Elliot Gaiser: Who’s in charge?

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, July 17th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Next up, attorney and WORLD Opinions contributor Elliot Gaiser on filling the nation’s top job.

ELLIOT GAISER: At the 2012 Republican National Convention, actor 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. Were the act to be repeated at this week’s GOP convention, the symbolism would be more potent following President Joe Biden’s recent debate performance. 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 reveal what is at stake in November: rule by a headless leadership class or leadership by a president as the Constitution envisioned.

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. 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 four years. A vote for Biden is a vote for a blank space where the leadership class will get to write in a name.

Like the debate, mainstream 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 assumption that a president, as envisioned by the Constitution, is an actual individual human being burdened with human nature.

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 exercising powers that the leadership class would prefer to delegate to a network of aides and experts.

Under this vision, the president cannot be allowed genuine powers and immunity from prosecution for exercising them. Such genuine authority would reverse 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.

I’m Elliot Gaiser.

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