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Last night, the same president who almost exactly a year ago disgracefully abandoned 14,000 Americans and tens of thousands of our allies to the Taliban decided to lecture the US on “the continued battle for the soul of the nation.”

Let that sink in for a moment or two.

In that speech, Joe Biden tried to take the high ground for democracy against authoritarianism — just a week or so after eviscerating the constitutional check on the presidency by claiming the executive branch has the authority to print and appropriate between $600 billion and one trillion dollars to transfer debt from Biden’s base voters to the rest of the taxpayers.

Let that one sink in for another moment or two. Especially after Biden described “the work of my presidency” as returning the US to the founding documents of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Joe Biden isn’t the solution for what ails the American soul. He’s not even really the main disease of what ails the American soul. Joe Biden is a demagogue who floated to the top of a morass that has been building for decades, and who only sees the problem to the extent that it benefits or harms Biden’s interests.

To wit — here’s how Biden framed the problem in this prime-time speech from Independence Hall [corrected]:

And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.

They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.

Ahem. One can certainly believe this to be true of “MAGA Republicans.” What about the Democrats and progressives that rioted in the streets of Washington on January 20, 2017, in an attempt to disrupt the inauguration of Trump? How about the way that Democrats — even mainstream Democrats — labeled themselves “The Resistance” almost immediately after the 2016 election, which preceded that Inauguration Day riot and helped fuel it? And for that matter, what about the pointless two years of “Russian collusion” allegations that turned out to be based on Hillary Clinton’s oppo research?

Where was Joe Biden’s concern for the “soul of America” at that point? Did it start with January 6?

They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.

Without a doubt, the riot was awful and embarrassing. But we also had ongoing insurrections in American cities from Seattle to Washington DC, where armed militants seized entire city blocks and held them as “autonomous zones” where they claimed US authority didn’t exist. In Portland, left-wing domestic terrorists attacked the federal courthouse for weeks on end, if not months. In Minneapolis, where I lived at the time and which was the epicenter of these insurrections, armed mobs assaulted law-enforcement officers, burned out hundreds of businesses, looted thousands more, and created a lawlessness that still exists to this day.

Did Biden ever bother to lecture America on those insurrections, those assaults on police — not just in Minneapolis, but across the country? No; instead, he played footsie with the significant number of “defund the police” nihilists in his own party, including a number of Democrats in Congress. His defenders insist now that Biden never endorsed “defund the police,” but he’s never rebuked his party for their own anti-law-enforcement rhetoric, and certainly not in the way Biden did last night when aiming his demagoguery soooo conveniently at his political opposition.

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Last night’s speech was nothing more than soulless demagoguery by a soulless demagogue desperately trying to distract from his failures at command-economy machinations and Afghanistan over the past year-plus.

But even this is just a symptom of the problem plaguing the soul of America. Biden may not even be that far off of it, but he’s pointing his finger at the wrong end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The real problem plaguing America is a creeping authoritarianism that Biden is all too happy to indulge — when it suits him. But he didn’t start it, and to the extent he gets away with it, the blame doesn’t entirely fall on him.

That blame falls on Congress. It falls on a compliant media in bed with one political party almost without exception. And, to some extent, it falls on us.

Biden’s Academia bailout is a sterling example of Congress’ failure in this regard. Biden announced that he would appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air (even by the White House’s estimate) to pay off the student-loan debt. He didn’t say he was moving the money around from other programs, as Trump did with wall funding, which itself was certainly debatable in terms of constitutionality. Biden will just borrow the money on his own.

That is a grotesque violation of one of the Constitution’s checks on executive power. The Constitution grants the power of appropriation exclusively to Congress, which limits the executive’s ability to spend money to only tasks authorized by Congress. In a sane constitutional model, we wouldn’t be waiting for Republicans to “pounce” and find someone with standing to sue over this in court. The leaders of Congress would have immediately gone to the federal court to preserve their institution’s constitutional authority.

Instead, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer reacted by dancing around Biden’s authoritarian bonfire of the Constitution. The media — and especially the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Washington Post — are casting pushback on Biden’s Academia bailout as extremist. They’re cheerleading autocracy and authoritarianism to “own the cons” they accuse in the same breath as endorsing.

It’s madness. And it’s utterly shameful.

But Biden didn’t start this. Neither did Donald Trump. Barack Obama spent a lot of his time issuing “pen and phone” edicts like DACA, DAPA, and the like without institutional challenges from Congress until the opposition party took over. Obama also started a war with Libya that decapitated its government, not just without authorization from Congress but without bothering to even go back and get retroactive authority. Hillary Clinton gleefully chortled “we came, we saw, he died” about Moammar Qaddafi’s demise, shortly after which Libya became a failed state that triggered a refugee crisis in Europe and an explosion of terror networks. That would result in the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi a year later, on the eleven-year anniversary of 9/11.

Clinton’s reference for that chortle was Julius Caesar, by the way, who said “Veni vidi vici” about his reconquest of the Bosphorus after the conquest of Egypt. How’s that for an imperialist presidency?

It didn’t really start with Obama either, though. Creeping authoritarianism in the presidency accelerated in the Cold War period but really began in FDR’s administration. FDR used command economics to deal with a catastrophe — the Great Depression — and then immediately went into World War II and the necessities of wartime command. Even after emerging from the hot wars, though, we have Richard Nixon imposing wage and price controls with a compliant Congress doing next to nothing to challenge him, and so on.

Pick your spots: Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton’s wag-the-dog stunts to distract from personal scandal. George W. Bush and domestic surveillance. This problem of authoritarianism runs deeply and diversely through our modern history. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are the products of this trend, not its initiators.

And why do we produce authoritarians? Mainly because Congress has spent the last several decades ceding its political and moral authority to the executive. We could go all the way back to Woodrow Wilson on that score and his insistence on federal-bureaucracy governance of “experts,” but even without that, Congress has become utterly limp. It’s gotten so bad now that Congress can’t even pass budgets under normal order. Leadership under both parties have made this co-equal branch under the Constitution nothing more than a rubber stamp for presidents of the same party or brick walls for presidents of the opposite party.

That produces an electorate with no investment or trust in Congress. So to whom do they turn? Not to constitutionalists that might return some level of constitutional humility to the Oval Office and force Congress to take responsibility for governance. They vote for demagogues and authoritarians who promise to get things done without Congress or the courts. When the crowds don’t get what they want, then they riot instead of getting Congress to act. And all the while, our institutional media plays these same games overwhelmingly on behalf of one party over the other, then cries about being victimized by questions of credibility and bias.

Make no mistake — Joe Biden’s correct that we have a soul-sickness in America. And make no mistake — Joe Biden is a large part of the problem, having spent forty years in Congress making this situation worse, and now becoming the authoritarian he warned about last night.

The antidote is a return to actual constitutional governance. We don’t need an imperial presidency any longer, if we needed it at all. It’s time to dismantle the regulatory state and force Congress to do its job by limiting the presidency’s power in all senses, legitimate or otherwise. When we start having Congresses that govern properly and directly, we will have no need for authoritarians and demagogues, nor to “own” the other side.

Addendum: The stagecraft was the least of the issues in last night’s speech, but maybe someone at the White House should have thought this one through a bit better:

Nothing screams unity like a backdrop of blood red lighting and Marines positioned behind Biden as he shouts with raised clenched fists from the podium. pic.twitter.com/ZkjUPGF0WN

— Mia Cathell (@MiaCathell) September 2, 2022

Yeah, well, Independence Hall was lit in red and blue as the backdrop. There’s nothing wrong with either color, and the obvious intent there was to promote America as a brand and unity as an ideal. Credit given for best intentions, but the end effect was probably not a great outcome for the message Biden thought he was delivering.

Correction: Biden delivered this speech from Independence Hall, not the White House — which I knew but erroneously forgot. I’ve corrected the references above.