Politics

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week it finally happened: David Ignatius gave Washington elites permission to talk about moving on from Joe Biden. Few columnists represent the voice of the DC establishment more than Ignatius, who was counted among the favorite writers of the president, at least until publishing this piece, titled “President Biden should not run in 2024.” We’ll see if he’s going to get invited back for the next cranky conversation in the Oval, where Joe will show him he’s still pretty spry — no joke!

In the closing months of the 2022 midterms North Carolina residents began receiving text messages and phone calls from unfamiliar numbers, a ritual all too familiar to a swing-state voter. The benevolent voice on the line had seen the recipient’s name on a petition to allow the Green Party on the ballot and wanted to ensure the signature was on the up and up. With validity confirmed the anonymous caller would reveal himself to be a Green Party representative. “If the Green Party is on the ballot, it’ll take votes away from Democrats, giving Republicans a huge advantage. It will help them win North Carolina in 2022 and 2024. There’s far too much at stake to let this happen. Are you interested in asking to have your name removed from this petition or leave it as is?

Impeaching a president may not have the same power it once did in Washington. But the announcement of an official inquiry today by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is the first time Capitol Hill Republicans have seriously deployed impeachment in a quarter century. Much as Republicans hated Barack Obama, and much as they could have found a path to impeaching him with their large post-Tea Party Congressional majorities, they never went down this path. This is the new aggressive politics in an age of lawfare — but it’s also justified by what we already know, and what we’ve learned in the past year. “I’m directing our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden,” McCarthy announced.

The Democrats are having a hard time keeping their story straight on abortion. Last week, former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki claimed on her MSNBC show (which should be called The Spin Zone) that “no one supports abortion up until birth,” only to then describe all of the scenarios in which she would support a late-term abortion. Vice President Kamala Harris similarly balked in a CBS interview Sunday with Margaret Brennan when asked if she would support any limits on abortion. Instead, she opted to reiterate several times that “we need to put back in place the protections of Roe v. Wade.” The inability of Democrats to articulate what abortion limits they support is a feature, not a bug.

“Everything’s bigger in Texas” is one of those clichés that happens to be entirely true. With the diminution of the importance of impeachment as a political issue on the federal level, the Lone Star State seems obliged to take up the slack — and the impeachment of controversial Attorney General Ken Paxton is turning into a process that pits the highest-paid power lawyers in Texas against each other in a duel to the death. There's been plenty of color in the proceedings, and not just from Paxton attorney Tony Buzbee, whose heavily tanned appearance led him to take to Instagram to accuse "reputable media organizations" of editing his skin tone in photographs (watchers had started passing around memes of Buzbee as an Oompa Loompa). "So you think the news isn’t bias [sic]?

Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze in place and was unable to answer questions for an agonizing period. The incident raised concerns about both his age (eighty-one) and health. But it should spark a larger debate about the gerontocracy that sits atop America's government. In January, the Pew Research Center reported that the Senate's median age is now 65.3 years old. That's up from 62.4 years old as recently as 2017, the first year of the Trump presidency. More senators have been eligible for Social Security than not for years. Just this Monday, an Associated Press poll found 77 percent of Americans think eighty-year-old President Biden is too old to effectively govern in a second term. That included 69 percent of all Democrats.

First lady Jill Biden, who received the Covid-19 vaccine and boosters, has tested positive for the virus again. President Joe Biden, while presently unafflicted, is instead battling dismal approval ratings. A Wall Street Journal poll this week found that “voters overwhelmingly think President Biden is too old to run for re-election and give him low marks for handling the economy and other issues important to their vote…”Similarly, an Associated Press-NORC poll released last month found “fully 77 percent said Biden is too old to be effective for four more years. Not only do 89 percent of Republicans say that, so do 69 percent of Democrats.