Not once during his presidential tenure has he managed to stand firm in defense of his oath of office.
Not once during his presidential tenure has he managed to stand firm in defense of his oath of office.
‘W e gain the strength of the temptation we resist,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Is it any wonder that President Biden now looks so weak?
As a presidential candidate, Biden promised to engage in a “battle for the soul of this nation.” As president, alas, he has surrendered each and every time he has been tested. Not once during his two-and-a-half-year tenure has he managed to stand firm in defense of his oath of office. Like Ado Annie Carnes, he is a guy who can’t say no. Into his office file the progressives, with their risible ideas and their self-serving claims, and, after a brief period of hemming and hawing, Biden either endorses their theories in outline, or, more often, does precisely what they want. Given the breadth and tone of his rhetoric, one might expect to see some examples of Biden manning the barricades. There are none. He caved on court-packing. He caved on the filibuster. He caved on the eviction moratorium and on the vaccine mandate and on student loans. This week, he’s refusing to rule out raising the debt limit without Congress. This is the guy who was supposed to save us from Donald Trump?
Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, “No” is an extremely easy word to say — far easier, in fact, than almost all of the others in the dictionary. As a matter of fact, it is possible for a president to push back against those who are attempting to seduce him without ever having to use any words with multiple syllables or unusual pronunciations. “No,” a president can say when asked if, in contradiction of his prior positions, he intends to adopt the latest fringe nonsense. “No. I swore an oath to the law, and I want to make sure that I keep it. It would be wrong if I did that, so I will not.”
Biden could have delivered this answer verbatim when he was asked if, despite having previously described the idea as a “boneheaded” notion favored by people who had been “corrupted by power,” he favored packing the Supreme Court. He could have delivered it verbatim when he was asked whether he supported the abolition of the same filibuster that he’d once characterized as a check “against the excesses of any temporary majority” that was opposed only by people hellbent on “tilting the playing field on the side of those who control and own the field.” He could have delivered it verbatim when he was asked whether he would agree to bypass Congress and impose an eviction moratorium that, having “kicked the tires” and “double, triple, quadruple checked,” he understood was “not likely to pass constitutional muster.” He could have delivered it verbatim when he was asked whether he would order a federal vaccine mandate that his own press secretary had confirmed was “not the role of the federal government.” He could have delivered it verbatim when he was asked whether he intended to side with progressive activists against the Department of Education, against a bewildered and emphatic Nancy Pelosi, and against the plain text of the U.S. Code, and transfer the liability for a trillion dollars of student debt to Americans taxpayers. He could have delivered it verbatim yesterday, when he was asked whether he intended to unconstitutionally bypass the legislative branch and raise the debt ceiling on his own.
Biden didn’t do that, of course. Not even close. On packing the Supreme Court, he said that voters “don’t deserve” to know his position. On the filibuster, he said that the tool he passionately supported for five decades was a “relic of Jim Crow” and should be reconsidered. On the eviction moratorium, he said that, while he understood that his actions were illegal, he hoped he could “keep this going for a month, at least, I hope longer,” while it was litigated. On the vaccine mandate, he attacked the Supreme Court for having blocked the “common-sense life-saving requirements for employees” that his administration had previously conceded were not within the executive branch’s purview. And, having vacillated for months on student loans, he eventually gave in to pressure from Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock and released what may be the most contemptuously weak legal memo in the recent history of the United States.
Words will only take a man so far. It is all very well for presidents to give saccharine speeches about integrity and norms and the importance of the rule of law, but what really matters is whether they are willing to back them up with self-abnegating resolve when it is inconvenient to do so. Since he took office, President Biden has proven unwilling to do that at any point, and, over time, Americans have noticed. An American Cincinnatus? Hardly.