Opinion: How Biden’s last few months could be his most effective

By Thomas L. Knapp

Following Joe Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from a seemingly doomed re-election campaign, Democrats instantly re-focused on picking/backing a new candidate (at the moment, vice-president Kamala Harris seems well on her way to nailing the nomination down), while Republicans took up the cry “if he’s unable to run, he’s unable to serve, and should resign or be removed.”

I’m not seeing much speculation — yet — from either camp on the equally interesting subject of what Joe Biden’s final six months in office might look like.

There’s an old, apparently incorrect but highly applicable, western saying that the Chinese word for “crisis” embodies the written characters representing “danger” and “opportunity.”

The “danger” part of the Biden equation is easy to see: To the extent that his Democratic successor gets blamed for his mistakes, anything he does could potentially damage that successor’s prospects in November.

But what if Biden doesn’t believe Harris (or some other prospective nominee) can win the election anyway? What if he believes he’s a true “lame duck?”

If that’s the case, he doesn’t need to give a [word that rhymes with “duck”], does he? He can do as he pleases without facing much in the way of consequences.

The overbearing 21st century power of the imperial presidency, combined with extreme unlikelihood that a Democratic cabinet would invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him, or a a split Senate convict him upon impeachment, leaves him sitting pretty to do things he couldn’t do if he was worried about his re-election (or his chosen successor’s election).

On the trivial end, he could, for example, pardon his son Hunter, recently convicted on (wholly unconstitutional) federal gun charges. Heck, he could probably sell pardons and other executive branch favors to the highest bidders without worrying much about how that looked.

He could also do more consequential things.

For example, in his meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, he could put his foot down: No immediate and unconditional Gaza ceasefire, no more US weapons (and the usual welfare checks might get lost in the mail, too).

He could pick up the phone and tell Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy something similar: Open real peace talks with Moscow or the weapons shipments stop.

He could re-commit the US, fully and unconditionally, to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the “Iran Nuclear Deal.”

He could end the US embargo on Cuba and fully normalize diplomatic relations with its regime.

Of course, he could go in the opposite direction, dragging the US into all-out wars with any or all of several adversaries. But based on his decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan instead of nullifying his predecessor’s deal with the Taliban, I suspect there may be a “peace president” trapped in the body of America’s current “war president.”

In fact, the Afghanistan withdrawal had me thinking, at the time, that he INTENDED to be a one-term president with a “peacemaker” legacy.

Now he has multiple opportunities to be exactly that ... if that’s what he wants.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism