The Democrats are doing a lot of half measures these days, and they're going
to try to kind of slide by, slide by as if they're half measures
have solved the whole problem. That was the theme of the show yesterday,
and I think it's going to continue to be the theme today. So I
think they have a lot of half measures they've done of just sort of trying
to sneak Kamala Harris in when boy, I think politically it would have been
a lot smarter for them to do a whole measure completely start with a fresh
slate. She's got more baggage than any other Democrat option. She's probably the
least popular out of all the available Democrat options. Mark Kelly from Arizona,
Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer from Michigan. Heck, even Gavin Newsom
might be more popular than Kamala Harris's. Harris inherits all of the bad baggage
of the Biden presidency. Plus she still inherits the age problem for Biden.
And that's the thing I think I want to discuss. The media is going
to start acting like the Biden as best they can, although maybe Biden's health
gets to a crisis point and it just becomes insoluble, and maybe Democrats will
just have to make the shift. Democrats are going to try to act like,
well, Biden's out now, So the age issue that's off the table.
Hmm, No, couple of things. As long as Biden is still
in office. The age issue remains a problem for Kamalo. Why because as
the vice president, it's her job to know how the president's doing. It's
her job to make sure that he's still physically and mentally able to run the
country. And if he ceases to be physically or mentally capable of running the
country, then she has a tough constitutional role and decision that has to be
made to avoid the kind of I think it was Woodrow Wilson who towards the
end of his presidency was so sick and infirmed that basically his wife was running
the country like she was deciding things Kamala Harris would need to fulfill to basically
use the mechanism of the twenty fifth Amendment to ensure that we have an actual
functioning American president. Why Well, because of the fundamental structure of how American
governance works, which I'll get to in a second year. But basically,
the Biden age issue doesn't go away with this half measure that Democrats have landed
on. Biden drops out of the race, but he does not resign the
presidency. She's still gonna get asked about it. She's going to be asked
about it at every debate she has with Trump. She's going to be asked
about it repeatedly. Is Joe Biden still running the country? You know,
Joe Biden dropped out or do you have confidence he can still run the country.
And she's going to have to stand there in front of the American people,
none of whom believe Joe Biden is well enough to be president, by
the way, and that's the other thing people didn't People thought Biden was too
old to be president before, you know, a month ago, before his
terrible debate performance. They certainly all believe he's too old to be president now
that he's dropped out of the race and basically admitted that point. So she's
going to have to stand up there and implausibly tell people, oh, yeah,
he's definitely still running the country. Oh yeah, he's definitely still fine.
The age issue just doesn't go away for Democrats unless and until Biden resigns,
And even if Biden resigns, I think people are going to start asking
her, well, when did you know that the president was going senile?
They're Democrats coming out now with stories going all the way back to twenty twenty
one about how Biden seemed amazingly reduced. We have stories coming out that the
cabinet hasn't met since October of twenty twenty three. You know, they haven't
met for nine months. How is Kamala Harris not going to have to be
held responsible that? How would the sitting vice president not be viewed as uniquely
culpable if there was a cover up of Biden's condition, How would the vice
president not be uniquely culpable? Because that's because this, this is the problem.
It's one thing for Biden to drop out, but it's another thing to
explain it. You know, Biden just said in his sort of in the
statement that was put on Twitter in his name, which was very weird,
by the way, and gives the appearance of something that's done when your circle
of confidence is shrinking to about four or five people, and this is the
best we can do with four or five people in the room, even down
to like it was. The wording and drafting of that letter was odd and
not very well done. It wasn't done on official White House letterhead. It
had some kind of e signature put on it. It wasn't like an actual,
you know, ink by hand signature. It was a very odd thing.
And then to release it just on Twitter, not like, hey,
memo to the press, the President's going to make an address via video in
an hour regarding the future of the campaign, you know, not a press
release giving people a heads up. No, just all of a sudden on
Twitter. Boop, here's a letter. Biden's dropped out of the race,
taking everyone by surprise, including his own White House staff, his campaign.
Everyone was taken by surprise. Now, in the letter, Biden doesn't say
why he's dropping out. He just says it's in the best interests of the
Democrat Party in the American people. But why is it in their best interests?
There are only two answers. One is that he is so mentally or
physically infirm that he cannot effectively campaign, which, if that's true, he
also needs to resign. You can't say that I'm physically with it enough to
be the president, but not to run for president. That makes no sense.
The other option is I'm dropping so much in the polls and politically,
I'm in such a position that I know I will lose. The other option
is fundamentally undemocratic because Democrats had a whole primary process in which to consider that
and voted for him. Nobody else ran against him significant other than you know,
Dean Phillips. And the problem is it's really kind of both. His
obvious declining mental and physical strength led to a situation where the donors refused to
give any more money, which would mean that he would lose polling wise.
But that's the thing. They're going to try to sort of play this sort
of charade of not openly saying, hey, I'm not physically capable of doing
this anymore. They're not going to say that because Biden wants to still be
president. Jill wants to still be the first lady. They don't want.
Biden doesn't want to resign midstream. Only one American president has ever resigned the
office midstream, and that was Richard Nixon. Biden doesn't want to be in
that camp, even Lyndon Johnson, who only he served out the end of
his term through nineteen sixty eight into January of nineteen sixty nine. I guess
so, I don't think that Harris can really escape this problematic issue of Biden's
age. And she's the one candidate the Democrats could put forward that wouldn't be
able to escape it. If the Democrats actually had an open convention and just
open the field, everyone's stand, everyone, come on board, Everyone shoot
your shot. Let's let's see who's gonna win the nomination. Andy Basher from
Kentucky wouldn't have to answer anything about Biden's age. That's not his job,
it's not his responsibility. Mark Kelly from Arizona wouldn't have to answer for it.
Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvani wouldn't have to answer for it. Gretchen Whitmer from
Michigan wouldn't have None of the other Democrats would have to answer for it.
The only one who will have the anvil of Joe Biden around her neck is
Kamala. And I think Democrats have sort of convinced themselves, the donors have
convinced themselves of some things that are that they can't unders understand because there's so
much in their little echo chamber. I think a lot of these Democrat donors
think that Biden's been a really good president and the only reason he's losing is
because he looks old. He hasn't been a good president. His approval numbers
are bad, and that is true regardless of his age. Inflation spiked massively
during his administration. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster, and it was the
Afghanistan withdrawal that was the beginning of the nosedive for Biden's you know, favorability
numbers. The only reason the Democrats did okay in the twenty twenty two elections
is because Republicans ran a bunch of kind of stop the steal crazies in a
lot of key elections that wound up losing them, you know, winnable seats
and sort of dampened the national mood for Republicans. But Biden is not some
popular president. He's not been a very good president by any measure. But
I think these wealthy Democrats who live, these wealthy Democrat donors who are sort
of centered around the Bay Area, centered in Silicon Valley and San Francisco,
they think the Biden administration has been hunky Dory, So of course, let's
just get rid of the age issue and put Kamala Harris up there. Biden
was doing badly because of the performance of his administration. The reason why he's
losing in states like Pennsylvany. He was losing in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan
and Wisconsin is because his presidency was doing poorly. It wasn't just because he
was old. The mood for There's a large segment of voters who don't like
either Biden or Trump, and the election is going to be decided on how
they break. The folks who didn't like Trump or Hillary broke for Trump.
The folks who didn't like Trump or Biden in twenty twenty voted for Biden.
Now looked like they were going to go back to Trump again. A lot
of them, and they don't like And Kamala Harris is not any more popular
than Biden. She's not more popular with Biden, even Senile Biden. I
think we're gonna start seeing polls. We haven't had had many polls that account
for Biden dropping out. A lot of the early polling we saw, you
know, Harris versus Trump had to head that that was before Biden announced he
was dropping out. But I just don't think she's gonna pull much better because
she is just toxic to people in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin. She said
she was openly against fracking. She was all of these major problems with her
candidacy. Now, when we return, I want to talk about a little
bit more about the age issue with Harris because of the fundamental structure of the
executive branch and why this is going to be a problem for Democrats still next
on the John Girardi Show, there's kind of a fundamental governmental problem if we
just kind of skate along the next six months with Kamala Harris is running for
president, Joe Biden is. Joe Biden's still the president. Everybody he was
too old and sick to effectively run for president, but apparently he's not too
old and sick to be president, and we're going to just kind of coast
along with Biden as the president. There's a fundamental problem with that, and
it has to do with some basics of constitutional law. So we have three
branches of our government. We have the legislative branch that rights our laws.
We have the judicial branch, which interprets our laws, resolves cases and controversies,
and we have the executive branch which enforces and applies our law. The
Constitution of the United States vests law enforcement power in how many people, one
thousand people, no, one person, one single person. The President of
the United States, the President of the United States, has the executive power
of the federal government. He is the law enforcement official for the federal government.
And not just criminal law enforcement. I'm talking all law. The enforcement
and application of all the laws of the federal government sits with him. Enforcement
of environmental law, the application of law from the FDA. Basically, it
goes like this. Any federal agency that is tasked with enforcing some aspect of
federal law that was created by Congress, it enforces law with the delegated power
of the President. Every executive branch agency if you look at its org chart.
Okay, let's go to the FDA. The FDA is a federal executive
agency that deals with the regulation approval, not approval, scheduling of drugs.
The head of the FDA reports to the Secretary of the Department of Health and
Human Services, who reports to the President. The Environmental Protection Agency reports to
the head of thee to the Secretary of the Interior, who reports to the
President. I think the EPA is under the sec Department of the Interior.
We've had, you know, all this controversy about the Secret Service. The
head of the Secret Service Agent reports to middle manager Superiors, who reports to
the Head of the Secret Service, who reports to the Secretary for the Department
of Homeland Security, who reports to the President. All federal law enforcement power,
the power to enforce the law, the executive authority of the United States,
flows from one man, the President. We elect this person. The
Framers set up our system of government so that this awesome power of enforcing all
of the law of the United States would be in the hands of one politically
accountable person, a politically accountable person who knows he is subject to election re
election, that he only has a limited time in office to enforce the law,
and is subject to impeachment or removal if he does something really egregiously bad.
Law enforcement power in the hands of someone who's not politically accountable. The
Framer's thought could result in tyranny. That it is law enforcement power, not
that I think all monarchies are or have been tyrannies. In history, but
basically, executive enforcement power unmoored from political accountability is basically monarchy. Okay,
you're an unaccountable, single person wielding power, and that there are monarchical elements
to the presidency, but it is ultimately politically accountable. It is politically limited
by the four year term of office, and politically accountable. You only get
that job by being elected. So for us to have a president who is
so medically and physically mentally and physically infirmed, where some Democrats have said,
well, you know, you know, some Democrats have tried to rationalize what's
going on here by saying, you know, well, President Biden has a
great team of people all around him. You know, it's not like he
has to be you know, no, no team. We didn't elect a
team. The team can't get impeached. The team isn't accountable to the voters.
The voters didn't vote for the team. The team is not the font
from which all executive authority for the over the federal government flows. The president
is that we need to have a living, breathing, functioning president for this
whole political science experiment to work. That's it's it's a foundational thing that you
can you don't have a f youarhead president. This isn't Great Britain where the
monarch doesn't really exercise much power at all. No, the president is a
real person who exercises genuine authority, like the idea that so the idea that
Harris And by the way, who is the chief official responsible for ensuring this
well? According to the twenty fifth Amendment, it's either Congress has to do
it or the vice president has to do it of removing the president when he
is not capable of doing the job anymore. And given that the vice president
has likely closer access to the president, I think that job falls mostly on
her. So this idea that the Democrats think they can kind of just skate
by, and maybe they can, maybe the media will cover that for them
effectively enough. But I in a functional democracy, given the fact that he
was he is clearly very old, very infirmed. We haven't seen proof of
you know, we went days and days and days and days without even hearing
from him. We heard his voice yesterday. The press should be asking Kamala
Harris every single day, how's President Biden doing? Is he all right?
Is he still there? Still working? If Biden's not going to show himself.
I mean, this age issue, I don't know that Democrats have solved
it because you can't have Harris out there b sing the American people that,
Nope, Biden's fine, He's still, you know, going one hundred percent.
When Biden is canceling visits with foreign leaders like Benjamin Netanyaw was visiting the
United States, really Biden, Biden has no more symptoms of COVID left,
according to his own doctor, he's almost one hundred percent fine. He can't
have a meeting with net and Yahoo where they're you know, sitting ten feet
apart from each other at a at a conference table and Biden's maybe wearing a
mask or something like like is that so impossible? Like it's implausible to everyone
the level that Biden has shut himself down that things are just normal. So
there's a massive political and legal problem with Biden, with us just sort of
pretending Biden's fine, And really it's who's making these decisions? Is it ron
Klain, Like who's actually running the country when we return? Why all of
a sudden are Democrats okay with firing people? Next on The John Girardi Show,
the head of the United States Secret Service Kimberly Cheatle announced that she was
resigning today, and this followed what was a fairly remarkable to me hearing.
I expect, I mean, let expectations versus what happened. I expected that
the House Oversight Committee hearing where Kimberly Cheatle was going to testify, I expected
it would turn into kind of partisan silliness, the normal sort of tribal alignment
that we see with everything, where Republicans would blast her, Democrats would not
blast her or mildly defender, or they would blast the Republicans in turn for
politicizing this, and we'd have a stalemate and the person would not resign.
Because that's what's happened with like every problem in the entire Biden administration for the
last three and a half years, anything that's gone wrong in the country,
nobody resigns. No one gets fired, No one really gets held accountable.
Secretary of Marijorkis doesn't get in trouble. No one with the FBI gets in
trouble. For all the various abuses of its power that were uncovered during the
Biden During the Trump administration, nobody gets fired. Mark Milly can oversee this
disastrous withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and he doesn't get fired. You know,
thirteen soldiers get killed in Kabul as the American military is leaving. We
leave hundreds of American civilians in Afghanistan. As we pull out, we abandon
all of these Afghan people from Afghanistan, who the Afghan translators and people who
worked with us and our military w while we were there, to god knows
what fate. Maybe the Taliban will kill them all. Nobody resigned from that.
No one was forced to be to be fired from it. Biden didn't
fire anybody. And I feel like it's just this attitude. As I talked
about this a little bit yesterday, I think there's this attitude in the Biden
administration that this is the administration of buy and for career Washington Executive Branch officials,
that we just sort of assume that the career executive branch employees of the
federal government, we assume, we know, we bank on the fact that
they're liberals and that they are the professionals, and that Congress scrutinizing them as
a bunch of interloping know nothings sticking their nose into our important business of the
federal government and that even if we do things that have disastrous results, well,
we were doing the right thing and we were doing our best. So
why are you getting so upset about it that that's ridiculous? Like you tried
really hard. And for that reason, I was astonished yesterday to see the
to see the unbelievable harsh critiques from Democrat members of the House of Representatives who
were nailing this woman, Kimberly Cheatle, for the security failures surrounding the assassination
of Donald Trump. And they didn't turn it into a political thing about how
you know horrible Donald Trump was, or that Trump brought it on, none
of the weird narratives of Trump bringing it on himself. They were just very
like, this was the greatest security failure by this Secret Service since Reagan's,
the near assassination of Ronald Reagan in nineteen eighty one. You had Roe Kanna,
a Democrat congressman who I believe he's from kind of Silicon Valley area,
flat out telling Cheatle she should resign like the head of the Secret Service did
after Reagan was shot. It's unbelievable, And so the Democrats were taking shot
after shot after shot, and then right after the I think within about an
hour of the committee hearing wrapping up, the chairman and the ranking Democrat,
the chairman James Comer and the ranking Democrat, Jamie Raskin, who have been
implacably opposed to each other for the last, you know, however many years
that they've been on this committee together. So Comer is the Republican chair of
the committee. Republicans have them Jordan in the House Representatives, So the chairs
of all the committees are Republicans, and Republicans have you know, a couple
more votes than the Democrats do. Comer is the chair of the committee.
Raskin is the leading Democrat, the ranking Democrat. They issue a joint letter,
signed by both of them, calling on Cheetle to resign, and it
was impressive just the amount of stuff she couldn't answer to. But again,
we've seen Biden administration executive officials give crappy, terrible answers to things, refuse
to show up for congressional hearings, bizarrely refuse to hand over information. I
mean, here's Merrick Garland for example. All right, Merrick Garland. I
think Merrick Garland's defiance of Congress has been astonishing. His defiance of the House
Representatives has been astonishing. Here's Garland, who oversees the Special Council investigation into
Joe Biden for unlawful retention of his documents at unlawful retention of classified documents at
his beach house. Okay, Biden keeps classified stuff at his private home.
He clearly got these documents when he was Vice president and while he was a
senator before that classified stuff that he would have stolen, he keeps it at
his beach house. And clearly he had it between twenty seventeen when he left
the White when he left the Vice presidency, and January of twenty twenty one
when he became president. So he was private citizen Joe Biden in possession of
all these classified documents that he was not lawfully allowed to have. Robert Hrr
investigates him. Robert Herr issues his Special Counsel report saying, I'm not going
to charge him, but it was likely that he did have those documents,
and I'm not going to charge him because of his sinility, because he seems
too old and not with it that no jury would actually convict him. The
House of Representatives the Committee demands from Attorney General Garland, hey give us the
transcript of Biden's interview with her, or they demand from Garland. Rather,
we want to know what the president said to Robert Hurr, so we want
the recording. Garland gives them the transcript. Now, in any other context,
a transcript isn't good enough in any legal setting. If you've got an
audio recording, that's the evidence you introduce in court. You don't introduce a
transcript without the audio recording. A transcript is just like a helpful aid to
listening to the audio recording, because the audio recording is the actual evidence her.
Garland refuses to give the audio recording to Congress with the most ridiculous reasons
possible. Oh, well, the audio recording might be used for deep fakes.
He's the president in the United States. We've got enough audio of him
talking. That's a preposterous thing that you're going to give the transcript but not
the audio recording. It's ludicrous. So Biden officials have gotten away with thumbing
their nose at Congress repeatedly, time and time again, and with the blessing
of the White House. Because even now so Cheatle resigns and immediately after a
statement comes out from the White House statement from President Joe Biden on Secret Service
Director Kim Cheadle. Jill and I are grateful to Director Cheadle for her decades
of public service. She has selflessly dedicated and risked her life to protect our
nation throughout her career in the United States Secret Service. We are thank her
for answering the call the lead of the Secret Service and are grateful to her
service to our family As a leader. It takes on recursion incredible integrity to
take full responsibility for an organization task with one of those challenging jobs in public
service. The independent review to get to the bottom of what happened on July
thirteenth continues, and I look forward to assessing the conclusions. We all know
what happened that day can never happen again, as I wish him all the
best, and I will plan to appoint a new director. Not a word
of criticism for the woman who oversaw the agency that just let a former president
and major presidential candidate get one centimeter away from being dead. I don't think
Biden, and now maybe we'll see more reporting on this, but would Biden
have actually fired this woman because we know how she got her job. She
got her job because she used to be a Secret Service agent attached to Jill
Biden when Jill was the second Lady. When Joe was the vice president,
Jill was the second Lady. Kim Cheadle was assigned to her detail. When
Biden became president, Jill pushed him to a pointer. There's reporting on this,
So would you have done it? Are the Democrats so all of a
sudden, like, why is there this shift on the part of the Democrats
that we're going to have accountability for failures by the executive branch? Where did
this attitude come from? Are they just thinking she's expendable? Are they basically
thinking none of us fear Joe Biden anymore? So instead of looking like idiots
trying to defend the indefensible, we're actually going to score some points for being
not bipartisan and actually hold someone accountable who's clearly an idiot, who clearly didn't
do her job, or at the very least, who clearly didn't do her
job, and her testimony was ridiculous. She basically wouldn't answer any questions that
the House gave her, so well, you know, I guess I applaud
Democrats for doing the right thing here. Even AOC AOC was blast in this
woman. I wonder why I'm feeling to see the connection for why we're having
executive accountability now when we weren't before. When we return the bizarre drama happening
in the Southern Baptist Convention over how wonderful Joe Biden is next on the John
Girardi Show. Now, generally, when I talk about religious stuff, I'm
talking about Catholic stuff and various forms of inside Catholic baseball. As I do
so, it's with a little trepidation that I look across the street at other
denominations. But I've noticed a some bizarre stuff happening with the Southern Baptist Convention.
So the head of the ERLC, the Ethics and Religious libert the Commission
or convention. I'm not sure what the C stands for, which is basically
the public policy advocacy entity that represents the Southern Baptist Convention. It's got a
gentleman named Brent Leatherwood. The ERLC issued this statement about how you know,
impressive it is that Joe Biden is stepping down from power and that you know,
shows you know what a good decision this is for the country, that
what a noble thing it is for Biden to step away from power, which
everyone read and by the way, Southern Baptists are usually pretty conservative, the
most of them, and everyone was scratching their heads like, what the heck
are you talking about. He's clearly was dragged into this, kicking and screaming
because the donors said they wouldn't give a dime to any Democrat candidates and the
whole election would be a disaster. Probably they were threatening they wouldn't donate for
a Biden presidential library and museum like they were. He was dragged, kicking
and screaming and clawing away, and he didn't give up the presidency. He
just said he's not running for reelection. This was not some selfless act by
Joe Biden. What are you crazy? This in conjunction with this soft kind
of liberal sympathy that the ERLC leadership has had, kind of driven by Russell
Moore who used to be the head of the RLC. They were very anti
Trump, and but then that morphed into being super pro fauci, pro all
these vaccine narratives, pro the all kinds of other sort of soft liberal causes
that the ERLC was really pushing on the rest of the Southern Baptists. Meg
Basham, who works for Daily Wire, has covered this pretty extensively. But
again, and I just want to focus now. This has resulted in Brent
Leatherwood, the head of the ROLC, getting fired by the board, then
getting reinstituted, and the chairman of the board getting fired. This bizarre turnaround
that's happened in the last like twenty four hours, and it kind of,
for one, says a Catholic, I sort of feel relieved that the US
Catholic bishops generally don't feel compelled to comment on kind of day to day new
zy political things like that. They I mean, they comment on policy stuff,
but not on things like that. And finally, I was like,
oh Jesules, finally, for once, Catholics aren't stepping in it. But
I just to put a bow on this, the notion that Biden is doing
this like he's Cincinnatus, the famous Roman senator who was called upon to be
the dictator basically the temporary dictator, to fight off the invasion of Rome and
immediately resigned his power after the threat to Rome, was defeated and went back
to plowing his field. You know that he's our modern day Cincinnatus. No,
this was not some selfless act by Joe Biden. He was dragged from
Power kicking and screaming the whole way. That'll do it for John Girardi Show.
See y'all next time on Power Talk