The latest Suffolk University-USA Today poll found 86% of Democrats comfortable at the thought of Vice President Kamala Harris taking over if President Joe Biden can’t make it to 2028. This is no empty hypothetical question because American men who reach 70 die on average at 84. Biden would need to make it to 86 to complete a second term.
That is a big reason why 73% of U.S. adults, including 47% of Democrats, would prefer Biden not to run again. He wants to renew his job contract even though, like his principal rival, he is manifestly unfit to do it.
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So, what is going on? The reason for the 86% is not that Harris is hugely popular. On the contrary, she is less admired than her floundering boss.
A likely explanation, it seems to me, is that although Democrats would prefer a vigorous leader like former President Barack Obama, they’ve now seen for two-plus years how easy it is to advance their radical agenda with an empty suit in charge. A lot of radical things get done if the president is no more than a figurehead grinning on the prow of a leftist warship.
But someone must be exercising power. People often wonder who is pulling the strings of the Oval Office puppet, for Biden isn’t acting as the centrist he promised to be. He hasn’t resisted any leftist extreme — spending trillions of borrowed dollars stoking inflation and crippling savings, opening the border to illegal immigration, and proudly hanging the LGBT flag more prominently than Old Glory at the White House.
You name it — he’s with the program. So the Left is rolling its tanks largely unchecked across our economy and culture, and faster now than when they had a real leader. Content-free Biden suits Washington’s permanent left-liberal bureaucracy down to the ground.
If another nonentity such as Harris took over, things would work just the same. And it would create an incumbency advantage in 2028. What’s not to like if you’re happy with the country’s trajectory and rapid repudiation of the values it once stood for? Who thinks that way? Left-wing Democrats and (tautologically) federal bureaucrats.
Shifting power to an unelected oligarchy is especially obvious when a man who is hardly present is president. But it is not a new phenomenon. For decades, unelected regulators have effectively created new laws by reinterpreting old ones along radical lines. There has been a decadeslong power grab by the central command in Washington, militating ceaselessly against the individual freedom of ordinary Americans.
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This has not always been resisted. Congress has ceded much of its constitutional role willingly so pols can focus on elections — raising money and avoiding difficult votes — rather than governing. Pushback is still far too weak, but it can be seen, for example, in the House Republican majority passing the REINS Act on June 14 requiring congressional approval of any regulation that costs more than $100 million.
It won’t pass the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats. But it should, for it would be a start to Congress reasserting its proper role. Power abhors a vacuum. And power is being exercised in Washington, even if not by the vacuum in the Oval Office.
