Replacing Biden would change the Democratic Party forever

And that's another reason to do it.

Welcome to a Wednesday morning edition of Progress Report.

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Imagine that you’re being chased by a bloodthirsty lunatic and a handful of his flunkies, who torch everything within their reach as they pursue you with violent relentlessness. Desperate to get away, you flag down a cab, and when the cabbie promises to do everything he can deliver you to safety, you hop in the backseat and tell them to gun it.

But instead of smashing down on the gas and trying to lose the killer, your driver instead barely takes the car out of neutral, rolling it though the streets with the evasiveness of a tugboat as the killer closes in. You cajole and yell and demand that he hit the gas and take the threat seriously, but the driver refuses to even reach the speed limit, arguing that doing so would be reckless.

There are other cabs still available, but the driver insists that this one is still the best equipped to deliver you to safety, even as others weave through traffic speed past. He also keeps asking you for money, teasing that it might help him drive with a little more urgency, but it never seems to be enough.

Put yourself in the backseat of this car, with the doors locked and your fate seemingly out of your control. Where is your anger focused? The would-be assailant is ultimately responsible for creating this scenario, but personally, it’s the cab driver who would earn most of my frustration and scorn. He’s supposed to be the dependable and rational one, but instead he’s breaking his promise and escorting me to my doom.

Sure, it’s a heavy-handed metaphor, but it’s a good way to understand why people are so angry at Democratic Party leadership, even though it’s Donald Trump and the ultra-reactionary Supreme Court that present such an imminent threat to American democracy and civilized society.

Since at least early 2023, according to Carl Bernstein, those closest to Biden have misled voters about his mental acuity, portraying him as sharp and ready to vanquish the far-right and its would-be autocrat. They closed ranks, played hardball, and took advantage of the good faith of an overly trusting voter base to prevent any real democratic contest for the Democratic nomination. And now this is all anybody is going to talk about for the rest of the election, no matter how unhinged Trump becomes.

In hiding Biden’s declining condition even as it’s gotten worse and casting out those who voiced the same concerns as a majority of Americans, they essentially gaslit Democrats into coming within weeks of nominating someone who is incapable of doing the job for another four years or beating Trump in four months.

It’s hard to overstate what they’re risking here. Unburdened by the law or any regulation that the Birchers on the Supreme Court don’t like, a Trump presidency and a GOP majority in Congress will put the lives and well-being of hundreds of millions of Americans at risk. The far-right is in the opening stages of a fundamental dismantling of American society, which it intends to turn into an autocratic kleptocracy in perpetual civil war, polluted and plundered, doomed by the opposition’s fealty to arcane rules and institutions.

Political powerlessness is a choice

None of this was inevitable. Biden inherited a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, but he didn’t have to accept it as an immutable fact. With Democrats holding a trifecta, progressives in Congress began pushing for Biden to back a plan to expand the Supreme Court and restore its partisan balance. There were press conferences, rallies, and bills introduced in Congress, but the White House put ringers on the court reform commission who dutifully shot the idea down entirely.

Sure, the filibuster would have made it hard to pass, but as Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, told me last week, these justices are political actors who sometimes respond to public opinion and political pressure. As such, threats to pack the court could have potentially shaped some of their decisions, and there’s every chance that even belatedly embracing the movement after the Dobbs decision could have kept helped Democrats their trifecta in 2022.

Instead, Biden doubled down on inaction, and on Monday, he didn’t even allude to reforming the court during his brief response to one of the most shockingly radical court term in generations. Sen. Dick Durbin’s response was somehow even more pitiful, fitting because he’s just as responsible for inviting and accommodating conservative destruction of a century’s worth of progress.

Even the most basic accommodations meant to mitigate the effects of the industrial poisoning of the Earth are now at risk. The Biden administration on Tuesday announced a new rule intended to provide 36 million workers some minimum protections from the heat, but after the defenestration of the administrative state in last week’s Loper Bright decision, it will face an uphill struggle to even see the light of day.

The gutting of the EPA’s authority, meanwhile, means that my nearly two-year-old son may grow up breathing in microplastics and drinking forever chemicals, consequences be damned. I just hope that there are still public schools for him to attend; the Supreme Court is likely going to look to get rid of those, too.

The dark irony is that Biden is the most progressive president since LBJ, and has bonafides that go behind what JFK and Truman accomplished for working people. I’m not here to condemn much of his record in the White House. The problem is that much of what he accomplished is now in danger of being erased due to the institutional rot within the party that has blunted the edges of many of his policies and put him in this position.

The countdown has begun

In the immediate aftermath of Biden’s dismal debate performance, his campaign trotted out supportive statements from former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, called doubters “bedwetters,” and held one conference call after another to dissuade potential challengers. It seemed for a moment that he might make it through this crisis, but I think the tide has turned after an onslaught of bad news.

The numbers were ugly. One Democratic poll showed Biden trailing by huge margins in most swing states and coughing up leads in what have been solidly blue states, and trailing all of his potential replacements.

A nonpartisan poll found that 72% of Americans think that he does not have the cognitive abilities to do this job. And as the day went on, Democratic lawmaker doubts and defections began to pile up, starting with Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas this morning and then working up to serious words of concern from Nancy Pelosi.

“I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode or is this a condition?’” Pelosi said. “When people ask that question, it’s legitimate.”

Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) criticized Biden’s team for trying to dismiss those questions out of hand; Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), running for re-election, decided not to appear with Biden at a rally on friendly turf in Madison on Friday; and former Housing Secretary Julián Castro called for Biden to withdraw.

Gutless Maine Rep. Jared Golden straight up wrote that Trump was going to win and that he’s OK with that. Golden sucks, but he’s not stupid. He sees the writing on the wall, though at this point it’s somewhat hard to miss.

Because this is a party that squashes dissent in the name of “winning,” there is no way for most Democrats to credibly distance themselves from the president. Expect more and more ads like this one from Dave McCormick, the Pennsylvania Republican Senate nominee.

Democratic governors are demanding a meeting with Biden, while House members can’t focus on anything else. Politicians are always focused first on survival, and Biden represents a giant obstacle to that.

After three years of impressive discipline, the administration is now leaking like a sieve, as are Democrats and civil servants who have spent time with the president. Every few hours, the media breaks a new story about one or more mental lapses suffered by the president during one important meeting or another.

There are plenty of complications that would arise if Biden was to bow out, be they legal, political, or financial. It’s tough to have a candidate that did not technically receive support from any voters. But we are way past the point at which Joe Biden could win re-election, and continuing on this ride is guaranteed doom.

On the other hand, switching candidates right now could prove to be an unprecedented blow against the apparatus of a party of conservative incrementalists has been content not to fight fascism but to use its specter as a tool for fundraising and maintaining control. It would prove end their long control over what’s possible and remind rank and file voters that it’s OK to demand more, that ambition isn’t something to be eschewed in the name of “winning.”

Losing to Trump would be catastrophic, and the only thing that could make it worse is a captured opposition.

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