At today's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) questioned Sean Spicer about the alleged cover-up around former President Biden's cognitive decline.
00:06Professor Harrison, we've talked about the mechanics of the 25th Amendment
00:10whereby an incapacitated president would be removed.
00:16But it strikes me that ultimately it happened,
00:23albeit not before the end of President Biden's full term.
00:28What we saw happen after the disastrous debate in the summer of 2024
00:37is basically an exercise of the powers of the 25th Amendment
00:45by the political elites in the Democratic Party
00:49to get President Biden not to run again
00:52and to substitute Kamala Harris for him as the Democratic nominee
00:57for President.
01:01So Mr. Spicer, maybe the mechanics were a little bit different.
01:07Maybe the timing was not the same.
01:11But doesn't that demonstrate the capacity of the leadership of the Democratic Party,
01:18of the Biden family, of the senior staff and the president's administration
01:25to be able to convince the president that he no longer was capable of serving and needed to step down?
01:31Senator, the left and the friends in the media like to throw around terms like threats to democracy, constitutional crisis.
01:40And if we don't have confidence in the leader of the free world making decisions,
01:44that truly is the definition of a constitutional crisis and the threat to democracy.
01:49So for all these folks to stand up here and use those phrases over and over again and then not have the desire to show up to understand what's happening,
01:58to stand up at the time, as we discussed earlier, whether it was a staff or a cabinet member,
02:03to literally avoid going to the Oval Office.
02:06And in the case of the media, to avoid the questions that were so clearly obvious to the rest of America
02:12shows that they were more concerned with power and preserving that power and an agenda than they were at really caring about the Constitution and democracy.
02:21I agree that that is the clear conclusion and obviously they decided to do it only at such a time as that ability to wield power was coming to an end.
02:38If in fact President Biden had remained the nominee of the Democratic Party and then ran against and lost to President Trump,
02:47these folks would be out of luck and out of power, so they decided to act under that circumstance.
02:54Senator, you look at a lot of these decisions and it was pretty clear that there was a handful of folks at the top of the Biden administration
03:01and the Biden White House that had been around him for decades, where all of that information funneled.
03:06So I mentioned before there are approximately 20, 25 senior White House staffers that have the rank of assistant to the President.
03:13Those are the highest White House staffers.
03:15I would bet that only a handful of them ever interacted with President Biden on a daily basis.
03:22The rest of them had their communications funneled through other people.
03:26If the press secretary, the communications director, whose job it is to speak on behalf of the principal in lieu of them being able to talk or communicate,
03:34don't have access to those individuals at the senior most level, then what good are they?
03:38And I would argue that while many times we heard people in the press and on the left accused the Trump White House of quote unquote lying,
03:47for them to go out there and talk about the president's stance on issues, what President Biden thought or didn't think on a personnel issue, a policy issue,
03:55when in fact they had never spoken to him is in fact the epitome of lying.
04:00One of the most consequential actions or inactions of the Biden presidency during four years was his failures to secure our southern border and to deal with illegal immigration.
04:17I have in my hand examples of the Biden immigration proclamations and executive orders and there are a lot of them.
04:27As you know, they also include things like granting temporary protected status to large populations of immigrants, particularly from countries in Central America.
04:41Rescending Trump administration policies when it came to enforcing our laws at the border, granting parole, which is essentially a permission slip to enter the country in a way that would otherwise be illegal.
05:02And Mr. Chairman, I'd ask unanimous consent that this document be made part of the record as an example of the sort of consequential border security and immigration related measures that President Biden purported to sign without objection.
05:19Without objection.
05:22Mr. Wall, I do want to follow up on a comment.
