Our increasingly imperial executive branch has become the center of American politics as the presidency itself shrinks into irrelevancy.
It is a dangerous dynamic that threatens the future of our country, and it’s been exposed during our current president’s lamest of lame-duck final months in office.
President Joe Biden—if we can still give him that title—appears to be using his last three months as the commander in chief to vacation, snooze, and eat ice cream.
Some legacy media outlets, when they take a moment away from their nonstop adulation of Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ anointed successor, are treating this as if Biden is taking a well-earned, permanent break.
Biden “saved democracy” and deserves some time off or something like that.
Here’s C-Span with a two-minute video of Joe and Jill Biden just hanging out at a beach in Rehoboth, Delaware.
What an insightful look into the inner workings of our government.
That presidents take vacations is all good and well. It’s a hard job, or at least it used to be.
But what’s happening with Biden goes beyond just taking a few hours to golf on the weekend. His calendars have been cleared, his public appearances have become even more infrequent, and so far he only occasionally makes trips to promote Harris, his endorsed successor, on the campaign trail.
Biden is just working on his “legacy,” his supporters say. He’s become a “caretaker” president.
In what sense can the supposedly most powerful man in the world be merely a caretaker? Have our enemies around the world taken a vacation? Are there no potential crises that could happen between now and Jan. 20 that would require an able, alert, and decisive commander in chief?
There are more hot war zones and potential war zones around the globe than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Who is making the ultimate decisions about how to deal with them?
Is it Biden? Someone in his inner circle? Perhaps former President Barack Obama? The fact that the buck stops seemingly nowhere is a deeply disturbing thought.
The White House has assured the American people that Biden is working real hard and is on top of everything, just like they’ve told us how sharp and dynamic he’s been behind closed doors for over three years.
Nobody with a shred of common sense is buying this.
What Biden’s situation demonstrates is that we’ve arrived at an odd paradigm in the history of American government.
In some sense, the executive branch as an institution is the most powerful it’s ever been. The presidential campaign has certainly become the center of our nation’s political life. Endless amounts of money and resources are expended to take the White House.
And there is a certain logic to this.
Why bother with Congress and all its maddening dysfunction when executive departments can issue an order and implement policy?
The executive branch now drives policy while Congress acts as an occasional, flaccid check on its actions. This is a total reversal of how our constitutional system was supposed to operate. From domestic matters to issues of war and peace, everything now flows through the presidency first and foremost.
But what we have isn’t quite Caesarism, at least not in the classic sense.
One man doesn’t run the show. In fact, it appears that the position atop the executive branch is more and more a ceremonial formality. Right now, it has been granted to Biden, who is being rewarded for his more than half-century of service to the Democrat Party with a career capper.
No, what we have is a different kind of Caesarism than that of classical Rome.
We have little Caesarism, with apologies to the pizza chain.
We are now ruled by millions of little apparatchiks burrowed in our Byzantine executive and legislative agencies. It’s a vast interlocking web of government bureaucracies that dictate federal policy more than our elected officials, whether members of Congress or the president.
In the case of a strong executive with a will of his own who defies the ethos of our permanent ruling regime, this bureaucratic managerial class busily schemes to resist his prerogatives and works to have him removed.
They did this quite openly during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Trump, for good or ill, regularly fired his political appointees. He attempted to manage the executive branch like a chief executive would, despite the fact that his ability to control personnel below the highest political level was extremely limited.
Since Trump has been gone, the machine has been ruling itself, promulgating policies and carrying on its initiatives without resistance.
And Biden has allowed things to just sail on with little regard to success or failure.
After the Biden-Harris administration’s shambolic departure from Afghanistan, nobody at the top got fired. Not a single high- or even middle-ranking general or official fell on his sword or copped to why things had gone so terribly.
The only man who lost his job was an officer in the Marines who criticized the military’s failure to exit Afghanistan responsibly.
When you see videos like this, remember that the people who were in charge when we handed the Taliban millions of dollars in weapons and other military equipment mostly remain at their post.
What happened when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin just decided to disappear for a few days without informing anyone while he had surgery? Nothing.
One would think that years of shattering record after record for illegal border crossings would be enough for the president to send Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas packing, or for the man to admit failure and abscond on his own.
No again. Threats of congressional impeachment and an actual impeachment vote by the House have been met with a shrug.
Mayorkas hasn’t budged and Biden fiddled while millions of illegal aliens poured across our southern border.
Now that Biden has become politically useless, now that the façade of his presidency has disintegrated, he’s been unceremoniously dismissed like the last, Lilliputian emperor of the Western Roman Empire.
Romulus Augustus—a mighty name for such a petty man—was sent away by the barbarians who took Rome, to finish his days of irrelevance in Ravenna.
Biden’s been sent away to enjoy his retirement in Rehoboth.
The regime’s unseen hand cleared a path to put a younger, more credible president before the people.
But if Harris wins the presidency in November the difference in leadership would be marginal. With Harris, the regime may have someone who can more vigorously prosecute the Left’s enemies. But we mostly will get more of the same of what we’ve endured for the past four years.
That’s not just a crisis for one administration, it’s a crisis for the republic now and into the future.
With the end of the Chevron doctrine by the Supreme Court, perhaps Congress finally will reassert itself now that some authority theoretically has been stripped from the bureaucracy.
Perhaps we will at least move toward something resembling a unitary executive where the president is ultimately in charge of and responsible for the actions of his administration. That will take a serious change in how the executive branch works.
If those things don’t happen, the presidency will likely remain both everything and nothing as our country sleepwalks into domestic and international ruin.