Biden's in Big Trouble and the Democrats Need Someone to Dump On

The Supreme Court is the chosen boogeyman. The blasts at it have gone from unworthy to unhinged.

The Washington Post and ABC are not exactly hotbeds of cheerleading for conservatives or Republicans. So when they deliver bad news for Joe Biden, that’s one of the few things they report that you can believe.

Today’s polling news is bad in spades. I’ll just give you some highlights.

— Biden’s approval rating is not just underwater but under the ocean: 36% approve of his job performance and 56% disapprove, including 47% who strongly disapprove. I have never heard of a President’s being re-elected with those numbers.

— Bad as that is, it gets worse when you dig into the details. According to the Post, “Biden’s approval rating is underwater among a slew of groups that supported him by wide margins in 2020. He stands at 26 percent approval among Americans under age 30, 42 percent among non-White adults, 41 percent among urban residents and 46 percent of those with no religious affiliation.”

— The economy is expected to be the No. 1 issue next year, and by 54 % to 36 %, Americans say Trump did a better job handling the economy when he was President than Biden has done during his term.

— 63 % say Biden does not have the mental sharpness to serve effectively as president, up from 43 % in 2020 and 54 % a year ago. A similar 62 % say Biden is not in good enough physical health to be effective.

As to trust in honesty and ethics, the Post puts it this way:

Neither Biden nor Trump is viewed positively on questions of honesty and trustworthiness, but Trump, who has lied repeatedly in claiming the 2020 election was rife with fraud and therefore stolen, is seen more negatively. Today, 33 percent say Trump is honest and trustworthy while 63 percent say he is not. In comparison, 41 percent say Biden is honest and trustworthy while 54 percent say he is not.

In other words, the one important issue where Biden might have been expected to have an advantage has been largely, although not entirely, neutralized. And this is before DOJ’s expected decision within the next few days whether to indict Hunter Biden on tax and firearms charges, as reported by Politico and other outlets.

Perhaps the worst news for Biden gets (predictably) buried pretty far down the story:

Another warning sign for Biden and his team comes in hypothetical ballot tests. Throughout the 2020 campaign, Biden generally led Trump in head-to-head pre-election polls — and in November 2020, he won 51 percent of the popular vote to Trump’s 47 percent. Today, Biden is running behind the former president on the question of whom voters prefer for 2024.

When asked who they would support in 2024, 44 percent of voting-age adults say they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for Trump while 38 percent would definitely or probably vote for Biden. The remaining 18 percent are either undecided or gave another answer.

Two things to note there. First, “voting age adults” is almost always a sample more favorable to Democrats than registered voters, not to mention likely voters. Second, the six percent margin is well outside the margin of error.

Do things look better for Biden if DeSantis is the nominee? Not much. According to the poll, if DeSantis is the candidate, 42 percent today say they would definitely or probably vote for him, while 37 percent would back Biden and 21 percent are undecided or would chose another option. (That’s a lot of undecided’s, which is to be expected since, at this stage, both Biden and Trump are better known nationally than DeSantis).

Question: When your candidate is this far behind the Eight Ball, what do you do? Answer: Talk about something or someone else. The Democrats have found their boogeyman, namely, Clarence Thomas (a role he’s filled for them before), Neil Gorsuch, and more generally the Supreme Court. That the Democrats feel they need to take this option is revealing, because, as last month’s Pew poll shows, the Court remains substantially more popular than Congress (controlled by Democrats for the great majority of the last 30 months), by a margin of 48% to 26%. When you feel like you have to go after something that’s almost twice as popular as you are, there’s trouble in River City.

To be clear: I don’t think the attacks on the Court are primarily a response to Biden’s tanking numbers. The election is still far away. As I said in an earlier post, the main reasons for attacking the Court are simply childlike, foot-stomping fury that it’s the one important institution in American life the Left doesn’t control; and a more calculated strategy to undermine the Court’s authority in order to promote, and get away with, defiance of its expected decision in June against racially-rigged college admissions.

Still, the attack dogs have been unleashed, and none is more ready than Maureen Dowd of the NYT, the lady who’s made a profession of snark. She was in full flower this weekend:

It’s the greatest gathering of grievances we’ve ever seen on the high court. The woe-is-me bloc of conservative male justices is obsessed with who has wronged them.

It might be an opportune time to hire a Supreme shrink so these resentful men can get some much-needed therapy and stop working out their issues from the bench.

Neil Gorsuch is settling a score for his mother.

In her memoir, Anne Gorsuch Burford wrote that when she was forced out as Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator in 1983, her 15-year-old son, Neil, “was really upset.” He told her: “You should never have resigned. You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president ordered. You raised me not to be a quitter…”

It’s all true. Neil Gorsuch is a grievance-huckstering cipher because, as a tenth grader, he took his mother’s side.

This is what gets published in the New York Times, mind you.

The scar from that trauma flared as he prepared a moot court brief with classmates at Harvard Law School and “tried to add material concerning the E.P.A. that did not fit,” according to a classmate who talked to The New York Times.

Ye gads! In addition to drowning kittens, thirty years ago, while writing a dreaded moot court brief, Gorsuch “tried to add material concerning the E.P.A. that did not fit.”

Ladies and gentlemen, hang your heads. This is where we are as a country. Our Supreme Court has become an ethical cesspool because it features justices who wrote moot court briefs with material “that did not fit.”

How low can we go?

Burford was attacked during her tempestuous tenure as an enemy of the environment who slashed rules and spending to gut the E.P.A. The last straw, even for Republican lawmakers and Reagan officials, was when she rejected calls to turn over documents about a toxic-waste cleanup program that her agency had corrupted. She received a contempt citation from Congress.

You mean like the one Eric Holder got?

The Times wrote in an editorial back then: “On becoming the head of the E.P.A., Anne Gorsuch inherited one of the most efficient and capable agencies of government. She has turned it into an Augean stable, reeking of cynicism, mismanagement and decay.”

Methinks the real grievance going on in the New York Times is the Left’s very, very odd, 40 year-old obsession with Justice Gorsuch’s mother.

Last year, her son moved to complete her toxic mission. He enthusiastically joined the 6-to-3 vote to severely curtail the E.P.A.’s ability to regulate power plant emissions. The activists who pushed for Gorsuch to be nominated to the court are finally getting to their real goal: the dismantling of their despised administrative state.

There actually is a serious and long-brewing legal question about Chevron deference and the balance between judicial and administrative resolution of ambiguous statutory language. But Ms. Dowd isn’t going to, and doesn’t, say a word about that. Why explain the issue in a Supreme Court case when you can just unload bile?

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Ms. Dowd goes on in a similar vein about Justice Alito and of course Justice Thomas, and believe me, it doesn’t get any better. If you have the stomach for it, you can read the rest of her piece. All I can say at this point is that if this is the best Joe Biden’s allies can do to deflect attention from his cratering administration, then he deserves the pasting the WaPo/ABC poll tells us he’s probably going to get.