Ben Cline was among the 147 Republicans who voted hours after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to decertify the 2020 presidential election.
Now Cline is joining others from among those 147 with a problem about Democrats pushing Joe Biden out of the 2024 race.
“Over the years, Democrats and their media allies have shamelessly dismissed valid concerns about the President’s mental capacity as conspiracy theories. Every individual involved in this cover-up, particularly Vice President Harris, must be held accountable for their actions,” Cline said in a statement released by his office on Monday.
ICYMI: Joe Biden dropping out of 2024 presidential race, endorses Kamala Harris
Cline, by this reasoning, should maybe then be held accountable for dismissing the valid concerns about ex-president Donald Trump’s mental capacity, which date back to the first year of his term in the White House, and have only worsened since his 2020 election defeat.
To wit: his recent rants about his good friend, “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” a fictional character that he has taken to citing in reference to immigration, which reveal to the world that Trump doesn’t know the difference between “political asylum” and “insane asylum.”
Now you know why he keeps saying so many immigrants come from mental institutions; he thinks that immigrants applying for political asylum are patients from, yeah, what we used to call insane asylums.
But, sure, Biden’s the one with mental-capacity issues.
And the fact of Trump’s near-illiteracy doesn’t account for the concerns that would seem to be there with Republicans having just nominated as their presidential candidate a man who was convicted on 34 counts of fraud related to his effort to cover up hush-money payments aimed at keeping the story of his affair with a porn star from being made public before the 2016 election, which is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the guy’s legal and criminal issues.
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If Democrats, as Cline suggests, are guilty of a “cover-up” with respect to Biden’s issues with aging, how do we refer to what Republicans are doing with Trump’s litany of mental and moral failings?
Their response to Biden dropping out of the race, in the form of threats to take legal action to try to prevent Kamala Harris from becoming the Democratic Party nominee, tells us where their heads are there.
“It would be wrong, and I think unlawful, in accordance with some of these states’ rules for a handful of people to go in a back room and switch it out because they’re, they don’t like the candidate any longer. That’s not how this is supposed to work. So, I think they would run into some legal impediments in at least a few of these jurisdictions,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told ABC News “This Week” anchor Martha Raddatz.
Johnson, who like Cline, was among the 147 who voted to decertify the 2020 election, would presumably be aware that Democrats haven’t yet nominated a candidate for president, so with Biden ending his campaign, it’s up to the party, not the states, not the courts, to figure out how to get a nominee in place between now and the time that the states need a name to print on their ballots, which is the only part they play in this process.
But maybe Johnson, who like Cline is a lawyer, isn’t aware of how this pretty easy for the rest of us to understand process works, akin to how their party nominee doesn’t know that the word “asylum” can have multiple definitions.
I think they know that there’s nothing to the legal issue that they’re trying to raise; they’re just throwing things at the wall to see if something sticks.
Biden’s departure from the 2024 race clearly upends the conventional wisdom on how things play out between now and Election Day. Biden, in the wake of the questions about his abilities following the disastrous performance in the June 27 CNN debate, was on his way to a Jimmy Carter-level re-election defeat.
Harris, for the moment, at least, gives Democrats’ fortunes a boost, and the way you can tell the dynamics of the race have changed is how Republicans have responded.
Steel yourself for the next Jan. 6, is what I’m getting at here.
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Chris Graham
