In two earlier pieces for Townhall (here and here), I’ve sounded warnings for the Biden administration: Unless something changes, President Biden will be ranked as among America’s worst chief executives. And this is not only according to the Constitution’s job description, a measure conservatives might use to assess presidents. It also is true according to indicators left-of-center academics employ to raise the rankings of presidents whose policies they like and suppress the rankings of presidents they don’t like.
Like nearly all deficient presidents, Biden served only one term. He is now mercifully gone. But his actions during his final days will cement his low rating.
Biden was unique among presidents in scoring poorly not just on one or two of the factors academics use for demoting chief executives, but on several: corruption, failure to enforce the law, executive ineptness, incapacity, divisiveness (or lack of moral leadership), and civil liberties violations. Thus:
– The reputations of Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1876) and Warren G. Harding (1921-1923) suffer because of corruption in their administrations. However, neither was personally corrupt. By contrast, Biden apparently received cash from his son’s influence-peddling operations.
– James Buchanan (1857-1861) gets low grades for failing to enforce the law against seceding Southern states; Biden failed to enforce the law against a massive invasion across the Southern border.
– Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) is marked down for ineptness, but nothing he did quite matches such fiascos as Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the failure to protect Donald Trump against two assassination attempts.
– The ranking of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) drops because of personal incapacity late in his second term. In recent days, even the New York Times has admitted that Biden was “faltering” throughout his administration.
– Andrew Johnson (1865-1869) is disfavored for his divisiveness and intemperance. Biden called his political opponents “fascists” and “threats to the republic,” even while pursuing policies in some ways reminiscent of fascism.
– Liberal historians demote otherwise-favored Presidents—such as Wilson and John Adams (1797-1801)—for violating civil liberties. But the Biden Administration waged unprecedented “lawfare” against political opponents. Its efforts to suppress disfavored books and other writings was perhaps the most extensive peacetime attack on the First Amendment in U.S. history.
The Last Days
Many Presidents try to polish their historical reputations during their last days in office. Biden’s last days, however, further damaged his legacy.
One example is his last-minute use of the pardon power. He overturned his son’s felony convictions, after promising he would not do so. He also shielded from prosecution people who may have violated the law in their unholy jihad against Trump.
Biden’s attack on Meta (Facebook and Instagram) for its retreat from internet censorship cannot have helped his legacy. The attack only underscored the reports of Meta’s CEO documenting the Biden administration’s thuggish efforts to suppress internet content it found displeasing. None of this will improve Biden’s reputation as a civil libertarian.
Perhaps worst of all, was an act of constitutional sabotage involving a proposal called the “Equal Rights Amendment.”
Biden’s Constitutional Sabotage
In his final days, Biden announced that the long-dead Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was now ratified and part of the Constitution. To understand how bizarre and potentially harmful this proclamation is, some background is in order:
The Constitution permits Congress, by a two-thirds vote of each house, to propose a constitutional amendment. Any proposal must be ratified by three fourths of the states, which now amounts to 38 of 50. In 1972, Congress proposed the ERA, and soon a fair number of states had ratified in a burst of enthusiasm.
As time progressed, however, people began to realize that the ERA was poorly drafted. If its language had any clear effect, that effect would be to transfer vast areas of public policy from democratically-elected lawmakers to a judicial oligarchy.
So the pace of ratification slowed, and it stopped short of the required 38 states. Moreover, several states that had approved the ERA repealed their ratifications.
Congress then tried to unconstitutionally extend the ERA’s seven-year ratification time frame to ten years. That didn’t work either. No more states ratified within the extended time limit.
Eventually, reputable supporters of the ERA, including the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, admitted that it was dead.
So why would Biden proclaim it to be part of the Constitution?
The answer may lie in this: There is a cottage industry of unscrupulous leftists who raise money from gullible donors on false claims that the ERA still can be ratified. Given Biden’s record, it may be that someone in his administration has a job lined up in that industry.
Whatever the reason, the proclamation qualifies as “constitutional sabotage” because it creates needless and groundless uncertainty about the text of the Supreme Law of the Land. And that text is something we all need to be certain about.
For several years, left-of-center academics will remain grateful to Biden for expanding the size of the federal government—and for not being Trump. So it will take time for Biden to drop toward the bottom of the presidential surveys.
But Biden’s actions during the last days of his presidency assure that it eventually will happen.
On the other hand, let’s give Joe Biden credit for one thing he did right: He was gracious enough to attend Trump’s inauguration.