A Decaying Joe Biden Underlines the Need for a Less Powerful Presidency
The power of the office is excessive, and we don’t even know who is wielding it.
Observers of the American presidency warn with increasing frequency that the office of the country's chief executive has acquired power more befitting a monarchy than a republic with elected officials. But what if the person holding that office is a placeholder for aides who cocoon the president and who really make the decisions? That is, what if all that growing power is wielded by an unelected and relatively faceless circle of advisers? That brings us to the Biden administration which, in just one term, has powerfully reinforced the argument for making the presidency much less important.
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The Walled-In President
"Presidents always have gatekeepers," Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes wrote last week for The Wall Street Journal. "But in Biden's case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed."
In President Joe Biden's day-to-day work, they added, several key aides to the elderly official "were often with the president as he traveled and stayed within earshot or eye distance….They would often repeat basic instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage."
The New York Times, which has been protective of Biden's tarnished reputation, conceded in a story by Peter Baker and Zolan Kanno-Youngs that "time is catching up with Mr. Biden. He looks a little older and a little slower with each passing day." People who traveled with the president noted that he "maintained a light schedule at times and sometimes mumbled, making him hard to understand."
None of this is especially surprising to the American people at this point. Even before Biden's disastrous debate performance in June, which forced him to surrender dreams of a second term, surveys found overwhelming majorities—86 percent in a February 2024 ABC News/Ipsos poll—thought he was too old to serve four more years in office. That followed special counsel Robert Hur's decision not to prosecute Biden for illegally retaining classified materials because he "would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
Major Decisions by Whom?
That's terribly sad. But it's also disturbing given that Biden is still the president of the United States and will remain so until Donald Trump is inaugurated next month. If Biden is too tired, forgetful, and feeble to exercise the powers of the presidency, who is making the decisions that emerge from the White House?
"It's unclear even to some inside the West Wing policy process which policy issues reach the president, and how," Semafor's Ben Smith reported in July, citing "a government official with regular access to the West Wing" as his source. "Major decisions go into an opaque circle that includes White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients (who talks to the president regularly) and return concluded."
The Times and Journal stories (Linskey and Hughes wrote an earlier take in May for the Journal on the same topic) support Smith's suggestion that policy is being crafted by obscure, unaccountable White House advisers. We've already been down that path, when Edith Wilson stepped in to act as de facto chief executive when her husband, President Woodrow Wilson, suffered a stroke. That was unacceptable and dangerous then, and it's even more so now given the greater power concentrated in the White House.
Asking, and Allowing, Too Much of the Office
"For far too long, Americans have looked to the presidency for far too much," Gene Healy wrote in the new edition of his book, The Cult of the Presidency. "No longer a limited constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws, the federal chief executive has been transformed into a quasi-messianic figure, expected to create jobs, teach our children well, advance freedom worldwide, and serve as a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, stock market turmoil, and spiritual malaise."
Worse, adds Healy, "as our politics took on a quasi-religious fervor, we've concentrated vast new powers in the executive branch" in the form of unilateral power to wage war overseas and set policy at home through executive orders. The process has been accelerated by crises, including the 2008 financial collapse and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch agrees.
"Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country," Gorsuch wrote last year about a case that came before the court dealing with pandemic-era executive actions by the president regarding immigration. "Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale."
"Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow," he concluded.
That's bad enough when political figures who campaigned for and won the votes to take office stretch the power of their office beyond its constitutional bounds, as presidents from both major parties have increasingly done. But now we have Joe Biden who, by all accounts, has become a figurehead in his own White House, with much of the serious work done by those around him.
Biden's departure from the scene next month doesn't resolve the issue. At 78, Donald Trump is "young" only by comparison to the octogenarian he'll succeed. While his lapses pale by comparison to Biden's, he's had a few apparent senior moments of his own. Those could worsen over the next four years.
Strip the Presidency of Dangerous Power
But even if Trump retains his health and mental faculties, the precedent of political apparatchiks nudging failing or simply weak elected officials aside in favor of their own judgment is a terrible one. Down that path lies Potemkin elections that have little to do with the people who govern the country and the policies they impose on the rest of us. We'll have rule by anonymous committees with a little democratic window dressing.
And there's no way to guarantee that presidents won't become enfeebled or sick in the future. If they do, the power of their office will be available for the taking by ambitious White House aides. The only way to prevent the excessive power of the kingly presidency from being hijacked by those surrounding the throne is to remove its monarchical qualities.
To preserve the presidency as an office of a republic, it should be stripped of much of its power.
