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J.D. Vance among growing number of voices calling for Biden to resign if he drops out of race

July 20, 2024 | | Print Article

An increasing number of voices say that if President Joe Biden drops out of the 2024 race, then he should resign from office as well.

The argument undergirding this viewpoint is that if the president isn’t competent enough to run for president again, then he isn’t competent enough to be president now.

“If Joe Biden doesn’t have the cognitive function to run for re-election, then he certainly doesn’t have the cognitive function to remain as Commander-In-Chief,” Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance explained in a tweet published Friday.

“How can any Dem pushing him to drop out of the presidential race, argue in good faith that he should stay on as POTUS?” he added.

Look:

Sen. Marco Rubio, who’d also been on former President Donald Trump’s VP shortlist, echoed this sentiment while speaking to reporters at the Republican National Convention this Thursday.

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“The question is, if he’s not going to be their nominee because he’s not up to it, how can he be our president for the next six months?” he said.

“If there’s something wrong with you that doesn’t allow you to run for president, how can you still be there as president? If they’re going to remove him as nominee, they’ve got to remove him as president, and that’s really bad for our country,” he added.

Some folks on the left have also called for Biden to resign.

“I’ve spent the past two weeks listening to my constituents express their concerns about the President’s age and health,” U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Vancouver) told local station KGW. “Like most people I represent in Southwest Washington, I doubt the President’s judgement about his health, his fitness to do the job, and whether he is the one making important decisions about our country, rather than unelected advisors.”

“Americans deserve to feel their president is fit enough to do the job. The crisis of confidence in the President’s leadership needs to come to an end. The President should do what he knows is right for the country and put the national interest first,” she added.

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Left-wing data cruncher Nate Silver has also joined the calls:

One left-winger, Alexis Coe, penned a Rolling Stone column Friday arguing that Biden “should resign” to save his supposed “legacy.”

The benefit of doing so, Coe argued, is that Biden would be responsible for ushering in America’s first woman president.

“Biden must resign. By doing so, his name would always appear alongside that of the woman president’s ascension to the highest office,” Coe wrote. “Gerald Ford predicted America’s first woman President would ascend from the Vice Presidency, and though it’s not ideal, given the present circumstances, it feels necessary.”

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“It’s hard to imagine, with no rising star in the party, the Democrats bypassing Kamala Harris as their nominee. And strategically, it’s the only way to guarantee the country becomes better acquainted with her through inevitable media focus on the historic nature of her candidacy. She can easily be cast as the comparatively youthful, optimistic foil to Trump, a doom-and-gloom senior citizen,” he added.

Last up is historian Allan J. Lichtman, who echoed some of Coe’s arguments in a column for the New York Daily News.

“[T]here is a Plan B that preserves Democratic prospects for November,” he wrote. “Under Plan B, Biden would resign from the presidency, letting Kamala Harris become president and the consensus nominee without a contest. Under these conditions, historically, the party holding the White House usually wins reelection.”

Uh, maybe …

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It’s not yet clear what the president will do. Some reports have indicated he’s planning to step aside (but not resign from office) as early as this weekend. But these reports have been dismissed by his senior advisers.

Vivek Saxena
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