Were President Joe Biden not a lame duck, his attack on the Supreme Court would be more worrying. It’ll go nowhere but it is nevertheless another stain on his thoroughly soiled career, undertaken in a last desperate partisan gasp as the Democratic Party shoves him ruthlessly aside.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called the president’s plan “dead on arrival,” to which Biden responded with now-characteristic clumsiness, “I think that’s what he is.” This was especially awkward given that former President Donald Trump had been shot by a would-be assassin two weeks earlier.