What We Warned About Biden

Plus, farewell to Chevron deference

Biden campaigning in New Hampshire four years ago.

The presidential debate is the topic of my latest New York Sun column, which I filed at about 11:30 pm last night and was published shortly thereafter:

By the time the presidential debate was over, President Biden looked like some athlete in a contact sport who waited too long to retire. Slack-jawed, hoarse, dazed, gazing vacantly into space, desperately trying to complete a thought, a sentence, or distinguish between billions, millions, or trillions, Mr. Biden looked like he was barely going to make it safely to bed tonight, let alone to the end of his presidency. Asking America to trust him to lead the country for another four years seemed preposterous.

The poor performance leaves the Democrats with a dilemma. Mr.  Biden did terribly, but maybe not quite so terribly that it justifies swapping him out at this juncture for another candidate. The other potential candidates all poll worse or the same against Mr. Trump. …

Please check the whole thing out over at the Sun.

Longtime readers will not have found Biden’s problems on the debate stage to be a surprise. Here’s a piece I wrote for the predecessor site to The Editors, FutureOfCapitalism.com, on June 29, 2023, which holds up pretty well in retrospect:

 Biden's Blunders

The White House transcripts of two Biden speeches yesterday indicate that the president is a little confused.

From the big "Bidenomics" speech: "the shame [sic] of working-age Americans in the workforce — the share of them — the share of them is the highest it's been in 20 years." And "today, with the help from the Inflection [sic] Reduction Act — Inflation Reduction Act."

From a talk at a Chicago fundraiser: "We stripped the dignity and pride and hope of one community after another all across America, particularly from Western Pennsylvania and going through the Middle East — I mean, through the middle of the country and down south." ...

More from the big Bidenomics speech, with the strikethroughs and brackets from the White House:

under the trickle-down economic thr- — theory, three quarters of U.S. industries grew more con- — concencra- — I mean — excuse me — consecrated [concentrated]. I'm thinking I didn't go to mass. (Laughter.) They c- — they were moving to diminish competition.

Well, that may have been things — made things easier for big corporations. But for everybody else, it made it harder and more expensive. It got harder for bus- — small businesses to compete. It stifled integration [innovation]. It reduced wages for — for workers. And it made our supply chains more vulnerable.

So, folks, that's been the Republican plan so far. Good for big business. Bad for everybody else. It's not even that good for big business anymore.

When I came to office, it was a very different plan: a limited contertation [concentration] of power at the expense of consumers.

It's one thing to have trouble pronouncing or finding the correct word; it's another thing to have a shaky grasp on the policy details. In the Bidenomics talk, Biden said, "I'm not talking about the old, old days of 70 percent tax. I'm talking about a fair shot. If they just paid the top — at the top tax rate that exists now, which is lower than 30 percent, we'd raise billions and billions of dollars." The top tax rate now is not "lower than 30 percent." The top federal income tax rate is 37 percent. It's possible Biden meant the long-term capital gains tax rate, but that's not what he said. Some income is also subject to state income taxes or to an additional 3.8 percent Net Investment Income Tax.

Anyway, you see this sort of thing and it makes it easier to understand why so many Republicans are in the presidential race—they aren't just positioning themselves for 2028, they think they have a real shot at defeating Biden in 2024, on the theory that once Americans start seeing this guy in action on the campaign trail or on a debate stage, the weaknesses will be clearer and clearer. [emphasis added].

Here’s a piece from The Editors on April 19, 2024: 

The White House transcript, as is frequently the case, also contains strikethroughs and brackets that record Biden’s trouble speaking, even from a teleprompter, at these sort of events.

It was even harder to believe just two months later, on June the 5th [6th].  I had just graduated from law school, earned an incredible — and learned about an incredible man, later that night, had been assassinated….

Are you ready to choose freedom over [and] democracy?  Because that’s America.  (Applause.)

The New York Times has an article about this event by Nicholas Nehemas and Michael Gold that mentions neither of the blunders nor the budget cut claim. That creates an opening for publications like this one to fill in the gaps and let readers in on news that the left-leaning press doesn’t think is news.

The best face to put on it is that Biden may be not terrific in a debate format and may have lost some zip on his fastball but nonetheless has values, judgment, experience, and management skills that are sufficient to lead the country more successfully than Donald Trump. He’s surrounded himself with a strong team that helps to compensate for any weaknesses, this argument might go.

Some tens of millions of Americans will buy that and vote for Biden, but at this point it seems unlikely to be enough to get him elected, especially because Trump makes a somewhat convincing case that Biden’s not merely a bad debater, but an overall weak leader whose failures have translated into chaos at the border, in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Middle East, and in American cities and college campuses. It’s probably too late to try to swap Biden out for an alternative candidate, and given the alternative candidates available, it’d probably be futile even if the Democrats do try it.

An end to Chevron deference: Were it not for the presidential debate, the big story would be the Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.

In a 6-3 ruling (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson dissenting) the justices overturned the 1984 precedent of Chevron USA v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The effect is that courts no longer have to defer to the executive branch’s interpretations of statutes. 

The case was brought by Atlantic herring fishermen in New England who objected to a federal government mandate that they hire and pay an observer, at $710 a day, to ride on the fishing vessel and enforce catch limits. 

Gina Raimondo is the commerce secretary and former governor of Rhode Island who has a reputation as one of the more business-friendly and centrist Democrats; she’s even mentioned as a possible substitute presidential candidate. That it’s her name on the case says a lot about how the administrative state has a tendency to rope in even the most well intentioned and sensible public servants, and why giving that administrative state a legal advantage, as Chevron did, is a mistake.

It’s good for free markets and growth to have that Chevron precedent overturned, and it’s been a goal of free-market-oriented advocacy groups for a long time. Justice Kagan, in her dissent, makes a rule-of-law argument for respecting precedent, an argument that Justice Gorsuch gamely engages in his own concurrence. It’s worth engaging, but so are the herring fishermen whose family businesses are forced to pay for bureaucrats that Congress never actually ordered, but that some agency—in this case, the National Marine Fisheries Service—has interpreted as being necessary. The herring fishermen’s relief in this case will be shared by lots of landlubbers who are also trying to make a living with as little meddling as possible from imperious federal government bureaucrats. 

Recent work elsewhere: “Jewish Leader Slams New York Times for ‘Dreadful’ Bias as Paper Faults ‘Ferocious’ Israel, ‘Rabidly Partisan’ Adelson” is the headline over my latest column for the Algemeiner. Please check out the full column over at the Algemeiner for the details.

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