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Why is there no attention or reporting on the shadow executive branch? If Biden is mentally checked out, then the country is currently run by his most important appointments. These appointments are influencing Biden to stay in the race, and they have not made public statements against him or performed costly signals of resignation. Right now Biden’s most influential puppeteers are —
Anthony Blinken, Department of State
Jeff Zients, Chief of Staff
Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense
Janet Yellen, treasury
Alejandro Mayorkas, Homeland Security
I remember thinking to myself four years ago, “who really controls Biden? Is it the DNC leadership or is it his advisors?” The present situation tells us that it’s his advisors who have the controlling share in the Biden Admin. But why is no one talking about this? It seems like a waste of time to event care about the temporarily vivified corpse of Joe. Shouldn’t we be directing all of our attention and questions to the advisors controlling him?
What's there to say? Tell everyone to go back 20 years and read Unqualified Reservations?
Everybody involved in serious politics already knows POTUS is ceremonial by now. Most normies seem to have intuited it too.
Anyone who actually needs economic policy to move was already negotiating with or trying to oust Warren. Hell the ever laggards GOP is talking about reforming the bureaucracy and Chevron just got overturned.
People know. It's just not official. Officially Charles is the UK's head of state.
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I'd say the real puppeteers are those who manage his day-to-day agenda. It's the job of various secretaries to run their departments.
But if a full-strength president works 72 hours a week like a Chinese wage slave, Biden only works about 20 hours each week. The aides that decide what meetings he attends and which ones he skips are the ones on charge of the most rare resource in the US.
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Biden is old and gets tired easily, but he's not catatonic. I think it's an exaggeration to call his top appointees "puppeteers". By all accounts Joe Biden's determination to stay in the race is coming from Joe Biden himself, with the encouragement of his family and some yes-men in his inner circle.
“Old and tired easily” describes Winston Churchill taking naps but executing his job well. It doesn’t describe Joe Biden, who is clearly far from the cognitive functioning of previous years, forgetting the names of his own appointees, barely able to walk on his own undirected.
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That's not actually a "shadow" executive branch. Under normal conditions the department heads DO run the executive branch. It's more like a headless executive branch.
Under normal conditions the President disagrees with and fires cabinet appointees. Bush disagreed with Rumsfeld in 2006, replacing him; Obama fired Chuck Hagel; Trump forced Sessions and Tillerson to resign.
Biden is a unique case of someone who is clearly cognitively out of it, who cannot reasonably disagee with his appointees, and is likely completely controlled by them.
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Exactly. The department heads running their departments is completely normal and acceptable and not even worth comment. The only unusual thing is that they are doing so without oversight from their boss. But even in a normal situation where the president is vital and fully engaged I'm not sure how much oversight those department heads are really getting, so this may very well be only a nominal difference.
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