Lying about the mental state of the President and failing to discharge duties related to that mental state are both conspiracies against the United States, punishable by law, but accountability beyond jettisoning the perpetrators into political oblivion will be hard to come by.
Conservatives have long been convinced that President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline made him unable to carry out the duties of the presidency and that both Democrats and the media were engaged in a coordinated cover up to hide the truth from the American people and the world. Even before the 2020 election, the signs were clearly there. Though the President has always been prone to gaffes and various other verbal slip ups, there was something substantively different in his bizarre pronouncements, sudden flashes of anger, and inability to continue a coherent thought. To me at least, this was obvious in the late summer of 2019, long before the first primary votes were cast. At a Democrat candidate debate in July of that year, President Biden was asked about inequality in schools. He responded with an answer so rambling, it has to be read to be believed. “Well, they have to deal with the … Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure that we are in a position where—Look, we talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal of … A raise of getting out of the $60,000 level. No. 2, make sure that we bring in to the help with the stud—the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need… We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are required—I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have three, four, and five-year-olds go to school. School! Not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t know what— They don’t know what quite what to do. Play the radio. Make sure the television—excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night. The phone—make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school—er, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.” While some in the media and the Democrat Party noted this answer was a potential red flag for the Biden candidacy, the desire to stop President Donald Trump overwhelmed any and all other concerns, ultimately leading to future President Biden prevailing in the primary and the general election.
He was certainly aided in this endeavor by a media that took no interest in why then-candidate Biden was running a tightly controlled campaign from his basement, both heavily scripted and with heavily restricted access. At the same time, campaigns are essentially giant advertising operations, not known for the truth, and not obligated to reveal anything they do not wish to share. They are privately funded and can, to a large extent, do and say what they want. In other words, there is nothing illegal about hiding or attempting to hide or diminish the deficiencies of a candidate, but the same is not true once someone ascends to the presidency itself. The President, their Cabinet, and all of their staff are employees of the United States government, and via the Constitution’s “We the people” preamble are servants of the taxpayer. Thus, many if not most of the top positions swear an oath to obey and uphold the Constitution itself, above and beyond the Presidency or the President, meaning they work for us, not him or her. This brings with it certain obligations to the people directly and the rule of law generally, including transparency about the President’s physical and mental condition. The 25th Amendment was ratified on February 10, 1967 to clarify both the order of succession should the President be killed or suffer a disability preventing them from discharging their duties and the obligations of both the Vice President and the Cabinet. The amendment was ratified following the assassination of John F. Kennedy four years earlier, but was widely seen as resolving long standing issues with the succession. Eight presidents and seven vice presidents had died while in office, and several presidents had been incapacitated for various reasons and durations. President James Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881, but lingered in and out of consciousness on copious amounts of morphine until September 18. President Grover Cleveland had a secret surgery performed on him on a yacht of all places to remove a growth in the roof of his mouth in 1893. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke in 1919 and was incapacitated for almost two full years, during which his wife effectively ran the country. As a result of these and other incidents, the 25th Amendment details the role of the Vice President and the Cabinet should they feel the Commander in Chief is incapacitated for any reason. The text of the applicable clause is simple and straightforward, “Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.” Crucially, this both establishes a framework to determine when a President might be incapacitated – if a majority of the Cabinet agrees or Congress initiates an inquiry – and by doing so, obligates them to evaluate the President’s capacity and act accordingly.
Failure to do either, is a violation of their oath of office, but as we now know, this is exactly what the Biden Administration has done for over three years now. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, President Biden’s inner circle was aware of his cognitive decline almost the entire time he was in office. They described a “tightknit inner circle of advisers” who would control access to the President, intentionally limiting his exposure both to other members of the government and the American people when his decline was too apparent to hide. For example, one aide recalled telling a national security official prior to the collapse of Afghanistan in the spring of 2021 that the President “has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow.” The New York Post summarized the Journal, “Meetings were often scheduled for later in the day — a fact first disclosed after Biden’s debate flop against President-elect Donald Trump, when staff admitted the then-Democratic nominee had difficulty functioning outside a six-hour window that closed around 4 p.m. daily. Once inside the room with the president, officials were instructed to make their briefings short and to the point. Private discussions with even some of his top cabinet picks, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, grew more infrequent. One cabinet official eventually stopped reaching out to schedule talks with the commander in chief after having been repeatedly rebuffed, an ex-aide revealed. The White House also hired a voice coach, Hollywood mogul and campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, to try to improve his faint, raspy tone.” Democrat Representative Adam Smith detailed how difficult it was to speak to the President, claiming he was “more insulated than most.” “I spoke with Barack Obama on a number of occasions when he was president and I wasn’t even chairman of the committee,” he said. Representative Jim Hines said he wasn’t allowed to speak to the President at all, having “no personal contact with this president.” “I had more personal contact with Obama, which is sort of strange because I was a lot more junior,” he explained. Needless to say, members of the Biden Administration disputed this characterization, insisting “President Biden has earned the most accomplished record of any modern commander-in-chief and rebuilt the middle class because of his attention to policy details that impact millions of lives, his active solicitation of diverse opinions from outside experts, everyday Americans, members of Congress and other elected officials, his cabinet, and historians, and because of his determination to fulfill a big-picture economic agenda that realized major priorities Democrats have worked toward for decades,” but The Wall Street Journal stands by its story. They responded to this claim by noting that they spoke to at least four Cabinet secretaries, and “Our reporters were also offered interviews with Sec. Pete Buttigieg and EPA Administrator Mike Regan, who both made similar points and weren’t directly quoted. As noted in the piece, our reporters interviewed nearly 50 people; you can’t expect all to be quoted — but the views and perspectives expressed were all reflected.” Further, it’s not as if the Journal is alone. President Biden’s own Justice Department found him incapable of standing trial because of his diminished mental faculties and the entire world saw his meltdown at the debate in June.
In other words, we have no reason to trust the very same people who have been lying to us. The question is: What can we do about it? How can we hold those who lied to the American people for years accountable? When Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated, the public didn’t learn the truth until years later, the truth itself was withheld from even most of his Cabinet and almost everyone in Congress, and even so, there was no 25th Amendment. The process at the time required Congress to pass a resolution that the presidency was vacant, but they would only do so if the First Lady and his physician, Dr. Cary T. Grayson certified Wilson was unable “to discharge the powers and duties of the said office” according to the original text of the Constitution. When both of them refused to write such a letter, the government was paralyzed to do anything further. The 25th Amendment, however, cleared that impasse and allowed the Cabinet and Congress to act on its own, which President Biden’s Cabinet and even a Republican controlled Congress failed to do. Unfortunately, violating a Constitutional oath alone isn’t a crime for the great majority of the Executive Branch outside servicemen and women who are subject to laws governing dereliction of duty. The remedy in other instances is political, via the impeachment process, but those involved will shortly be out of office and hence, can no longer be removed from office. There are, however, laws regarding conspiracies to defraud the United States, laws where if “two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.” This broad language has been interpreted by the Supreme Court. First in 1924, in Hass v. Henkel, “The statute is broad enough in its terms to include any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful function of any department of government…(A)ny conspiracy which is calculated to obstruct or impair its efficiency and destroy the value of its operation and reports as fair, impartial and reasonably accurate, would be to defraud the United States by depriving it of its lawful right and duty of promulgating or diffusing the information so officially acquired in the way and at the time required by law or departmental regulation.” Second, in Hammerschmidt v. the United States, “To conspire to defraud the United States means primarily to cheat the Government out of property or money, but it also means to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest. It is not necessary that the Government shall be subjected to property or pecuniary loss by the fraud, but only that its legitimate official action and purpose shall be defeated by misrepresentation, chicane or the overreaching of those charged with carrying out the governmental intention.”
While I am no legal expert, it seems reasonable that both standards apply to lying about the mental state of the President and failing to discharge duties related to that mental state apply here, but rather incredibly, no one really seems to care. The media isn’t interested, perhaps because they engaged in a conspiracy of their own. Democrats aren’t interested, for the same and also for purely political reasons. Even Republicans aren’t all that interested, believing this only confirms what they already knew and President Biden is on his way out the door anyway. While a few conservative-friendly media outlets have rightly noted this is the biggest scandal in US political history, an understatement if ever there was one, they too seem to have accepted this was the case all along and aren’t acting as if any accountability is in order. For that matter, even I am not certain the years’ long investigation required to identify who precisely knew what and did what, when, would be worth it. At the same time, there is one thing we can do: Never listen to any of these people ever again. They – as in the Administration, Democrats more generally, and the media more broadly – colluded to cover up the mental state of the most powerful person in the world for almost four years, plunging us first into an unknown crisis with world-shaking implications and then into a scandal of historical proportions. They did so purely for their own power and political goals. They deserve and should receive nothing but scorn forevermore.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 