{"id":85293,"date":"2022-09-03T23:19:41","date_gmt":"2022-09-04T04:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=85293"},"modified":"2022-09-03T23:19:41","modified_gmt":"2022-09-04T04:19:41","slug":"85293","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=85293","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Biden\u2019s soulless screed a smokescreen for what really ails the nation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Last night[Thursday], the same president who almost exactly a year ago disgracefully abandoned 14,000 Americans<\/a>\u00a0and tens of thousands of our allies to the Taliban decided to lecture the US on \u201cthe continued battle for the soul of the nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let that sink in for a moment or two.<\/p>\n

In that speech, Joe Biden tried to take the high ground for democracy against authoritarianism \u2014 just a week or so after eviscerating the constitutional check on the presidency by claiming the executive branch has the authority to print and appropriate between $600 billion and one trillion dollars to transfer debt from Biden\u2019s base voters to the rest of the taxpayers.<\/p>\n

Let\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0one sink in for another moment or two. Especially after Biden described \u201cthe work of my presidency\u201d as returning the US to the founding documents of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n

Joe Biden isn\u2019t the solution for what ails the American soul. He\u2019s not even really the main\u00a0disease<\/em>\u00a0of what ails the American soul. Joe Biden is a demagogue who floated to the top of a morass that has been building for decades, and who only sees the problem to the extent that it benefits or harms Biden\u2019s interests.<\/strong><\/p>\n

To wit \u2014 here\u2019s how Biden framed the problem in\u00a0this prime-time speech<\/a>\u00a0from Independence Hall [corrected]:<\/p>\n

And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.<\/p>\n

They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they\u2019re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ahem<\/em>. One can certainly believe this to be true of \u201cMAGA Republicans.\u201d What about the Democrats and progressives that rioted in the streets of Washington on January 20, 2017, in an attempt to disrupt the inauguration of Trump? How about the way that Democrats \u2014 even mainstream Democrats \u2014 labeled themselves \u201cThe Resistance\u201d almost immediately after the 2016 election, which preceded that Inauguration Day riot and helped fuel it? And for that matter, what about the pointless two years of \u201cRussian collusion\u201d allegations that turned out to be based on Hillary Clinton\u2019s oppo research?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Where was Joe Biden\u2019s concern for the \u201csoul of America\u201d at that point? Did it start with January 6?<\/p>\n

They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th \u2014 brutally attacking law enforcement \u2014 not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Without a doubt, the riot was awful and embarrassing. But we also had\u00a0ongoing<\/em>\u00a0insurrections in American cities from Seattle to Washington DC, where armed militants seized entire city blocks and held them as \u201cautonomous zones\u201d where they claimed US authority didn\u2019t exist. In Portland, left-wing domestic terrorists attacked the federal courthouse for weeks on end, if not months. In Minneapolis, where I lived at the time and which was the epicenter of these insurrections, armed mobs assaulted law-enforcement officers, burned out hundreds of businesses, looted\u00a0thousands<\/em>\u00a0more, and created a lawlessness that still exists to this day.<\/p>\n

Did Biden ever bother to lecture America on\u00a0those<\/em>\u00a0insurrections,\u00a0those<\/em>\u00a0assaults on police \u2014 not just in Minneapolis, but across the country? No; instead, he played footsie with the significant number of \u201cdefund the police\u201d nihilists in his own party, including a number of Democrats in Congress. His defenders insist now that Biden never endorsed \u201cdefund the police,\u201d but he\u2019s never rebuked his party for their own anti-law-enforcement rhetoric, and certainly not in the way Biden did last night when aiming his demagoguery\u00a0soooo<\/em>\u00a0conveniently at his political opposition.<\/p>\n

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Last night\u2019s speech was nothing more than soulless demagoguery by a soulless demagogue desperately trying to distract from his failures at command-economy machinations and Afghanistan over the past year-plus.<\/p>\n

But even this is just a symptom of the problem plaguing the soul of America. Biden may not even be\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0far off of it, but he\u2019s pointing his finger at the wrong end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The\u00a0real\u00a0<\/em>problem plaguing America is a creeping authoritarianism that Biden is all too happy to indulge \u2014 when it suits him. But he didn\u2019t start it, and to the extent he gets away with it, the blame doesn\u2019t\u00a0entirely<\/em>\u00a0fall on him.<\/p>\n

That blame falls on Congress. It falls on a compliant media in bed with one political party almost without exception. And, to some extent, it falls on us.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s Academia bailout is a sterling example of Congress\u2019 failure in this regard. Biden announced that he would appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air (even by the White House\u2019s estimate) to pay off the student-loan debt. He didn\u2019t say he was moving the money around from other programs, as Trump did with wall funding, which itself was certainly debatable in terms of constitutionality. Biden will just borrow the money on his own.<\/p>\n

That is a grotesque violation of one of the Constitution\u2019s checks on executive power. The Constitution grants the power of appropriation exclusively to Congress, which limits the executive\u2019s ability to spend money to only tasks authorized by Congress. In a sane constitutional model, we wouldn\u2019t be waiting for Republicans to \u201cpounce\u201d and find someone with standing to sue over this in court. The leaders of Congress would have immediately gone to the federal court to preserve their institution\u2019s constitutional authority.<\/p>\n

Instead, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer reacted by dancing around Biden\u2019s authoritarian bonfire of the Constitution. The media \u2014 and especially\u00a0the \u201cDemocracy Dies in Darkness\u201d Washington Post<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 are casting pushback on Biden\u2019s Academia bailout as extremist. They\u2019re cheerleading autocracy and authoritarianism to \u201cown the cons\u201d they accuse in the same breath as endorsing.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s madness. And it\u2019s utterly shameful.<\/p>\n

But Biden didn\u2019t start this. Neither did Donald Trump. Barack Obama spent a lot of his time issuing \u201cpen and phone\u201d edicts like DACA, DAPA, and the like without institutional challenges from Congress until the opposition party took over. Obama also started a war with Libya that decapitated its government, not just without authorization from Congress but without bothering to even go back and get\u00a0retroactive<\/em>\u00a0authority. Hillary Clinton\u00a0gleefully chortled<\/a>\u00a0\u201cwe came, we saw, he died\u201d about Moammar Qaddafi\u2019s demise, shortly after which Libya became a failed state that triggered a refugee crisis in Europe and an explosion of terror networks. That would result in the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi a year later, on the eleven-year anniversary of 9\/11.<\/p>\n

Clinton\u2019s reference for that chortle was\u00a0Julius Caesar<\/a>, by the way, who said \u201cVeni vidi vici\u201d about his reconquest of the Bosphorus after the conquest of Egypt. How\u2019s that for an imperialist presidency?<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t really start with Obama either, though. Creeping authoritarianism in the presidency accelerated in the Cold War period but really began in FDR\u2019s administration. FDR used command economics to deal with a catastrophe \u2014 the Great Depression \u2014 and then immediately went into World War II and the necessities of wartime command. Even after emerging from the hot wars, though, we have Richard Nixon imposing wage and price controls with a compliant Congress doing next to nothing to challenge him, and so on.<\/p>\n

Pick your spots: Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton\u2019s wag-the-dog stunts to distract from personal scandal. George W. Bush and domestic surveillance. This problem of authoritarianism runs deeply and diversely through our modern history. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are the products of this trend, not its initiators.<\/p>\n

And why do we produce authoritarians? Mainly because Congress has spent the last several decades ceding its political and moral authority to the executive. We could go all the way back to Woodrow Wilson on that score and his insistence on federal-bureaucracy governance of \u201cexperts,\u201d but even without that, Congress has become utterly limp. It\u2019s gotten so bad now that Congress can\u2019t even pass\u00a0budgets<\/em>\u00a0under normal order. Leadership under both parties have made this co-equal branch under the Constitution nothing more than a rubber stamp for presidents of the same party or brick walls for presidents of the opposite party.<\/p>\n

That produces an electorate with no investment or trust in Congress. So to whom do they turn? Not to constitutionalists that might return some level of constitutional humility to the Oval Office and force Congress to take responsibility for governance. They vote for demagogues and authoritarians who promise to get things done without Congress or the courts. When the crowds don\u2019t get what they want, then they riot instead of getting Congress to act. And all the while, our institutional media plays these same games overwhelmingly on behalf of one party over the other, then cries about being victimized by questions of credibility and bias.<\/p>\n

Make no mistake \u2014 Joe Biden\u2019s correct that we have a soul-sickness in America. And make no mistake \u2014 Joe Biden is a large part of the problem, having spent forty years in Congress making this situation worse, and now becoming the authoritarian he warned about last night.<\/p>\n

The antidote is a return to\u00a0actual<\/em>\u00a0constitutional governance. We don\u2019t need an imperial presidency any longer, if we needed it at all. It\u2019s time to dismantle the regulatory state and force Congress to do its job by limiting the presidency\u2019s power in all senses, legitimate or otherwise. When we start having Congresses that govern properly and directly, we will have no need for authoritarians and demagogues, nor to \u201cown\u201d the other side.<\/p>\n

Addendum<\/em>: The stagecraft was the least of the issues in last night\u2019s speech, but maybe someone at the White House should have thought this one through a bit better:<\/p>\n