A partisan pitch this blatant would have been unusual even coming from former Biden spox Jen Psaki, a member of today's Morning Joe panel. But coming from the mouth of Jon Meacham, it was nothing less than shocking. Yes, Meacham serves as an occasional Biden speechwriter, but he has always presented himself as fundamentally non-partisan.
But any such fig leaf was shredded by his performance this morning, in which Meacham made an explicit pitch to vote for Biden in the coming election. Meacham made a Manichean comparison between Biden and Trump, a virtual good vs. evil contrast. Or as he put, a constitutionalist versus a seditionist and insurrectionist. Meacham:
"And I just really believe that we have a pretty clear choice in this political season. You know, it's pretty basic. Do you want a constitutionalist or an insurrectionist? It is straightforward. That's the choice before the country."
Predictably, Joe Scarborough agreed with Meacham.
As for Biden and Democrats supposedly being constitutionalists: the show opened with a segment blasting the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade. But strikingly absent from the discussion was even the smallest shred of a suggestion that--as a matter of the Constitution--Roe was rightly decided or that Dobbs was wrongly decided. The entire, exclusive, focus was on polling numbers and political results showing support for Roe and for some abortion rights.
And Scarborough, condemning the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe, decried that the Court has run "roughshod over the will of the overwhelming majority of Americans."
But even a simple country lawyer—as Scarborough likes to tout himself with false modesty—surely knows that the Constitution established the Supreme Court in a manner as to protect it from the changing sands of public opinion. The Court is duty-bound to decide matters based on the law, and above all, on the Constitution.
Yet based on polls and politics, these supposedly constitutionalist Democrats support a non-existent right to abortion, while at the same time seeking to undermine the right to bear arms, firmly entrenched in the Constitution by the Second Amendment.
So please, Meacham, Scarborough, et al., spare us the talk of Biden and the Democrats being the constitutionalists!
On Morning Joe, Jon Meacham making a blatant political pitch to vote for "constitutionalist Joe Biden" over "seditionist and insurrectionist" Donald Trump was sponsored in part by Liberty Mutual, Golden Corral, GlaxoSmithKline, maker of Shingrix vaccine, and Priceline.
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC' Morning Joe
6/23/23
6:14 am EDTJOE SCARBOROUGH: I would ask you, Jon Meacham, to put this into historical perspective, but there is no historical perspective --
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: -- no precedent!
SCARBOROUGH: You have a president who's actually been indicted for hush money payoffs. You've got a president who's been indicted for stealing for nuclear secrets. You have a president who's been indicted for stealing secrets on invading Iran. You have a president indicted for stealing other military secrets and highly classified documents. You have a president indicted for obstruction of justice.
And now you have a president -- we were talking about the Supreme Court, I mean, the Supreme Court who, again, out of control, running roughshod over the will of the overwhelming majority of Americans. And now we have this president, again, unprecedented, but here we are moving towards, I believe, I think the most serious charges, and the one that I think historians are going to be grappling with long after we are all gone. That is a president charged with conspiracy to commit sedition against the United States of America.
JON MEACHAM: Yeah, and you it's, you're right. Historians will be wrestling with it. And as, as, as we all do all the time, I think citizens have to wrestle with it now, right? This is -- it's so central.
And I just really believe that we have a pretty clear choice in this political season. We can choose a constitutionalist, a party that has been pretty faithful to the Constitution, which is the party of the incumbent president. Or, we can favor a party that has been shockingly but persistently supportive of a insurrectionist or a seditionist.
That's not a sentence we would have said about Eisenhower and Stevenson, right? That was not something that, that, that a lot of people grew up with. But it's, it's pretty vital. And you have to ask the question: does, is any policy so important that you would want to favor someone that you think is a vehicle for that policy, even if they don't and have self-evidently tried to trash the Constitution of the United States?
And we could go on, but that's really kind of it. You know, it's pretty basic. Do you want a constitutionalist or do you want an insurrectionist?
And, you know, then we get into the "but, but, but: taxes and judges." If we don't have a Constitution, taxes and judges aren't going to matter at all.That -- that, that's where we are, remarkably, right now.
Amd again, we could go on, but I think it's a fundamental question. And I don't, it's -- people often say, you know, it's simple. It's not simple, but it is straightforward. That's the choice before the country.
