Biden needs a conservatorship

The wacky Libertarian Party, which sadly never gets anywhere in presidential elections, has just filed a petition to put eighty-year-old President Joe Biden and eighty-one-year-old Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell under “conservatorship.” The Libertarians claim that America’s “geriatric elites” are evidently unfit for public office and need, for everyone’s sake, to have all decision-making powers taken away.

The petition is a clever stunt — funny because it’s so true. There’s something deeply wrong with America’s leadership and everyone knows it.

There’s something deeply wrong with America’s leadership and everyone knows it

The Republican Party has just announced that it will be launching an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden over his possible involvement, as vice president, in his son’s dodgy business dealings. This third impeachment bid in four years is in no small part motivated by a desire to avenge the ongoing lawfare against seventy-seven-year-old Donald J. Trump.

What’s amusing is that, because Washington now so often seems to be a never-ending squabble in a retirement village, almost nobody is taking the impeachment process or the grave claims against the Bidens all that seriously. For political commentators, the immediate question is not whether Biden is guilty or not, or whether he should be removed from power. It’s whether the Republicans have made a strategic mistake in initiating an impeachment process against a president who is clearly failing. con

The latest polls show that almost two-thirds of Democrats would rather Biden not stand again. And three-quarters of all Americans have “serious concerns” about his physical and mental ability to serve his country.

The evidence of Biden’s frailty is all too obvious. At the weekend, during his trip to Hanoi for the G20 summit, the commander-in-chief once again proved all the doubters right.

His press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, felt compelled to call an end to his press conference because the commander-in-chief appeared to be on one of his now all-too familiar rambles down memory-loss lane. “I’m going to bed,” he said, addled and lost.

On Monday, to mark the twenty-second anniversary of 9/11, Biden said: “Ground Zero in New York — I remember standing there the next day and looking at the building.” In fact, he was in Washington, DC, on September 12, 2001 and there is no evidence that he traveled anywhere else.

The Grand Old Party would be in a better position to attack Biden’s mental state if Mitch McConnell, their own Senate leader, wasn’t quite so obviously unwell, too. Twice in recent weeks, he has “frozen” in public, appearing to lose all awareness of where he is and being ushered away by aides.

The Libertarians, America’s third largest party, are far too eccentric to win power. But their national committee chairwoman, Angela McArdle, sounds refreshingly sane when she says, of the conservatorship petition: “we’re committed to filing this thing and we wanted to send a really strong statement that we’re serious about getting someone in the White House who has the mental capacity to run the country because we don’t have that right now.”

She added that Biden and McConnell “have squatted in public office for decades, amassing massive wealth from lobbyists, super PACs and tax dollars.” They “stubbornly refuse to pass the torch.”

In pushing ahead with a Biden impeachment, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a spring chicken at fifty-eight, is betting that the full inquiry will at last reveal the grubbier side of what Trump calls “The Biden Crime Family” and prove that Democrats are deeply corrupt.

But in trying to remove Biden from power — a bid that will almost certainly fail unless the Democratic majority in the senate turns on their leader in the White House — the Republicans may be scrambling the electoral calculus just as it seems to be settling in their favor in the run up to 2024.

The GOP may be giving the people close to Joe Biden who are concerned about his public performances — his wife, Jill, say — a very good reason to urge him to stand aside. The bad news for the Democrats is that nobody knows who a good alternative candidate might be. All the most often-touted names are horribly flawed: Kamala Harris, the natural choice as vice president, is even less popular than Biden; Gavin Newsom has a woeful record as governor of California; Pete Buttigieg has very little popular appeal.

The most likely outcome of an impeachment inquiry is not that some damning piece of evidence will condemn Biden in everyone’s mind. It is that any and all inconvenient evidence will be ignored by each partisan side, and Democrats and Republicans will keep tearing each other apart with allegations and counter-allegations until the election cycle comes around. Bring on the conservatorship!

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.