Kamala Harris Should Already Be the 47th President of the United States
Kamala Harris Should Already Be the 47th President of the United States
It pains me to say it, but our commitment to democracy requires it.
Democracy itself is on life support in the Democratic Party and the United States government, which is a bad look in a presidential election year. Exhibit A: Kamala Harris is not already the 47th President of the United States.
After the recent debate, which made practically undeniable what was already abundantly obvious, Big Media and the rest of the Democrat machine are focused on President Biden’s doubtful viability as a presidential candidate. We can hardly blame them. But they should first address a larger, more immediate question: his viability as the current President of the United States, with six months left in the term.
Big Media and Big Government vigorously, almost unanimously denied it to the very hour of the debate, but only the most delusional Donkey Party fringe can deny it now: the President of the United States of America lacks the mental capacity to be a part-time door greeter at Walmart.
There’s much to say here about the ongoing war of narrative on truth, but today the point is democracy. That’s actual democracy, not the overworked incantation that says if you disagree with me (technically, with Big Them) you oppose democracy.
To use the word democracy responsibly, I must be clear about what I mean. If you’ll indulge a moment of theory, I think it will help. I’ll keep it short.
51 wolves and 49 sheep
In its theoretical purity, democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on who’s for dinner. Or we could say it’s 50.1 percent hungry wolves and 49.9 percent delicious sheep.
Some of you will object that the United States is not a democracy, and you’ll be correct. We’re a constitutional, democratic, representative republic:
republic because we’re not a monarchy and the people are not the property of the state; we’re citizens, not subjects, and government gets its power from us; “we the people” did “ordain and establish . . .”;
representative because the people’s representatives make our laws; we generally don’t make them by direct, democratic vote;
democratic because we voters elect those representatives and our chief executives (albeit indirectly in the case of president);
constitutional because the law, not any person or group of persons, is supreme; the law stands above the will of any ruler and the democratic will of the masses, thus guarding the rights of minorities who would be eaten against majorities who would otherwise feast on lamb chops. In theory if not always in practice, constitutional means that even those who make and enforce the law are themselves subject to the law.
That last attribute, constitutional, is enhanced by an especially redemptive American principle: the majority respects the rights of the minority — again, in theory if not always in practice.
For all that, we speak colloquially and not altogether improperly of American democracy. The central pillar of American democracy has to be that our laws are made by democratically elected representatives, not unelected rulers or bureaucrats (a fertile subject for another day), and that the person running the the executive branch of our national government was duly elected by the people, if indirectly through the long-established constitutional means, the Electoral College.
Back to reality
Most hours of the day, if perhaps not quite all, the United States of America does not have a functioning president. The executive branch is still running, after a fashion, so we must conclude that someone else is running it, to the extent that the White House normally runs the government. Here’s the thing: We can only guess who that is. Since it’s not the president, and it’s clearly not the vice president either, it’s not someone we elected.
Even if it were the vice president, technically we didn’t elect the vice president to run the country. We elect the vice president to become the president, if the president is unable to run the country, due to death or incapacity, so we’ll continue to have a president to run the country. (The next officers in the line of succession were elected too. After that, it’s officers whom the Senate confirmed, and we elected the Senate.)
The present situation is profoundly undemocratic.
Again, I don’t mean undemocratic in the abusive, popular sense of “whoever votes for the other candidate is destroying democracy.” I mean this: whoever is running the government now, it’s not someone we elected, or even someone who temporarily succeeded to that role through our long-established, open processes.
In the name of American democracy, therefore, Kamala Harris should already be the 47th President of the United States.
If President Biden were a man of honor, he’d already have stepped down. (If honor were the better part of ambition in 2020, he probably wouldn’t have run.) Since he hasn’t stepped down, he should have been removed already. If the president’s party — notably the vice president and the cabinet, who can invoke the 25th Amendment — valued the core principle of democracy more than they value their own continued lock on power, they’d have lived up to their party’s name.
The core democratic principle, restated, is that duly elected officials run our government at the highest levels — not the unnamed, the unaccountable, the unelected. That core democratic principle gives Democrats only one proper path.
Not the best, not even good, but the only choice
The succession of which I write might already have happened, if Vice President Harris were a viable candidate for president. That’s what her party cares about. She polls worse than the president, and that’s barely even possible. She has not distinguished herself as vice president; she would be a profoundly weak presidential candidate, as she was last time. Small wonder the Saviors of Democracy™ don’t want her.
I don’t want her either; the barrier to saying she should be president now is robust for me too. She lacks the character, the temperament, and the intellect for the job — not that those bars have been more than a quarter-inch above the ground lately. And she’s been in on the Biden deception from the beginning. But her lone qualification, her office, beats whoever’s running the government now. Since that’s not anyone we elected to the job in 2020, they are by definition not just unqualified, but disqualified.
It is so important to American democracy to have an elected official running the government that we — I — must overlook those other concerns, great though they are. The vice president was duly elected. If our democracy were fully functioning or even deeply respected by the party in power, we’d have our first female president already.
Let’s be a little patient, but not very
If they could get away with it, they’d be pleased to continue the charade for four more years. They’ve made that clear. It doesn’t matter that the emperor is buck naked and everybody knows it, as long as they can win elections and consolidate, expand, and exert their power.
So let’s give President Biden, his puppeteers, and his thousands of co-conspirators a couple of weeks to adjust to the utter collapse of their deception.
Maybe they’ll yield to reality, though that’s not really their way; they prefer narrative to truth. Maybe they’ll double down, continue to deny, and go all-in to distract us with the hysterical illusion that a second Trump term will be a dictatorship and thus the end of democracy as we know it.
Distractions aside, the fact (to which I keep returning) is that the elected chief executive clearly isn’t running the country, and we don’t know who is. They should solve that problem now, and only then worry about their candidate for November.
If Kamala Harris isn’t the 47th President of the United States by the end of this month, the Democratic Party should find another name — for the party.
One more thought about democracy
There’s sufficient darkness (realism?) inside me that I often quote H. L. Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Less frequently, I quote the words of an old folk song, “Yes, the candidate’s a dodger, Yes, a well-known dodger.” Before Aaron Copland immortalized those words in Old American Songs, Set 1, they were part of the 1884 US presidential campaign. In a larger sense they are the way of the (small-d) democratic world.
Here’s a full verse:
Yes, the candidate’s a dodger,
Yes, a well-known dodger.
Yes, the candidate’s a dodger,
Yes, and I’m a dodger too.
What worries me most at this moment — possibly excluding bad actors abroad who exploit national weakness — is perhaps the most democratic aspect of all this. Here’s the song’s refrain:
Yes, we’re all a-dodgin’, dodgin’, dodgin’, dodgin’.
Yes, we’re all dodgin’ out away through the world.
We can blame and accuse whomever we wish, and there are plenty of people and institutions to blame and accuse. But if we, the demos in our democracy, are mostly dodgers, we can scarcely expect our elected officials not to be dodgers. In a sense they’re only representing us too well.
It’s time to stop being dodgers — yes, on both sides of the aisle. It’s time to stop electing dodgers, insofar as that is possible in any given election. In the meantime, Kamala Harris should be the 47th President of the United States, beginning this summer.
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