authors.
“I don’t think he has dementia,” said a second Cabinet secretary, according to the authors. “But the thing is, he’s an old man. The president can give you four to six good hours a day. When he got tired, sloppy isn’t the right word, but his guard was down.”
What to make of this? Even before we get to the constitutional issue, let us note that it’s not just the Protection Racket Media that has the Now It Can Be Told disease. Every single one of these people now attempting to help reporters sell books had at least a moral a duty to disclose that the president was simply not competent for the job. That includes the aides that saw Biden’s inner circle isolating him and presumably usurping Biden’s authority. They could have gone to congressional leadership to alert leadership of both parties of the crisis, even if they didn’t want to go to the press, to see if it could be handled quietly and with dignity. Instead, they all kept their mouths shut even after Biden (or his regents) launched a bid for a second four-year term in office.
However, as egregious as this is, it pales in comparison to the dereliction of duty by Cabinet Secretaries tasked by Biden and the Senate to uphold the constitutional order. The aides had a moral duty to speak up, but these executive-branch officers had a constitutional duty under the 25th Amendment to take action, as Jim Geraghty reminds us — and CNN ignores:
If the sitting president goes cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, or has some other circumstance that makes it impossible for him to adequately perform his duties, the vice president and the president’s cabinet are supposed to step in and declare that he can no longer perform the role and declare the vice president is taking over. It’s right there in the Constitution, and it has been there since 1967…
It’s one thing if the president’s meetings with members of Congress, foreign leaders, or ordinary citizens grow rarer and shorter. That’s bad, but that’s not a constitutional crisis. But if a president is deliberately avoiding meetings with his cabinet, he’s not around the only people who are empowered by our Constitution to recognize the problems in the president’s mental capacities and take action.
Exactly. So why did these Cabinet Secretaries allow Biden’s handlers to exclude them from the only person to whom they were constitutionally accountable? Why didn’t they speak up and alert the country to the crisis, especially after Biden (or his handlers) launched his re-election bid? Two explanations come to mind — neither of which makes them look good.
First: These Cabinet agency heads may have enjoyed the autonomy that Biden’s isolation provided them. As long as the Biden regency didn’t order them around, these officials may have preferred to operate entirely independently and without any accountability. What would have happened in a 25th Amendment action that actually succeeded in removing an incompetent incumbent? They would have more supervision and direction, assuming that the replacement didn’t remove them to bring in her own preferred Cabinet heads.
And that brings us to the second reason: Kamala Harris. Even if they succeeded in getting Congress to recognize Biden’s infirmity, the only result possible would have been Harris’ ascension to the presidency, either ‘acting’ or otherwise. Harris might have made some changes to the Cabinet in the aftermath of a Biden removal; Tony Blinken might have gotten the boot in favor of someone even less inclined to support Israel, for instance. Biden had not held any of these officials accountable for their myriad failures in office, especially not Lloyd Austin, who made a grotesque botch of the plan to bug out of Kabul and later went AWOL rather than discuss his not-at-all-unusual prostate issues with the President. Harris might have decided to flex her muscles and remove them from power.
However, that wouldn’t be the real reason for that reluctance. The real reason is that Kamala Harris is every bit as incompetent as Joe Biden, only for reasons having nothing to do with dementia. Harris could not be trusted with the presidency, as voters discovered in 2019 and again in 2024, when in both cycles she couldn’t even be trusted to handle the media, let alone the world.
If the United States had had a competent Vice President, the Cabinet might have acted to replace a president whose aides and families had isolated for reasons of incompetence. Their lack of action in that crisis is unforgivably cowardly, but also a massive declaration of no confidence in Kamala Harris. And then they stood by while Harris attempted to win office anyway rather than publicly demand an open and democratic process to replace the party’s nominee, compounding their cowardice.
The Now It Can Be Told moment in American public life is nothing short than an utter disgrace to everyone who kept these secrets … and that includes the reporters who buried them until a few months ago and now want to profit off of their exposure.
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