Joe Biden’s bungled clemency is why we need to investigate his age | Opinion
Leroy Brown was 8 when he was shot in the back of the head as he lay in the hallway of his home. His mom was slaughtered in a bedroom. The two were targeted because they were set to testify against a notorious Bridgeport drug dealer in 1999. As outrage over the deaths grew in Connecticut, the state reformed its witness protection laws even before Adrian Peeler was convicted for his role in the conspiracy to murder the second-grader.
For some reason, in a flurry of last-minute clemencies earlier this month, President Joe Biden let the man with a kid’s blood on his hands out of prison when he commuted Peeler’s federal drug sentence. The Biden White House said it was only letting nonviolent offenders out of prison. That’s some goof and it is reasonable to wonder how such a mistake was made. Was it bad staff work that Biden didn’t catch when exercising one of his greatest and gravest powers? Did Biden’s declining mental capabilities have something to do with it?
What we do know is that almost from the beginning of his presidency, Biden’s staff tried to manage the president’s decline at the same time they hid it from the press, the public and Congress. By the time last summer rolled around, senators and senior representatives knew what was going on. Some Democrats were privately telling the White House that Biden needed to be evaluated by specialists and the results published before they could support a run for his second term.
There’s one group of people the Constitution gives a special role to in determining the president’s competence. The 25th Amendment, the nation’s fundamental law, says the cabinet and the vice president can remove the president if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Hiding Biden’s condition from members of the cabinet is a grave offense to the Constitution and that is exactly what the Wall Street Journal reports was done. “Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members — including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen — were infrequent or grew less frequent,” the paper reported, “There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed.”
If that’s true, and The Wall Street Journal has been a step ahead in covering the story of Biden’s decline, the public needs to know exactly who was making the decisions in how to manage Biden and how much was done to hide his condition from cabinet members.
Lawyers disagree on the best way for that to happen. “The newly configured Justice Department could launch an investigation into whether White House staff was complicit in hiding the details of Biden’s cognitive problems,” Matt Mangino, a former Pennsylvania district attorney and law professor at Thiel College, told me.
Others say the Republican-controlled Congress would have to lead an investigation. “If any such investigation over this is to occur, it will be in Congress. Both houses are controlled by Republicans, so either or both could form a select committee to look into who all knew what about Biden’s mental condition during his time in office,” said Nicholas Creel, a law professor at Georgia College & State University.
The only thing that would come of such an investigation is information for the public and Congress to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again. There’s no punishment for undermining a key clause of the Constitution meant to make sure the president is up to his job.
What’s clear is that there needs to be some kind of investigation, not because of anything Biden did, like accidentally release a killer when he meant to release only nonviolent offenders, but because of what is happening right now.
There are plenty of big differences between Biden and Donald Trump, but one thing that remains the same when you trade in an 82-year-old for a 78-year-old is the threat of mental decline.
We need to investigate Biden in case we need to do something about Trump.
This story was originally published January 29, 2025 at 5:06 AM.
