Why The Democrats' Coup Is A Problem
"Power At All Costs" Is NOT How The Democratic Process Is Supposed To Work
Political columnist and generally annoying hack Jonah Goldberg posed a simple question this morning:
Before the coronation of Kamala Harris is complete, I want to ask a question: What’s wrong with the Democratic Party picking a candidate without putting it to voters?
To be fair, Goldberg does make an important point that the primary election cycle is a fairly recent innovation in the American political system. Prior to 1972, the candidates in both parties were selected by the “bosses” in both parties.
That history is important context because of the rather arcane way in which the American voter actually participates in a Presidential election. As I explored when dissecting the Supreme Court’s Chiafolo decision, Americans have never technically voted for President. Instead, Americans elect slates of Electors to the Electoral College, and those individuals are the ones who actually elect a President.
In fact, fully half the United States in its early years did not hold a popular vote at all for choosing its electors. The Constitution gives a state legislature sole authority to decide how electors are to be chosen, and many states early on relied on the state legislature exclusively. Only after the Civil War did the popular referendum vote on a Presidential candidate become the universal norm.
Moreover, even after the passage of the Twelfth Amendment, the role of the American voter was still left for the individual state legislatures to decide. The Twelfth Amendment left the selection process for Electors from Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution intact.
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
As a purely historical and Constitutional question, we cannot say that voters have an inalienable right to vote for President, either during the general or during the primary elections. For significant parts of American history, many voters did not have a right to cast a vote at all in Presidential elections.
Which brings us back to Jonah Goldberg’s question: “What’s wrong with the Democratic Party picking a candidate without putting it to voters?”
As it turns out, quite a few things.
First and foremost, regardless of what the history of Presidential nominations was prior to 1972, the rule within the Democratic Party has been that delegates are to represent the will of the voters who voted for them (or, more properly, for their candidate). That is made clear by Rule 13(J) in the “Delegate Selection Rules For the 2024 Democratic National Convention.”
Delegates elected to the national convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.
The Democratic primary voters voted for Joe Biden. The presumption has to be that their “sentiments” are for Joe Biden to be the party standard bearer, even though the “conscience” language presumably gives delegates some wiggle room when there’s a major change among the candidates—such as the “revelation” of Joe Biden’s advancing dementia.
Is it a reasonable presumption for either the corporate media or Democratic Party “insiders” that voter sentiments magically shifted to “anyone but Biden” immediately after the June 27th debate debacle?
What is certain is that, in the immediate aftermath of that debate, the media narratives were focused on the concerns of the corporate media and the Democratic Party.
Pressure is mounting on Biden to step down as many Democrats and media members display hysteria following a disastrous Thursday debate.
The immediate consensus of the chattering class after the debate was, in the words of CNN’s John King, “panic”.
Still, even if that panic is justified—and a candidate with obvious advanced dementia should be cause for panic—Rule 13(J) assures us that the delegates are not there to assauge the party bosses concerns, but to vote as directed by the voters who elected them—and those voters directed them to vote for Joe Biden.
Additionally, the Democrats have steadfastly maintained that Joe Biden does not have dementia, but that he merely had a bad night.
The White House Press Secretary said that explicitly when asked explicitly about Joe Biden’s mental condition.
Democratic governors met with Joe Biden and emerged to give him their full throated support.
Yet despite this constant reassurance that Joe Biden is cognitively “okay”, Democrats in Congress and their consultant class were calling for Joe Biden to withdraw from the race. Their logic, as per David Axelrod, was centered entirely on the Democratic Party’s hold on power.
It’s a scenario that Democrats might have scoffed at a few months ago. Not anymore. “The numbers were daunting before the debate, and now there’s a real danger that they’re going to get worse,” David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s two winning campaigns, told me in the first week of July. “If that’s the case—if we get to the point of fighting to hold on to Virginia and New Hampshire and Minnesota, meaning the main six or seven battlegrounds are gone—then yeah, we’re talking about a landslide, both in the Electoral College and in the popular vote.”
Axelrod added, “The magnitude of that defeat, I think, would be devastating to the party. Those margins at the top of the ticket would sweep Democrats out of office everywhere—House, Senate, governor, you name it. Considering the unthinkable latitude the Supreme Court has just given Trump, we could end up with a situation where he has dominant majorities in Congress and, really, unfettered control of the country. That’s not far-fetched.”
While these concerns might well have been justified, what those concerns are not are the sentiments and expressed will of the voters.
Moreover, there was ample opportunity to address those concerns during the primary process itself. Instead, the Democratic Party went to some lengths to preclude any primary challenge to Joe Biden.
Rep. Dean Phillips, author Marianne Williamson and progressive commentator Cenk Uygur have encountered roadblocks in Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina and Massachusetts -- which they allege without evidence have been placed, at least in part, by the national Democratic Party, or even the president himself as part of a broader conspiracy between the "party elites" and state chapters to bend the process in Biden's favor.
The Democratic Party went out of its way to have its voter base throw its support behind Joe Biden. Now the Democratic Party is telling that same voter base “never mind”?
It is not as if there were not off-ramps and alternatives available. The Democrats were basically told all the way back in February that Joe Biden was functionally senile by Special Counsel Robert Hur.
While that would have been too late for most states to retool their primary processes, as ballot deadlines would have already passed, the Democrats could have confronted Biden’s growing infirmities then with far less controversy than they have now.
The obstacle then, which has magically vanished, was that anything was better than advancing Kamala Harris—including a senile President Biden.
Special Prosecutor Robert Hur’s damning depiction of Biden as a doddering old man in his report on the mishandling of classified documents has ratcheted up already deep-seated concerns about Biden’s age and mental acumen. That has intensified scrutiny of Harris.
Whether the president drops his reelection bid or pushes ahead to November, the vice president will become the No. 1 issue in the campaign.
Republicans are already gearing up an attack strategy centered on the long odds of the 81-year-old president being able to serve out another four-year term.
The message: A vote for Biden is a vote for Harris.
Fear of how Kamala Harris might drag the party down kept Democrats from acting when the Robert Hur report was released—when party elders could have been “statesmanlike” and navigated either a “blitz primary” as was suggested earlier this month, or having Harris invoke the 25th Amendment and step into the Oval Office as Acting President.
This is the other point that deserves mention here: Joe Biden is still President of the United States—and arguably should not be. Republican Vice-Presidential nominee JD Vance made this very argument shortly after Biden’s announcement withdrawing from the election.
The Democrats are conveniently forgetting that Joe Biden still has six more months to go as President before his term is up. Will there be a national crisis or an international incident in that time? We certainly can not rule that out, and the Democrats are currently leaving in the Oval Office a man they do not believe is fit to run for re-election.
The hypocrisy in that position is absolutely staggering.
At least honoring the voters’ will would be a consistent position of principle. If the Democrats are going to insist Joe Biden is fit to be President then the Democrats should have honored the will of Democrat voters and nominated him. If Joe Biden is truly unable to serve then he should either resign or Kamala Harris should invoke the 25th Amendment. There are no third options that allow for any semblance of ethics, honor, or integrity.
Instead, the Democratic Party has made a calculated decision about Joe Biden’s dementia based not on the will of the voters or the good of the country, but simply on how best to maintain and enlarge Democrats’ political power.
That sort of political calculus is not how the democratic process is supposed to function. “Power at all costs” is not ever a guiding precept for democratic governance.
It is, as we are seeing now, the sole guiding precept for Democrats.
Very timely and useful article. I am impressed that this is not a knee jerk reaction, but you go into the history and detail.
See kids what happens when you believe and conflate narratives with principles? You end up in a web of deceit of your own doing. This is a classic story of maintaining power for its own sake without regard to anything else but power itself.