Fill the empty chair

At the 2012 Republican National Convention, Clint Eastwood addressed an empty chair as a symbol of Barack Obama’s presidency. The press mocked the shtick, but the visual clicked for voters suspicious that the president was not truly leading the country. A reprisal of Eastwood’s act at next week’s GOP convention would not be a metaphor, not after President Joe Biden’s debate performance two weeks ago. That debacle revealed that the Oval Office is effectively vacant.

The debate was followed a few days later by a panicked media reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity. The two events revealed what is at stake in November: rule by a headless leadership class or leadership by a president as the Constitution envisioned.

If President Biden is not really in charge, voters can be forgiven for noticing that there are actual decision-makers behind an open border policy, unlawful student loan forgiveness, and intrusive Title IX regulations requiring girls to share restrooms, dorm rooms, and locker rooms with males. Biden’s performance in the debate showed that the country is governed by a political machine run by a committee of aides, media figures, and career bureaucrats.

Indeed, the whole conversation about swapping the Democratic nominee now or staying the course with Biden presumes someone other than the president is really in charge of his campaign and the government. If Biden is forced out now, it will be a relatively small group of people, not the voters at large, who choose his successor. But even if Biden stays at the top of the ticket and wins in November, it is hard to imagine he will still be president at the end of the next term in January 2029. A vote for Biden is a vote for a blank space where the leadership class will get to write in a name.

Some may argue that rule by a leadership class is the lesser evil compared to the alternative: former President Donald Trump. But the scathing reactions from many of those same commentators to the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision show this is not driven by objections to a specific candidate.

Like the debate, the criticism of the immunity decision was revealing. The Supreme Court held that a president’s use of core constitutional authorities cannot be criminally prosecuted, but a president’s unofficial acts can be. Beneath the decision was perhaps the benighted assumption that a president, as envisioned by the Constitution, is an actual individual human being burdened with human nature.

That assumption suggests that if a former president can be prosecuted for official acts, then a current president is less likely to take many official acts, even if they are in the public interest. Such acts may simply pose too great a risk to the president’s ability to stay out of prison after leaving office. And if a former president may be prosecuted for decisions that turn out to be less wise or popular in hindsight, then political pressures will be immense for future presidents to prosecute past presidents. Such pressure will transform the country: Without a requisite protection of immunity, the loss of an election would mean the risk of prosecution and imprisonment. Countries that follow that road rarely continue to hold genuine elections.

The Supreme Court did not hold that the Constitution licenses a president to commit crimes. It merely held that the Constitution provides immunity for official acts to ensure that the incentives of the office and the incentives of human nature align with a republican form of government.

If that is all the court held, then why the meltdown from the left? Because the decision presumes a president will be an individual human being, surely supported by staff and appointees, but a single person nevertheless, clothed in the powers, pressures, and incentives of office and likely to respond to them as human beings do.

That presumption does not apply to rule by a leadership class. Under such a regime by committee, a cadre of aides, experts, journalists, and academics generate a consensus among themselves and then carry out that consensus in each of their spheres of power to remain in good standing in that same leadership class. Dissent from the party line, of course, is a great way to get canceled. And the ability to prosecute defectors might be seen as a helpful consensus generator.

Under this vision, the president cannot be allowed genuine powers and immunity from prosecution for exercising them. Such genuine authority would fatally undermine the fracturing of the executive’s power into the hands of hundreds or perhaps thousands of administrators, lawyers, and staffers.

After the debate and the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, the 2024 election is not just between Trump and Biden (or whoever might replace him). It is between the restoration of the U.S. presidency as described in the Constitution and reaffirmed by the Supreme Court—an office held by an actual human being with virtues and flaws and accountable to us all—or continued rule by the leadership class.

In short, the Supreme Court said that if the American people so choose, they can fill the empty chair.