Biden's Disasters

There’s usually a bit of a satirical edge in my political posts, because humor illuminates truth. Or so “they” say. In this case, my thinking about our current problems began in deep sadness.

Some background is necessary. My maternal grandmother lived and breathed politics. Her father had been a biggish fish in a small pond, but her father-in-law was a biggish fish in a big pond. Everyone was a Democrat in a city and state that lived under one-party rule. That being the case, primaries were the real election, and primaries highlighted the party fault lines: north and south; big cities, like Chicago and New York, versus the countryside; and trade union left and right. In the south, if you wanted to have any political say, you had to work within the party, which caused another split: Jim Crow supporters and those who thought that Jim Crow was not only bad policy, it was immoral. My grandmother believed it to be immoral. I know this, because she told me about meetings with the governor to discuss Brown V. The Board of Education. She wasn’t happy with separate but equal, but there wasn’t enough pull in the party on her side to get much done in the 1950s.

When I was four, she began taking me to the state capitol and introducing me to state and federal senators and representatives and city leaders. Never ones to alienate a mover in the party with her future voter in tow, everyone was quite polite. As I got a bit older, my grandmother explained various issues, such as Brown, and the rigors of primary day. In my childhood, pleasant afternoons would be disrupted by a call alerting her that the opponent’s minions were picking people off the street, giving them a pack of cigarettes, and taking them to the polls. Or some other equally shameless ploy was afoot. She would rush out to put a stop to such shenanigans. My politically irreverent father often asked her how many dead people voted this time, and I’m not entirely sure he meant only the other side. My grandmother died before I reached voting age, and I miss her, but every time I look at Nancy Pelosi I feel like I escaped a terrible fate. Eventually, I and all my family walked away from the Democrats.

So here we are in the summer of 2021. It would take too long to go through all of President Biden’s disasters. The crisis at the boarder, inflation, dependence on OPEC and Russian oil, flouting the Supreme Court, and now Afghanistan. (And yes, there are more.) I can guarantee that there has been wailing and gnashing of teeth behind closed Democrat doors that is now reaching a crescendo.

If moderate Democrats want to retain their seats, or even a bit of self respect, they have to impeach Biden or invoke the 25th Amendment. But then what? No one likes or trusts Kamala Harris - certainly not her staffers or party members who voted in the primary - and it would be too painful to listen to her cackle from the White House. So she steps down. Nancy Pelosi is next. While she might know more about ice cream and geopolitics than Harris, she’s too old and has spent too much political capital focusing on personal politics. So here’s my solution: Congress could call an emergency session and honestly address the problems - just kidding, that’s not going to happen.

Without Congress, we have to get creative. Maybe recognizing that millions of Americans think there was something fishy about the 2020 election and anticipating the audits - not recounts - of ballots in several states, the Democrats should get out ahead of the problem. Invoke the 25th, impeach, or tell Biden to step down. Harris is sworn in with Donald Trump as her vice-president, then she steps down. I suggest down ballot audits in all 50 states if Congress is too narrow minded to contemplate this innovative, but Constitutional, solution. We’d find a lot of interesting facts in that audit.