Save the World, Chuck!

After Thursday night’s disastrous debate performance, the whole world sees what those who were paying attention have known for some time: The leader of the free world, President Joe Biden, is an empty chair. Mr. Biden no longer has the mental capacity or stamina to perceive events comprehensively and make decisions based on that perspective.

As a partisan Republican, I have strong reasons for not wanting to see Joe go. A weakened man is a weak candidate, and a weak candidate is a weak rival to my party’s preferred alternative, Mr. Trump. But however the race goes, the United States only has one president at a time, and—unless something is done—until January 20, 2025, more than six long months away, that president is Joe Biden.

Just focusing on foreign policy alone, Mr. Biden’s empty-chair administration has been disastrous. When the president doesn’t choose a policy, nobody else can choose for him. Instead, without guidance, each piece of the bureaucracy follows its own priorities and acts on its own agenda, even when those agendas make no sense when taken simultaneously.

Most spectacularly, the administration hasn’t chosen sides between Israel and Hamas but supports both sides in that terrible war, with money, with supplies, and with rhetoric.  As Mr. Trump said in the debate, effectively, Mr. Biden “has become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him because he is a very bad Palestinian. He is a weak one.” A similar point applies to the Russia-Ukraine war, where the US has intervened to prevent a compromise peace but has not offered the aid that would enable Ukraine to win. And thanks to the combination of Russian aggression and American dithering, the world is closer to thermonuclear holocaust than it has ever been. That peril will not wait for the Electoral College.

So what can be done? The US Constitution offers two methods for shunting aside an unfit President before the end of his term. There is the complicated and untested mechanism of section 4 of the 25th Amendment: “Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

But that mechanism has never been used, much less the following provision: if the President contests the claim of incapacity, Congress should decide.

There is, however, a better way.

If the Democratic House and Senate leadership would put country and the fate of the world over party, go to the Republican leadership, and say “this cannot go on,” an impeachment in the House and trial and removal in the Senate could be done in a few days.

True, in either case, the buck would stop with Vice President Harris, either as acting president or as the real thing, and many in and outside the Democrat Party do not see her as an effective chief executive. But she is at least smart and aware enough to hear the warring bureaucrats, choose a consistent policy, and, if ably served, make everybody work for its success. Like any President, Ms. Harris might make a wrong decision, but she would at least decide.

So what will it be, Senate Majority Leader Schumer? Will you go to the Republican House and Senate leadership and offer to work together to put an actual President behind the Resolute desk, even if that means undermining your nominal President and embarrassing your party? Or will you do nothing and hope that the ship of state remains afloat despite the stormy waters, the looming rocks, and the senile captain?

“Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”