There's Only 1 Democrat Talking About the Constitution, and It's (Shudder) Joe Biden

[EasyAce]

The Democratic presidential field is not interested in your puny restraints on the executive branch.
By Matt Welch
https://reason.com/2019/09/13/theres-only-1-democrat-talking-about-the-constitution-and-its-shudder-joe-biden/

Let us not now pretend that Joe Biden brought anything like coherence to Thursday night's Democratic presidential debate in Houston.

At some point near the exhausted end of the nearly three-hour affair, the 76-year-old former vice president

blurted out within the space of a few seconds the sentences "Make sure that kids hear words," and "I know Maduro." Confronted with the Obama administration's unlovely record on deportation, he just lied about it: "We didn't lock people up in cages. We didn't separate families." And at the close of one particularly free-associative word salad that hopped from the Afghanistan surge to Pakistani bases to weapons inspectors to the authorization for the use of force in Iraq, the perennial presidential contender simply concluded, "I said something that was not meant the way I said it." We feel you, Joe.

Yet the Democratic front-runner also played a starring role in what was arguably the most clarifying exchange of the night. Moderator David Muir, addressing the cavalier gun-grabber Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), asked her to address Biden's recent assertion that "There's no constitutional authority to issue that executive order when they say 'I'm going to eliminate assault weapons,'" because, "you can't do it by executive order any more than Trump can do things when he says he can do it by executive order."

"Well, I mean," Harris began, failing to suppress a smug laugh, "I would just say, 'Hey, Joe, instead of saying no we can't, let's say yes we can!"

As the crowd hooted and applauded, Delaware's favorite son attempted to interject: "Let's be constitutional! We've got a Constitution." Ha ha, what?

There were many things missing from this third Democratic presidential debate—a straightforward defense of free trade, say, or any notion that trillion-dollar federal deficits are unsound in year nine of an economic expansion. But perhaps the most striking absence was any sense from Biden's nine challengers on stage that there are, or should be, constraints on the executive branch carrying out the domestic policy whims of the Democratic electorate . . .