Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book has finally given liberals the permission to admit that former President Joe Biden indeed lost whatever marbles he once had long before he maintained that he was mentally fit for a second term in the White House, and nearly five years after the release of Hunter Biden’s pornographic personal laptop, the rest of the press is finally able to admit that the Biden family isn’t exactly the most ethical bunch.
In a staid lamentation, the Washington Post editorial board derided the Biden family’s “decision to put personal loyalties ahead of their duty to the country.” In a much less staid excoriation, Washington Post royalty Sally Quinn conceded that former first lady Jill Biden committed “elder abuse.”
But appealing to morality is a fool’s errand in as wretched a hive of scum and villainy as Washington. Rather than consider the demonstrable lack of ethics in pantomiming Weekend at Bernie‘s with a cancer-ridden octogenarian atop the presidency, Democrats must consider that their addiction to gerontocracy has cost them not just the White House but also the ability to block President Donald Trump’s blockbuster “big, beautiful bill” from passing the House.
In the 4 1/2 months of the 119th Congress, three House Democrats have died. Sylvester Turner, 70, of Texas’s 18th Congressional District, replaced Sheila Jackson Lee, who herself died less than one year ago at 75. Arizona’s Raul Grijalva, 77, decided to run in 2024 despite a lung cancer diagnosis, promising this would be his last term in office, but he then died within a year of starting treatment. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) moved heaven and earth to secure Gerry Connolly, 75, of Virginia’s 11th District, the plum position of ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, but he, too, died of cancer that was diagnosed prior to the 2024 election.
Including Lee, three Democrats also died in 2024, and the year before that, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. With the exception of New Jersey’s 9th Congressional District, which was represented by Bill Pascrell, 87, not one of these districts had a Democratic lean below the double digits. Unlike former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who nearly performed necromancy to keep a crimson red jurisdiction in the control of Democrats, not one of these indigo districts were so tenuous that the party couldn’t safely expect to keep control of their seats with even a below-replacement-level generic Democrat under the age of, say, 60.
And yet, Democrats circle the wagons anyhoo.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to perform similar necromancy to construct the $3 trillion Frankenstein’s monster combining blue state subsidies for liberal RINOs, a $1 trillion spending cut for the fiscal hawks, and all of Trump’s disparate campaign promises tailor made to shore up his 2024 margins in dramatically diverse swing states. The speaker only controls 220 seats in a body with 435 chairs, and on Thursday’s final vote for the bill, just 215 Republicans voted in favor, which should have dealt a fatal blow to Trump’s entire legislative legacy.
However, the vote was on Thursday morning. Those 215 Republicans voted for the bill, with two voting against it, two not voting at all, and one voting present. Connolly died exactly one day prior, meaning that the entire Democratic caucus plus the two Republican defectors amounted to 214 votes.
Unlike the Senate, where ties can be broken by Vice President JD Vance, the House has no tiebreakers. If Connolly had not died, a 215-215 vote would have meant Trump’s agenda failed.
Instead, a septuagenarian with esophageal cancer did what septuagenarians with esophageal cancer usually do, and died.
As with all actualities of the swamp, Republicans aren’t perfect at knowing when to ask a senile senior to leave — the GOP just isn’t quite so shameless in denying voters’ lying eyes or comically incompetent in figuring out which of the elderly are actual liabilities. For an old to stay in good standing in Republican policy, you either have to display Trumptastic levels of tirelessness and energy — recall that Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) traditional reelection trek to visit every single one of Iowa’s 99 counties included an actual push-up contest against Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), a Bronze Star combat veteran — or you have to have the decency to make clear you’re on your way out the door, a la Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
While the median House Republican is only months younger than the average House Democrat, the median Senate Republican is nearly two years younger than the median Senate Democrat. Plus, there’s some indication that Trump, 77, is intentionally rejuvenating the party. The average age of Trump’s second Cabinet is 54.1 years old, the youngest since that of President George H.W. Bush. Compare that Biden’s, which, at an average age of 63.7 years old, was the oldest in modern history.
It is bad to lie that the leader of the free world is mentally fit to perform the most important job on the planet because it is dishonest. It is bad to gaslight your 82-year old husband into seeking a second term in office so you can keep scoring covers of Vogue magazine because it is disrespectful to your marriage, and it is bad to demand your father preserve his position to use it enrich yourself and avoid legal consequences because it is disdainful to the public.
But it is also bad because it is simply strategically stupid politics, and in the same way, gambling that old and obese people with cancer will survive long enough so Republican governors can’t keep an indigo seat vacant by punting a special election is no less idiotic than expecting you’ll become a millionaire by playing a slot machine. The public has long understood that the entire Biden cover-up was dumb and bad because we have souls, but even the sociopaths that dominate Washington should realize by now that it was dumb and bad because some of them have brains.
TRUMP IS FIXING THE INFLATION DISASTER BIDEN CREATED
I’ll do you one further hypothetical for just how far the Democratic Party has pushed its luck. After Republicans won 220 House seats in the 2024 election, Trump tapped three for his Cabinet, one of whom, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), came from the slightly swingy electorate of upstate New York. If Stefanik’s seat went blue before the mandatory wait time to fill the two Florida vacancies and none of the three Democrats had died, the House would have been a perfect 216-216 deadlock, allowing a Democrat to force repeated motions to vacate as Matt Gaetz did in 2023, until one Republican stuck in traffic allows a one-vote Democratic majority to blow up Johnson’s speakership entirely.
Instead, in reality, Trump is in the White House, and Democrats just allowed him to pass his legislative priority not 200 days into his term.