Our election clock is ticking faster. The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday has added a strange and untested new variable to our political equation. Trump’s nomination of Ohio U.S. Sen. JD Vance has defined the Republican ticket. And federal Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the classified documents indictment against Trump raises other disturbing questions about the evident politicization of the federal judiciary.
Yet the most turbulent matter remains the dilemma that has dogged the Democrats the past month: whether President Joe Biden should stay atop their ticket or whether the party needs to pursue some new strategy to retain the White House.
Three potential options await Democrats as they wallow in despair. Two rest on Biden exiting the race voluntarily, at the strong behest of party leaders. The third recognizes that Biden is the incumbent who carries a truly impressive record with him and the duly nominated candidate who faced no serious opposition in the primaries.
The first and most radical option would have Biden exit the race now and leave it to the party convention to choose its ticket. This is the scenario that the media would most love, which may explain why so many news pundits so eagerly derided Biden. The likely field of contenders would consist of Vice President Kamala Harris and the three big-state governors: Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. All four would be highly acceptable to the mass of Democratic voters. Whitmer and Shapiro have the advantage of governing two states that Democrats desperately need to carry.
But if all four candidates are equally acceptable, on what basis would the party choose among them? And how would anyone other than Harris be ready to manage and finance a campaign of two months? The second option offers a simpler and more effective solution. Biden should not only exit the race, but he also should resign from the presidency now and have Harris succeed him. That would give her the advantages that flow naturally from occupying the presidency. She is the most national of the four likely contenders and arguably the one best prepared to discuss and debate any issue. And elevating her in this way would avoid the grave damage of alienating a crucial and deeply loyal bloc of Democratic voters: African American women.
The third option, however, is the one Biden remains most committed to pursuing. He is the party’s chosen nominee and everyone else should simply unite behind him. He has also been the victim of a sustained media assault that has offended many Democratic voters, even as the press takes Trump’s many bizarre statements essentially for granted. The closer we get to the election, the more compelling that comparison will be. Not only will Biden still embody the positions Democrats generally favor, but also, the manifest anxiety that the specter of a second Trump presidency will evoke would concentrate every Democrat’s political imagination. In the end, whatever one’s personal preferences or worries, every American voter will face the same binary choice.
Yet that still leaves unresolved the pervasive qualms about Biden’s age. The president and his party need to address these qualms directly and even aggressively. To do so, they should consider taking a surprising course. They should indicate that the administration and the party are wholly willing to deploy Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, which empowers the vice president and a majority of “the principal officers of the executive departments” to indicate when “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Because no one has argued that Biden is incapable of serving as president now, a commitment to the future deployment of the amendment, when deemed necessary, should become a core element of the party’s position going into the election.
Biden himself should take the initiative of proposing this course of action, either in his acceptance address at the Chicago convention or in another special statement. Harris and senior Cabinet members should accompany the delivery of this declaration. They, too, should vigorously reaffirm their adhesion to the commanding principle of the 25th Amendment: that the president, the sole holder of executive power, cannot hold office when his competence is seriously in question.
Such a strategy would also pursue other political objectives. In contrast to the events of Jan. 6 and the two failed impeachments of Donald Trump, it would evince a Democratic fidelity to the Constitution that Republicans no longer muster. Second, and more important, while Biden’s voice may be faltering, and some of his sentences rest incomplete, there is little question which candidate is less compos mentis than the other. When was the last time Biden worried about the epic struggle between the battery and the shark, or the flight of electric planes when the sun is not shining, or, for that matter, whether it is the exporter or the consumer who pays the cost of a tariff? Bringing the 25th Amendment back on stage would serve a powerful educational function because it would remind us to ask why it was never applied to Trump.
One final point needs to be made. In our current passion, it is a commonplace to ask: Why is Biden so stubborn? Why doesn’t he read the polls and do the right thing? These questions seem so simple and easy to answer, right? But a still tougher question is: How is it possible that a defeated incumbent who staged an insurrection is even a viable candidate for election? How is this race even competitive? Why does speculation about a potential future harm, for which the 25th Amendment supplies a constitutional remedy, outweigh the manifest treachery of Jan. 6?
In the end, it is not Biden or his party that is placing the nation at risk, but the people themselves. We are the ones who are being tried in the balance, perhaps to be found wanting.
Jack Rakove is an emeritus professor of history and political science at Stanford University. His book, “Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution,” earned the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for history.
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