Sound or otherwise, contender or not – Joe Biden is set to remain president until next January

The glaring weakness in the world’s shiniest democracy is there is no practical way to punt an unsound leader. It has never happened, partly because the constitutional mechanisms for such drastic action cannot work in practice.

Has the world been asking the wrong questions about Joe Biden, the doddering great uncle at Christmas lunch who doubles as the most powerful person on the planet?

Speculations coalesce on Biden’s fitness for office after January, 2025. He has been carried, literally and figuratively, for months. Nature has clobbered him, as it will us all.

Fortunately, Hollywood sent a special envoy late on Wednesday.

George Clooney, a Democrat campaigner and Biden’s friend, dared utter what the Democratic hierarchy has dared not: “(The) Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at (a) fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”

Joe Biden has been carried, literally and figuratively, for months. Picture: Getty

Yet Biden, if he chooses – sound or otherwise, contender or not – is set to remain president until next January. A week is a long time, it is said. Six months is a political era.

Old age’s scalp of Sleepy Joe reveals a glaring weakness in the world’s shiniest democracy. Biden is unelectable.

That his opponent should also be unelectable is beside the point.

Biden clings to power, for this term and the hope of another.

That Biden’s opponent should also be unelectable is beside the point. Picture: Getty

His legacy stands to be the return of Donald Trump, the raging kook who nods to 1930s Germany when he vows to break the system which broke his disaffected voters.

Biden fronts like a clapped-out car for a transcontinental road trip. He’s haywire under the bonnet. He stalls without warning.

Any day now, the Biden bumper will clatter to the floor, followed by the petrol tank.

Yet he is also immovable (unless a glimmer of self-awareness intrudes upon his Shakespearean hubris).

For the second time in three years, a US president considered unfit for office cannot be deposed unless the unfit president allows himself to be.

Sad, bad or mad? It doesn’t matter. There is no practical way to punt an unsound leader of the US. It has never happened, partly because the constitutional mechanisms for such drastic action cannot work in practice.

Trump’s excesses prompted renewed scrutiny of the constitutional blind spot for “incapacity” during his presidential term.

The 25th Amendment was enacted in 1967, the height of the nuclear age, when the world fretted about hotheads and big red buttons.

Trump’s presidential playbook from 2016 leaned on the erratic and unhinged.

Jamie Raskin, a congressman and constitutional law professor, at this time drafted legislation which sought to crystallise section four of the 25th Amendment.

The section details the paths of removal of an unfit president who cannot recognise his or her unfitness for office.

It requires a vice president to act against the president who has promoted him or her.

In this lies the first problem. No vice president, however noble their intentions, will move to oust their boss.

A majority of the Cabinet or a body set up by Congress would need to concur with the vice president.

The obvious glitch?

Any president, or his people, who sniffed out such disloyalty could sack his or her subordinates and stymie efforts of presidential expulsion.

As Raskin told Vanity Fair, he himself was threatened when a violent mob stormed the Capitol Building in January 2021.

Trump voters tried to stop the congressional passing of Trump’s failed election in 2020.

People hid in offices and closets: 174 police officers were injured.

The rioters had been egged on by Trump earlier in the day; later a congressional committee found that the driver of the mayhem was “one man” – Trump.

Raskin said it was “hard to think of a more egregious departure from the president’s obligation to faithfully exercise the laws” of the US and its Constitution.

Trump was a “lethal danger to the Republic”.

And yet with weeks remaining in office, Trump could not be unseated.

Impeachment machinations came and went after Trump left office. At the time of the chaos, section four of the 25th Amendment was cited, but the calls played out like an empty threat wrapped in righteous anger.

The same impossibilities face any efforts to unseat Biden, should his mind further dim in coming months.

America is beholden to a man who walks like a marionette and talks like an automaton. He seems as lost, and as puzzling, as Hemingway’s leopard on Kilimanjaro.

Once again, the US is scuttled by a president and his misplaced pride. It’s bad timing, given the world’s wobbles and historical faultlines.

The unchecked rise of anti-western bile, including outbreaks in the parliaments and universities in Australia, demands a thriving America.

Instead, the US remains captive to the competing whims of a sad man and a bad man.

Originally published as Sound or otherwise, contender or not – Joe Biden is set to remain president until next January