Wednesday Edition: Dean Phillips Warned Us

For as furiously as Biden’s advisers have pushed back on concerns about his age, the now 81-year-old president’s halting, soft-spoken and scattered responses to former President Donald Trump, 78, shattered the party’s magical thinking on the subject. That the president’s cognitive difficulties came as such a shock was largely the result of how effectively his top aides and the White House on the whole has, for three and a half years, kept him in a cocoon — far away from cameras, questions and more intense public scrutiny.

I think it is easy to settle this right now by President Biden going to the Brady Press Center in the White House and doing a two-hour press conference. … The fact is, you know that and the campaign knows that, the White House knows that. That’s how you settle this, you put him in front of reporters and he handles himself with acuity, aplomb, we all see it’s just a fluke. The fact that you haven’t done that says quite a bit to me.

There was a sense that there was a lot of control of information and of [Obama’s] image, but there were senior journalists who just, day-to-day, had a sense of what the president was like. If he had been unable to complete sentences, it would have been clear.

The court’s conservative majority said former presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts that fall within their “exclusive sphere of constitutional authority” and are presumptively entitled to immunity for all official acts. They do not enjoy immunity for unofficial, or private, actions.

…I've seen some fairly outlandish responses about how this makes the president a king, or it allows the president to assassinate political opponents, etc. Everyone needs to cool down a bit on this. … immunity for official acts isn't uncommon. In addition to the US, you'll find it in India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, the UK, Germany, and Brazil, among others. The reason is precisely the one the Supreme Court laid out: We want presidents to have a wide scope for decisive action.

We don't want them hamstrung by fears that some enterprising prosecutor will someday try to toss them in jail for actions that they simply disagree with. … the Court's decision doesn't mean that presidents can willy nilly decide to assassinate someone they don't like. Immunity applies only to official actions, and while that's a broad scope it's not infinite. Bribery is still illegal, even if you're president, and so is murder.

Younger voters who are going to be stuck with the bill aren’t really paying attention to it. So older voters are going to the polls and essentially robbing younger voters.

One way of understanding the Social Security problem is, old people can’t work, young people can, babies can’t. So people at a certain age support the babies and the old people. And typically in our society, that’s people between the ages of 18 and 65.

If the argument here is we have to cut Social Security, then what you’re effectively saying is we just have to privatize what is currently a public problem of who pays for the older generation. And I don’t know why people think that you solve many problems by taking a bunch of elderly people and saying, “You’re on your own.”

In a year’s worth of conversations with other party leaders, Phillips told me, “everybody, without exception,” shares his fear about Joe Biden’s fragility—political and otherwise—as he seeks a second term. This might be hyperbole, but not by much: In my own recent conversations with party officials, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t jittery about Biden.

Phillips’s problem is that they refuse to say so on the record. Democrats claim to view Trump as a singular threat to the republic, the congressman complains, but for reasons of protocol and self-preservation they have been unwilling to go public with their concerns about Biden, making it all the more likely, in Phillips’s view, that the former president will return to office.

At that stage of life, it is impossible ultimately to conduct, to prosecute the office of the American presidency in the way that this country in the world needs right now. That is an absolute truth.

"I don't think Dean Phillips is earning any new friends in the House Democratic Caucus these days," said Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), the chair of the caucus.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) called Phillips' campaign a "total joke" and "very disrespectful of the president and the party," saying he's "torched his reputation."

"Dean Phillips is not going to win any primary. I think he's not helpful to the country," said former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.).

"He seems to be taking a page out of the Trump playbook," said Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.). "It makes me wonder ... if he's a real Democrat."