Time to Disavow Biden

There was a time when my support for Joe Biden extended beyond the need to find someone, anyone, half-decent and honest to replace the walking, scheming, immoral and unprincipled catastrophe that is Trump, to the hope that the new president would deliver both a reckoning to those who did damage and a hard push to correct some of the Republic’s obvious and metastasizing structural defects. That time is gone.

Biden’s 35 years inside the system have rendered him blind to the need for fundamental repair. Instead of viewing our current dysfunction and constitutional emergency as products of systemic flaws that have accrued since the founding — and which Trump and his ilk have exploited — he sees his predecessor’s destruction of norms as an aberration, a juvenile tantrum laying temporary, but reparable, waste to a basically sound system. Nothing that a little patch here and a little paint there won’t restore. Fundamental change? Not a chance; not needed.

In Biden, we have a convinced institutionalist rather than the innovative surgeon, architect, and reformer we need to remake a broken polity. We get patchwork, superficial bandages, and bromides. His inaugural address gave us a clue, though we were distracted by our delight in the absence of Trump to get the import of Biden’s message. To overcome the pandemic, climate change, racism, and domestic terrorism, “to restore the soul and secure the future of America,” he said we need “more than words”. We need “the most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity”. This is startling and dangerous naivete.

There is little evidence that Biden recognizes the origin of our distress, the fissures in our constitutional system that have turned into yawning chasms ready to crumble. Biden may have put out the immediate dumpster fire, but he is far from a rebuilder of something better. He cannot be, thoroughly steeped as he is in Washington ways and, in particular, the clubby world of the Senate where horse trading among millionaires is the only currency. His aviators signal blinders, the inability to see that a return to an illusory pre-Trump America is a tragedy of profound dimensions.

For instance:

1. He steps into a Hummer, America’s middle finger to the climate crisis, with a shit-eating grin to demonstrate his commitment to addressing climate change? The insensitivity and cluelessness of that move, promotion of the most egregious example of American climate indifference, defied belief. The eHummer designation does not ameliorate the disgust.

2. He prioritizes his domestic program over voting rights reform to the point of postponing the latter indefinitely. Is he truly unaware that rampant Republican gerrymandering will ensure disastrous 2022 mid-term results? Can he be further unaware that new voting rights legislation, even if passed soon, will not undo in time the gerrymandering already in place? Can he not imagine the real results of those midterms, namely, the permanent loss of our democracy? How is it possible to not understand the criticality of voting rights, rights on which everything else depends? In short, his priorities are inverted, betraying the most fundamental misunderstanding of reality.

3. He continues to support the filibuster, unable to see that it prevents passage of vital federal voting rights legislation. His refusal to acknowledge the morphing of the Republican Party into a cult has left him incapable of dealing effectively with the looming disaster. His decades in the Senate have indelibly colored his mental picture, distorting current sensory data, leaving us all to suffer the immediate and long-term consequences.

4. He and his administration — Garland’s DOJ, in particular — proceed as if we lived in normal times, seemingly infected with a mental virus that distorts time, elongates it, and dulls all sense of urgency. They dragged their feet on Bannon’s indictment for contempt of Congress. They failed to object to the DC Circuit’s permitting Trump to delay the proceedings on his executive privilege claim over documents related to January 6. They de-emphasized voting rights legislation as if incapable of pushing for it and the infrastructure program at the same time. On subpoenas for the investigation into January 6, they keep asking for voluntary compliance by people who have made it clear they have no intention of complying.

5. He postpones signing the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which furthers the impression of non-urgency across the board. Instead, in a preference for form over substance, he prioritizes the political moment, the ceremonial signing with multiple pens, instead of recognizing that the fruits of this legislation are what matters to the electorate, but which are not likely to be recognized for months. Where is the awareness that November 2022 is just around the corner? This baffling blindness reveals unacceptable indifference and/or incompetence.

6. He also continues to be indifferent to the criminal at Mar-A-Lago. This cannot lead to anything good, and the resulting impression of fear is terribly damaging to even a semblance of the rule of law. There is no greater example of the rules’ benefit and legitimacy than when applied (or not) at the top. Mueller provided the roadmap for doing so, at least with respect to obstruction of justice. (We can leave for another time Trump’s cover-up of pre-2016 sexual dalliances, election interference and other violations of election laws, and seditious conspiracy.)

7. Whereas Pelosi overcame her inherent conservatism when she recognized that leaving Rep. Paul Gosar unpunished for his outrageous incitement to assassination was far worse than the possibility of political payback down the road, Biden and his administration seem petrified by the mere idea of prosecuting Trump and his cronies lest such prosecutions be deemed “political”. It is the failure to prosecute that corrodes the rule of law, and it is that corrosion we need to fear. There is no evidence that Biden gets this.

8. Historical comparisons are always fraught, as circumstances are never the same. But in early July 1917, the Bolsheviks initiated a coup against the Provisional Government with mass armed demonstrations, only to back out when Lenin lost his nerve (as did Trump, fortunately, in early January 2021 under the threat of mass resignations at DOJ). Afraid to offend the St. Petersburg Soviet, Kerensky let Lenin escape to Finland where he continued to plan his next — and ultimately successful — coup. Decisive action, while risky, was clearly preferable to an outcome that lasted eight decades and reverberates still. Biden cowers before 74 million Trumpers, but it is the rest of us who will reap the reactionary whirlwind his timidity is guaranteed to bring.

9. There is no indication, either, that the Biden administration intends to challenge the validity of the pardons granted by Trump, as if these, too, were features of a normal presidency rather than the final act of a concerted four-year drama by the country’s chief executive to obstruct justice. While it is common to hear that the pardon power is unlimited, it cannot be so when the grantor’s intent is corrupt. But in place of a vigorous legal challenge to every Trump pardon — essential to the health of the rule of law — there is only silence, Biden’s tacit approval of Trump’s criminality purely for reasons of political calculation. He prioritizes the concerns of 74 million Republican voters over the 81 million who voted for him and who very much want to see Trump et al prosecuted.

10. Biden and his administration’s non-pursuit of Trump demonstrates a profound obtuseness by failing to appreciate how narrowly the country avoided a coup driven by a conspiracy that DOJ may (or not) yet come to grips with, and accountability for which last-minute Trump pardons were intended to prevent. Much as Biden wants the public to perceive it otherwise, the transfer of power from Trump to him was anything but normal, nowhere near the peaceful scenario to which Americans had grown accustomed over two centuries.

Biden’s opening the piggy bank in the form of domestic legislation changes none of this. His low poll ratings are, in part, an expression of disappointment, of indecision and cowardice. His deeply mistaken playing politics instead of standing on principle is the problem. No bipartisanship is possible with an opposition party that ex-Republican Steve Schmidt accurately calls “an organized conspiracy for the purposes of maintaining power for self-interest and for the self-interest of its donor class, and where there is no fidelity to the American idea or American democracy”. All evidence to date indicates that Biden rejects this reality. For that reason, it is no longer possible to continue to support him and his administration.