For what? Maybe forty years? My impression has been that Seymour Hersh gets his scoops from barflies in the watering holes of Washington, DC. This one may be no different but at the Post Millenial Libby Emmons is reporting that Sy Hersh’s most recent claim is that what we’ve been hearing from the White House and major media outlets has been baloney:

A new Substack out from Seymour Hersch indicates that former President Barack Obama and VP Kamala Harris, now presumptive Democrat nominee for president, threatened sitting President Joe Biden with the potential invocation of the 25th Amendment if he didn’t drop out the presidential race and cede that spot to the veep. This would mean that not only did they force Biden out of the race, but that the Democrats know full well that Biden isn’t fit to serve out the rest of his term, but are comfortable letting him continued as a figure head if it serves their efforts to retain power for the party.

Biden engaged in a debate with former President and GOP nominee for president Donald Trump on June 27. It was so bad that almost instantly Democrat leaders and pundits were looking for a way to get Biden off the ticket. They could see that there was very little chance that Biden, in his diminished state, coudl beat Trump at the ballot box. The party elite were aghast and worked hard both in public and private to oust Biden. While much of that played out in leaked rumor, speculation, it turns out, per Hersch, that what was going on behind the scenes was a kind of coup, complete with threats from the Obama Kamala team.

It’s a sad commentary when a presidential address to the nation carried on multiple networks has about the same level of credibility as the scuttlebutt in DC bars. Mister, we could use a man like Walter Cronkite again. Maybe he was no more credible than the present crop. He just didn’t have anybody fact-checking him.

Speaking of the White House I found the “Fact Sheet” produced there an interesting exercise in giving the impression of doing something while actually doing nothing interesting:

In the face of this crisis of confidence in America’s democratic institutions, President Biden is calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability…

Here are the three bullet points:

1. No Immunity for Crimes a Former President Committed in Office
2. Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices
3. Binding Code of Conduct for the Supreme Court

Each of those would require a constitutional amendment. How likely is any of those amendments to be achieved in the foreseeable future?

I did have a couple of questions. Why term limits for Supreme Court justices but not for members of the House or Senate. There are presently members of each house who have held their seats longer than any Supreme Court justice presently sitting. And why not a “binding code of conduct” for members of Congress? Or for the president?

Update

At Axios Stephen Neukam and Andrew Solender report that President Biden did not confer with congressional Democrats before making his Supreme Court reform proposals:

The White House didn’t consult Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin and other key congressional Democrats on President Biden’s proposals to dramatically overhaul the Supreme Court, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The lack of coordination with Capitol Hill signals that Biden’s SCOTUS proposals amount to more of a pre-election messaging push than a legislative imperative.

So it looks like my hipshot reaction was right.

Between meeting deadlines at work and the rapid and unusual developments in politics over the last week or so, I have been reluctant to post. I simply didn’t know what to say. The Democrats, who have been whinging about saving democracy for the last couple of years, have resorted to anything but democratic strategies for removing President Biden from the campaign and anointing Vice President Harris as his successor.

As it turns out I’m not the only one. At the Wall Street Journal Jon Kamp, Richard Rubin, and Justin Lahart struggle to figure out what VP Harris’s economic views might be:

Kamala Harris is well known for her forceful defense of abortion rights, her role within the Biden administration on immigration and border security, and her legacy as a prosecutor and attorney general of California.

But the economy is a central election issue, and there, her positions and policy goals haven’t yet been as clearly defined.

Her record does reveal, however, some clues about her priorities, including a focus on low-income workers, women, small businesses and middle-class families.

As vice president, Harris has largely moved in lockstep with President Biden on economic issues, and some analysts see this record as a road map. “In general, we think she’ll pick up the Biden-Harris mantle,” policy analysts at Evercore ISI said in a note Tuesday.

Before her time in the administration, she sometimes differed with Biden—specifically in trade and climate-related policy—often by favoring bigger governmental interventions in the economy.

For nearly 50 years Joe Biden has striven to characterize himself as a moderate by positioning himself in the center of the Democratic Party, wherever that might have been at the time. VP Harris has made no such effort. Her four years in the Senate were notable for her striking a position as the farthest left member of the Senate. Under the circumstances it seems unlikely to me that she will veer to the center of the Democratic Party let alone the center of the country should she be elected president.

The Economist struggles similarly to decode her foreign policy views:

Ms Harris did not mention foreign policy in her first campaign rally as her party’s presumptive nominee, in Wisconsin on July 23rd. Her cv on foreign affairs was thin at first, and the subject of controversy about her role in trying to deal with the “root causes” of migration from Central America. Indeed Republicans have renewed attacks on her for failing to secure the southern border.

That said, Ms Harris has become somewhat more assured lately, having visited Europe, Asia and Africa, among other regions. Her national security adviser, Philip Gordon, is a veteran of European and Middle Eastern affairs at the State Department and the White House under Democratic administrations. More than 350 former national-security officials, including Democratic Party heavyweights, described Ms Harris as “the best qualified person to lead our nation as Commander in Chief”, with more experience of foreign affairs than most recent incoming presidents.

Ms Harris shares Mr Biden’s internationalism. In February at the Munich Security Conference, an annual talkfest, she warned against American retrenchment under Mr Trump. “Isolation is not insulation. In fact, when America has isolated herself, threats have only grown.”

But just as she may lack Mr Biden’s love of Israel, she may also not fully share his generation’s instinctive transatlanticism. Unlike Mr Trump, she would not threaten to abandon European allies. But American politicians of all persuasions are increasingly preoccupied with the growing rivalry with China.

I find the attempts to characterize her efforts over the last several years as becoming some sort of foreign policy guru not just far-fetched but rather pathetic. What is far more likely is that the Department of State will continue its preferred role of dictating its preferred foreign policy direction rather than paying any attention whatever to the “temporary help”, as insiders refer to the White House.

I want to commend Isaac Saul’s take on President Biden’s ending his re-election campaign at the Tangle newsletter to your attention. To read the whole thing you need to register to receive the newsletter. Here’s a paraphrase of his bullet points:

• Biden did the right thing.
• We’re getting to watch political talking points being formulated in realtime.
• For the first time in years we’re seeing Democrats trying to attract voters rather than drive them away.
• Their present direction appears to split the difference between the least democratic response they might have made and the most democratic response they might have made.
• We’re in uncharted water.
• The president should have withdrawn earlier.
• He supports an open convention.
• Nancy Pelosi continues to be the most influential Democrat.
• Asking how President Biden is fit to serve but not fit to run is a fair question.
• The Silicon Valley tech-bro elites are becoming more obnoxious by the day.
• When he polled his friends and family about it the main reaction of Democrats was relief.
• The main reaction of Republicans was, basically, it doesn’t matter.
• When he posed the same question on X the main reaction was that VP Harris couldn’t win.
• She’s not a great politician.
• The significant amount of money raised from small contributions over the last 48 hours suggests substantial grassroots support.
• President Biden has been a drag on the Democratic Party for the last several months.
• Trump is now the oldest major party presidential candidate in U. S. history. The track record of old Republicans running against younger Democrats favors the Democrats.
• He thought that a Biden vs. Trump contest probably favored Trump. Harris vs. Trump may be about even.
• What will Biden do for the next several months?
• This will be the first Presidential election since 1976 to not have a Biden, Bush, or Clinton on the ticket.
• Trump would probably have preferred for Biden to remain in the race.
• Does this demonstrate that presidential debate do matter?
• Note that President Biden took this action without our hearing directly from him.
• This has been a pretty eventful couple of months

Those aren’t my observations—they’re Isaac’s. My only observation is that replacing President Biden with VP Harris on the ticket is the Democrats’ only play. Black women are the Democrats’ most reliable voting bloc. How would the Democrats explain passing over a black woman in favor of, say, a white man?

To that I would like to add former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s comment:

I’ve known Obama since 1995. We both come out of Chicago politics. I know how it works. He’s behind the campaign to dump 15 million Dem primary voters & replace Biden with his choice. Classic Chicago Democrat machine politics. Selection over election. The bosses over the people.

In other words there are people other than Republicans who will see it that way.

I was greatly surprised when President Biden announced he was ending his re-election campaign. As of this writing he had not endorsed anyone.

Now what? IMO the best case is an open convention and I honestly do not know what will emerge from that.

Update

David Ignatius remarks at the Washington Post:

Biden’s decision will allow a relieved country to applaud his success as president. Much of the Republican critique of Biden is pure nonsense. In fact, he helped steward sustained economic growth. He made critical investments in technology and infrastructure. He rebuilt America’s foreign alliances. And he was steadfast in the great moral challenge of our time, which was resistance to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dark designs on Ukraine and the world.

?It’s often said that if we could see ourselves through others’ eyes, we would make better decisions about our weaknesses. But Biden for many months resisted recognizing what television viewers could plainly see: that he was aging and increasingly unsteady in ways that made another term as commander in chief problematic.

Update

President Biden has just endorsed Kamala Harris.

Following up on their complaint about Democrats’ lying about President Biden’s condition, the editors of the Washington Examiner follow up with a complaint about lies with respect to the climate:

Climate change is real. The world’s average temperature is rising. It is just not rising as fast as Democrats claim and is not causing the damage Democrats say it is.

Take Biden’s statement about heat, deaths, and extreme weather events. Not one claim in that paragraph is true. In the U.S., extreme cold kills twice the number of people as extreme heat. Internationally, the numbers are even more stark, with extreme cold claiming nine times as many victims as extreme heat.

Turning to “extreme weather events,” hurricane frequency and intensity have not increased since 1900. Floods have not increased in frequency or intensity since 1950, and tornadoes have not increased in frequency or intensity since 1950 either.

I wish they were devoting that kind of attention to how the Republicans are lying as well.

My own view about climate change is that I think that climate change is a risk but not an issue by which I mean that is something which needs to be considered but is not an emergency. Furthermore, there is a fundamental flaw in the notion that we can combat global warming due to carbon emissions by buying solar panels and batteries from China. Chinese manufacturing is beyond our ability to regulate and the sad reality is that there’s a direct causal relationship between increasing Chinese manufacturing and increasing carbon emissions.

In her New York Times column Maureen Dowd has an unusually emphatic plea:

Lord Almighty, Joe, let it go!

but a little later in the column she states pretty clearly why President Biden’s inner circle is undoubtedly giving him exactly the opposite advice:

The race for the Oval today is between two delusional, selfish, stubborn old guys, and that’s a depressing state of affairs.

As for those D.C. careerists surrounding Biden who a) hid his true condition; b) gaslighted the press for focusing on what they called a nonexistent age issue; c) shielded the president from the truth about his cratering chances of winning; and d) seem to have put their self-interest first?

One way or the other, they’ll probably be out of their jobs soon.

What she doesn’t do and to the best of my knowledge no one else has either, is explain how we got in the position of having a choice between “two delusional, selfish, stubborn old guys”, one of whom has been rejected by the country once already and the other was rejected multiple times by his own party before becoming its standard-bearer.

BTW there’s bad news for Kamala Harris if President Biden stays in the race and re-elected. According to the Social Security Administration actuarial table, he’s likely to be alive at the end of his second term. What condition he will be in in 2028 I can only speculated on. And the full depletion of the Social Security Trust Fund should take place during a second term of his successor whoever that might be.

At The Hill Jeff Greenfield does his level best to explain the balloting rules of the Democratic National Convention and how, although unless he withdraws President Biden is likely to be renominated, almost anything can happen:

Particularly in an open convention, some early procedural votes could make all the difference. They could pave the way for Vice President Kamala Harris to quickly seize the nomination, for instance, or allow for a broader, more competitive contest. But either way, the rules will matter. (In what follows, I have drawn deeply from the wisdom of Josh Putnam, whose FHQ site is absolutely required reading).

The TL;DR version is it’s complicated.

At present I hold two seemingly contradictory opinions. First, I think it is very likely that President Biden will not withdraw, resign, or otherwise voluntarily remove himself from the 2024 election. Second, I think the optimum outcome for the Democratic Party would be if he did.

At Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman write:

As we can see, a modest Biden lead in Virginia would actually be consistent with a roughly 3-point Trump lead in the popular vote. While Biden’s current polling deficits in the “classic” swing states (specifically the Michigan/Pennsylvania/Wisconsin trio) are not necessarily as large as they are on the furthest right column on Table 1, the fact that we’re having a serious conversation about whether he could lose Virginia is telling. Aside from Virginia, other stronger Biden 2020 states, such as Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico are within single digits.

We are not directly addressing down-ballot races here, but this is not the kind of Electoral College situation where Democrats could be plausibly expected to win either the House or the Senate majority. It may also be that Democrats are being caught at a low point right now—but, it must be reiterated, Biden was trailing before the debate anyway. So maybe he could pull some of the bluer states back from the brink as the election got closer, but the really important states at the center of the electorate are quite possibly a different story.

Meanwhile at Axios Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen note:

The pressure to step aside as a candidate has been rising to intolerable levels, especially over the past few days.

• Democrats fully expect polls after the Republican National Convention to show a possible blowout that could bring down Democrats in Congress, too.
• “His choice is to be one of history’s heroes, or to be sure of the fact that there’ll never be a Biden presidential library,” one of the president’s close friends told us. “I pray that he does the right thing. He’s headed that way.”
• Yesterday’s AP poll, showing nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, ricocheted through the White House and Congress.

The Fair Model, updated with the BLS’s estimate of real per capita GDP growth, predicts that if he remains President Biden will not receive a majority of the popular vote. To remind you the Fair Model is neither a political analysis nor does it reflect opinion polls. It is an econometric model which has shown pretty fair accuracy over the last half dozen or so election cycles. Importantly, it also predicts that the Democratic share of the popular vote will actually decline if President Biden does not run.

That may provide us with an opportunity to see if my prediction, that complaints about the undemocratic character of the Electoral College will evaporate should Trump receive a larger percentage of the popular vote than Biden, holds true.