President Joe Biden called for the late Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-IN) to appear during a live event on hunger and nutrition Wednesday. Walorski was killed in a car accident last month, and Biden had previously called her family to offer condolences.
Though the White House attempted to spin his faux pas as a mere sign that Walorski was “top of mind,” describing it as the kind of mistake that anyone could make, the embarrassing error was the latest evidence that Biden may not be mentally competent to hold the office of president.
And yet there is no talk about removing him from office, using the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, under which the Vice President and the Cabinet submit a written statement to the leaders of Congress that the President is unable to discharge his duties. When President Donald Trump was in office, the media talked constantly about the 25th Amendment. There were even reports that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tried to invoke the 25th Amendment and replace Trump with Vice President Mike Pence.
Now, however, the media are silent. There are three reasons. The first may be that Biden’s gaffes are nothing new. In 2008, for example, then-Sen. Biden — younger and sharper than he is today — told a wheelchair-bound state senator in Missouri to stand up at a rally. The second reason is that Vice President Kamala Harris may not offer much of an improvement: on Thursday, during a visit to the Demilitarized Zone, she mistakenly praised the “strong alliance” between the U.S. and the “Republic of North Korea.”
But the third and most important reason is sheer political partisanship. The media, and the Democratic Party, and important parts of the executive branch itself, wanted Trump removed from power. Therefore any pretext — an offensive tweet, a slow walk down a ramp — became an excuse to demand that the Cabinet get rid of Trump. And it might have happened, too: the problem was that the same Mike Pence who would later decline to reject the Electoral College vote was not going to go along with a constitutional coup.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.