The Supreme Court, , just might have given presidents fewer constitutional constraints than King George III had in 1776 . The presidency is “an office that not only tests your judgment, perhaps even more importantly it’s an office that can test your character,” Joe Biden Monday. Indeed, I’ve been thinking about the old-fashioned question of the role of in public life all week.
Though this president might not approve of the conclusions I’ve drawn. For a good four years or so, dating from the Zoom-shrunken 2020 Democratic National Convention, I had been awed by Joe Biden’s character. Over the first several decades of his more than fifty-year political career, he led the way in guiding the Democratic Party toward embracing policy positions that were terrible.
But by the time he was running for President in 2020, when the errors of his ways became evident, he did a series of 180s, and he put his shoulder to the wheel to repair the damage. In 1972, in an , he said that drug dealers, as “potential killers,” should be treated the way “we track down killers.” In 1993, arguing for the mass-incarceration law that he boasted should be called the “Biden Bill,” of the “predators on our streets” that “we have no choice but to take them out of society,” though he also questioned whether they deserved to be considered part of it in the first place.
“It doesn’t matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to be socialized into the fabric o.
