Trego's Mountain Ear

It seems fairly obvious that if Joe Biden doesn’t have it together enough to continue his run for reelection he doesn’t have it together enough to continue as President.  This is fairly easy for me to accept, since I’ve thought that since Dukakis ran against Bush I.  It’s also easy for me to accept that, if Biden is incompetent, the lawful alternative is his vice-president, Kamala Harris.

Still, there are Dems who don’t like Kamala and want an end run to get someone else in office.  And I remember when the votes of 17 Democrat senators kept Al Gore from the presidency.  It wasn’t the hanging chads in Florida – it was the Clinton impeachment.

There were two charges against Bill Clinton – lying under oath and obstruction of justice.  Since Clinton paid Paula Jones $850,000 – though he didn’t admit guilt – it seems likely that if the impeachment vote hadn’t been along party lines, well, I suspect that at least a third of the Dem Senators might have also been convinced that Bill was guilty . . . but they didn’t vote that way, and Al Gore went on to become a climate change huckster instead of a president.

Now, we’re looking at a President with dementia for the second time (first was Ronald Reagan’s second term).  The obvious solution is to let Biden out and slide the vice-president in for the remainder of his term.  That solution seems unsatisfactory because most of the Dem kingmakers don’t particularly like Kamala Harris – but the law on presidential succession and the 25th amendment seem fairly easy to understand (Fair warning – I am not an attorney nor have I ever played such a role on TV . . . or even in an amateur melodrama). Still, when I think of how different the world might have been had 17 Democrat Senators voted to convict Clinton and put Al Gore in the White House, I’m thinking it might be a good idea to just follow the rules.  The bonus would be that we would have a woman president in my lifetime.