President Biden, threat to democracy

OPINION:

President Biden doesn’t want to leave the Oval Office in January, but his strategy of branding political opponents as traitors and criminals has failed to elevate his standing in the polls.

In a survey released Tuesday, Rasmussen Reports asked likely voters a particularly relevant question: Which president, Mr. Biden or Donald Trump, did a better job of protecting and defending the Constitution? A plurality, 47%, sided with the former president over the current president, who mustered just 40% support.

The result suggests the public is beginning to see through the coordinated attempt to attach labels like “MAGA extremist,” “insurrectionist” and “threat to democracy” to Mr. Trump. The public has instead judged Mr. Biden to be the one disturbing the balance of our constitutional republic.

When Congress refused to adopt legislation forcing taxpayers to pick up the tab for deadbeat students with overdue loans, Mr. Biden decided to forgive their debt anyway using authority he doesn’t possess. The Supreme Court said Mr. Biden violated the law. Following this rebuke, the Big Guy decided to ignore the high court — just as he ignored Congress — and discharge the student debt anyway.

All the president’s men share the same disregard for the Constitution. In March, the House Judiciary Committee asked a federal court to compel two officials at the Department of Justice’s Tax Division, Mark Daly and Jack Morgan, to honor a subpoena seeking their testimony about the mysterious inability of the Justice Department over the course of several years to sanction Hunter Biden for his obvious violations of federal law.

Even U.S. Circuit Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee, was troubled by DOJ’s resistance to having its lawyers testify before Congress. “I find it rich that you pursue criminal action and put people in jail for defying congressional subpoenas, then say this here,” she said.

Her honor was referring to the case of Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s former adviser on trade issues, who is in jail right now because he made a principled objection to a summons to testify before the irregularly established House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol tumult.

Mr. Navarro was not even at the Capitol that day, yet he is being treated worse than some gangsters and mass murderers. Colette S. Peters, director of the Bureau of Prisons, won’t allow members of Congress to visit him.

“I’ve been trying for five weeks to be able to interview Mr. Navarro,” explained Rep. Matt Gaetz. Ms. Peters reportedly rejected the Florida Republican’s request, saying that “Peter Navarro is too notorious to be interviewed by a member of Congress.”

“Notorious” is a word appropriate to inmates like “Son of Sam” murderer David Berkowitz, who was interviewed for a law review article in 2011 from a cell in a New York penitentiary. Federal regulations allow such interviews in the federal system, but Mr. Gaetz says he’s getting brushed off because the former Trump aide is a political prisoner.

As Mr. Navarro’s said himself in these pages Wednesday, “DOJ prosecutors act more like racketeers than those they are prosecuting.” And Americans are noticing, which is why they continue to doubt the president’s ability to follow the Constitution faithfully.