As President Donald Trump weighed whether to get involved with Israel’s war against Iran, Republican senators spent Wednesday morning airing their grievances about the last president’s performance.
A Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about former President Joe Biden’s mental acuity — officially intended to explore constitutional questions surrounding an aging president in decline — devolved into bitter recriminations and arguments among senators about what qualifies as a constitutional crisis.
“Who was running the country?” asked Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, about Biden’s time in office. Schmitt kicked off the proceedings by alleging that Democrats’ handling of Biden’s aging and mental state in office was “the great deception.”
Schmitt, who co-chaired the hearing, also slammed Democratic senators for not calling a witness for their side of the committee to testify, and for largely refusing to even attend the hearing.
“They have chosen to ignore the hearing as they chose to ignore President Biden’s mental decline,” Schmitt said.
Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the panel, and Peter Welch of Vermont appeared and spoke, but all other Democrats on the committee did not attend.
Durbin said he wished the committee was focused on oversight of the Department of Homeland Security, which is within its jurisdiction: “Apparently, armchair diagnosing former President Joe Biden is more important,” he said.
Welch argued that the hearing wouldn’t do much to address the policy issues constituents are dealing with on a daily basis. Instead, he said, the hearing represented “the politics of accusation, of demeaning adversaries, of deflecting from engaging in the hard discussion about hard issues.”
Republicans used Democrats’ absence to message political attacks about the party’s ability to govern more broadly.
“The fact that we have none of my Democratic colleagues over here — that this entire dais is empty — that what they allowed to happen, they are not interested in correcting it for the future, is absolutely mind-blowing,” Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama said.
“The stonewall continues,” Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, echoed. “They can’t bear to show their faces in public.”
“This is a party that cannot be trusted with power,” he added.
And Sen. Ashley Moody of Florida hypothesized that Democrats didn’t attend the hearing because: “What are they going to say?”
“How do you defend the indefensible?” she asked.
The hearing came nearly a year after Biden’s halting, often incoherent presidential debate performance last June derailed his reelection campaign. Biden’s struggles to complete sentences and articulate ideas during that debate prompted Democratic lawmakers to urge him to step away from the campaign — which he did a month later, and the party ultimately replaced him with then-Vice President Kamala Harris on the ballot instead.
At the time, Democrats said they believed Biden couldn’t win the election — but they didn’t go as far as urging him to step down from the presidency itself, and he finished his term. Last month, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
Republicans on Wednesday made a point to compliment Trump in comparison to Biden. The two men are less than four years apart in age.
“I watched him serve with the strength and endurance of a man half his age,” former White House press secretary Sean Spicer told the committee of Trump, who is 79, during the hearing.
“Biden stood frozen behind the podium, mouth agape,” Sen. Ted Cruz recalled of the 2024 presidential debate. “When he did speak, his words were confused and disjointed.”
But Cruz wasn’t happy with how Democrats urged him to step out of the race. “They pulled out their knives and took out President Biden like Caesar on the Ides of March,” he said.
The conflict between Israel and Iran — dominating the news this week — did come up obliquely at one point during the hearing, but only in relation to Biden.
“We heard about the moral responsibilities of a staffer,” Cruz said. “How about an elected senator who knows damn well that if we get into a war and Iran is preparing to fire a nuclear weapon at the United States, that the commander in chief is busy playing with his Jell-O and is not competent to defend ourselves — and every member of the cabinet, the chief of staff, press secretary, and the members of Congress who lied about this on a daily basis with the press’s complicity — they are all responsible for subverting democracy.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.