Forget about November, Biden should resign today

President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance raised questions about the mental abilities of the chief executive. Today, those questions remain unanswered — largely because the president and his staff refuse to answer them.

It places the country in the dangerous situation of not knowing who oversees the executive branch of our federal government.

Two similar (but not identical) themes have dominated the political discussion since the June 27 debate: whether the president is capable of winning reelection, and whether he can run the government. The former takes up much of the energy of pundits in an election year, but the latter is far more important.

No one in the Democratic Party establishment will care very much what a right-wing pundit thinks of their nominee — nor should they. But whether the president can do his job — whether he can fulfill the constitutional duties to which he has been elected — is a question that matters to all Americans, no matter their party.

» READ MORE: Biden was set up to fail at the debate. He should not be allowed to fail in November | Kyle Sammin

Biden has refused to take a cognitive examination. He continues to stumble when confronted with any sort of interview that isn’t (unethically) scripted in advance. He’s told Democratic governors he won’t schedule events past 8 at night — confirming that he knows his mental energy and efficacy have faded since taking office.

Sources within the administration have told reporters that the president is really only good between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. A mediocre news conference on Thursday is touted by his campaign as proof of his competence; it wasn’t a disaster, but it was still a depressing effort from a politician who has been talking to the press for 50 years.

The evidence all adds up to a man who can no longer faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, as his oath of office demands.

It is a difficult situation, but one that has only one legitimate solution: Vice President Kamala Harris should succeed Biden in office immediately.

For all the talk of a president as the leader of a team, he occupies a special place in the government: the one who has received a constitutional mandate. In a democracy, that matters.

No president supervises every detail of the executive branch. Even in George Washington’s day, when there were merely a few hundred executive branch employees and not the millions we have now, some responsibility was delegated to lesser officers. But the ultimate person in control was the constitutionally elected chief executive.

In monarchies of old, a declining king might find his court officials fighting to be the power behind the throne. When a king was unable to perform his duties, as in the famous madness of King George III, the result was a cobbled-together regency that lacked legitimacy. But, then again, Americans found the whole idea of monarchy to lack legitimacy, so what difference did it make whose hand held the scepter?

In our republic, things are different. A president derives his legitimacy from his election by the people. And unlike Regency-era Britain, America has a solution to this problem that we planned out well in advance: the vice president.

You might not love the way we elect presidents in this country. I suspect that if we were starting from scratch, we probably would not have an Electoral College at all. But we do have one, and it elected Biden and Harris.

You might not even think Harris would make a very good president — I sure don’t. But she is the lawful successor to the presidency. If Biden can’t do the job, his replacement is right there, elected by the same method he was, with the same democratic legitimacy.

» READ MORE: Trump’s prosecution stretched the law to find him guilty | Kyle Sammin

We elect a president and vice president. The president appoints a cabinet, whose members are not elected but are at least confirmed by the elected Senate after public hearings. These are the parts of government our Constitution tasks with oversight of the executive branch. But now, we have a president who is supposedly only at his best for a few hours a day. We have a vice president seemingly shut out of the process entirely. And we have a cabinet that hasn’t even met with the president as a group since Oct. 2.

This is the democracy the Democrats say is imperiled by Donald Trump?

When rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it was called a coup, a putsch, an autogolpe, and all other sorts of foreign words for the very un-American act of overturning an election. Those people made a hack-handed attempt to take power from the ones who were elected and give it to the ones who weren’t.

The Jan. 6 rioters failed to overturn an election. But the ones who were elected — Biden and Harris — still ended up not truly running the country. And as we hear the stories leaking out of the White House since the debate, we are forced to confront the fact that it’s been like this for some time now.

Alex Thompson of Axios reported on July 5 that one former Biden aide told him how “Annie, Ashley and Anthony create a protective bubble around POTUS. He’s staffed so closely that he’s lost all independence.” The “Annie, Ashley and Anthony” here refer to Deputy Chief of Staff Annie Tomasini, her subordinate Ashley Williams, and Anthony Bernal, a top adviser to first lady Jill Biden. Other reports name Hunter Biden (like Trump, a convicted felon) as his father’s “gatekeeper.”

I don’t recall seeing their names on the ballot in 2020, do you?