In 1618, English poet Sir John Harington penned this immortal summary of betrayal: “Why treason never prospers, What’s the reason; For if it prospers, None Dare Call It Treason.”
We are confronted with an eerily similar dilemma: How best to characterize the cascading infamy of Joe Biden? In light of what we now know – from his catastrophically inept performance during the June, 2024 televised presidential debate to his equally damning statement in 2023 before Special Counsel Robert Hur – there is little doubt of Biden’s lingering disability in office. But was his disability the result of a medical condition (Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or even the prostate cancer revealed only a week ago); if it was, then why was the 25th Amendment not invoked?
Writing in The Telegraph, the eminent political scientist Charles Lipson puts the dilemma in its proper historical context: “The scandal surrounding Joe Biden’s cognitive decline is the biggest in modern American political history” During his final two years in office, President Biden’s “brain fog” became a “three-fold scandal” involving “White House aides and top Democrats.” Consequently, there are “still-unanswered questions of which aides were performing presidential duties in his name, perhaps without his full knowledge and understanding.” Even worse, “These scandals are intertwined, reinforcing each other,” and involving the “White House Press Corpse” in a whole new level of media bias. In a particularly apt phrase, Prof. Lipson argues….”put simply, the mainstream media conducted its own tendentious version of lawfare…to prevent Trump’s election. The media version might be called “newsfare.”
Wow! When one of our leading academics produces such a stunning evaluation of the lasting damage done to our political system, one can only gasp. And put off wrestling with certain larger questions – including those posed long ago by John Harington. The irony here is that our Founders undertook the American Revolution in the certainty that, if they failed their mission of securing independence, they would surely face the hangman to answer for treason against the king. Consequently, Section 3 of Article III of the Constitution is narrowly drawn: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them aid and Comfort.” While the leaders of the Confederacy clearly fit that restrictive category, it was the wisdom and restraint of Abraham Lincoln which guided the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The Great Emancipator had also directed his generals in the final weeks of the war to let their former foes “up easy.” With peace as the overriding objective, the alternatives of pursuit through the Courts and even guerrilla warfare were too horrible to contemplate.
But the troubled histories of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries have taught us much about the changing definitions of both cold and hot wars as well as the new forms of invasion taking place when hundreds of thousands of invaders cross borders suddenly thrown open. Could a definition of treason be made to fit Alejandro Mayorkas simply because of his warped preference for open-borders? Didn’t his oft-repeated lies about the security of our southern border effectively link him with our “Enemies, giving them aid and Comfort”? Good question!
But probably the most troubling question involves Joe Biden, together with his enablers, defenders, strap-hangars, vice-presidents and maybe even ex-presidents – basically anyone who conspired to bring us a long-running cypher in place of an actual president. When contemplating the powers granted to the President by our Constitution, recognizing that his vigorous pursuit of those authorities is the linchpin on which American national security ultimately depends, what does it mean when our Commander-in-Chief is effectively removed from that equation for years at a time? While Biden’s disgraceful retreat from Afghanistan was bad enough, how might American power have been exercised if there was a nonentity in the Oval Office as China invaded Taiwan, if Iran had nuked Tel Aviv or if Putin had truly gone for broke, grabbing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in order to nullify Article 5 of the NATO Treaty? Excuse me but should we try to awaken President Biden, Dr. Biden or Vice President Harris in such an extreme emergency?
Even worse: what if multiple emergencies happened at the same time? While no one argues that our adversaries are always nice guys, surely none could be so devious, so reckless, as to endanger world peace and international public opinion by deliberately embarking on such a dangerous course of events? Surely this is all just a bad dream – isn’t it?
