Is pushing out Biden democratic?
Also: Governance post-Chevron deference and Explaining Senator Lee
Is pushing out Biden democratic?
I keep telling folks it feels like the past five years we have been repeating the late 1960s and the 1970s, albeit in a disordered way. Cities on fire. The stink of pot is in the air. A Republican president is impeached and leaves office disgraced. Inflation. Aerosmith is touring. Dudes are sporting thick mustaches and gals are wearing jumpsuits.
And now we may see a sitting president announce he is not running for reelection.
Certainly, one can see why various Democrats and their funders want President Joe Biden to stop running for president. They think he will lose and that his health is to poor to do the job. Yet, Mark Strand makes an interesting point—with a needle.
The Democrats held a free and fair set of elections called primaries. Joe Biden won. Only now, the party elders have decided that they do not want to respect the results of the election and are working overtime to try to force President Biden out of the race. And these are the people lecturing the country about saving democracy.
This zinger raises a longstanding question about primaries: are they party events or public electoral processes?
If they are the former, well, they are just part of the party’s process for deciding, and if a convention meets and decides to dump the top vote-getter, that is their own business.
But if primaries are public events that are regulated and run by government, then aren’t we obligated to respect their results?
This conundrum is the product of the confused nature of primaries as a tool for selecting candidates. Some folks have called for returning primaries to wholly private, partisan events. Others —such as advocates for Final Five Voting— have suggested ditching primaries in favor of caucuses. Still others advise that we move in the opposite direction: make candidate selection a public exercise that forces candidates from all parties to compete on the same ballot.
From where I sit, I think this topic should be more discussed. Perhaps Nick Troiano’s new book, The Primary Solution (Simon & Schuster, 2024), will super charge the existing discussions and advocacy efforts that aim to reform or replace primaries. Time will tell.
As for Biden, whether you think it is democratic or not, if funders and top party people think he cannot win then he will go. He cannot win without them.
ICYMI: Governance post Chevron deference
Late in June, the Supreme Court discarded Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce. For four decades, this legal doctrine held that courts ought to defer to agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous statutory language, as long as such interpretations were reasonable. While Chevron deference meant to clarify the balance of power between agencies and courts, it also tipped the balance of power from Congress and courts to the executive branch.
What does the Court’s holding mean for the balance of power among the branches? My American Enterprise Institute colleagues and I partnered with the Brookings Institution’s Katzmann Initiative on Improving Interbranch Relations and Government to discuss the issue. In short, power may flow from the executive branch to the judiciary, unless Congress takes it back.
ICYMI: Explaining Senator Lee
Why did Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) shift from being a wonky, libertarian conservative to a Trumpian populist who trolls on Twitter?
Steve Hayes of The Dispatch sat down with Senator Lee to try to get an explanation for Lee’s development. The Senator says he went from trying to stop Trump in 2016 to becoming his defender and advocate because:
I didn’t believe he would govern as a conservative. I didn’t like how the primary had gone, and I had three very close friends who had run against him. I didn’t like the way he had interacted with them. I didn’t know the guy, but that’s what I knew about him, was how he had treated them. I also knew that he hadn’t been involved in government and politics recently. I wasn’t sure that he aligned with Republican policies.
Trump’s performance as president defied his expectations, “on the whole, he did things, he moved the government in a more conservative direction.”
So he changed his mind, and though Senator Lee takes issue with some of the Donald’s words and deeds—he says Trump is better than Biden on policy.
Hayes brought up January 6, 2021 with Sen. Lee, but unfortunately it did not lead to any answer as to why Sen. Lee tweeting that federal agents were cosplaying as rioters. Nor did the interview get into the other things that have left conservative admirers of the Senator scratching their heads, like Lee claiming Biden suffered a health emergency on a plane, saying the late, disgraced, former journalist Lou Dobbs would be missed, and boasting about hanging out with Nigel Farage and Erik Prinze, neither of whom are famed for being constitutional conservatives.