The chair of the House Intelligence Committee is warning that President Joe Biden’s health is endangering national security — and he’s pushing for the Cabinet to decide “a way forward.”
Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) spoke a day after the 81-year-old president withdrew from his reelection campaign and pledged to serve out the remaining six months of his term.
“With national security threats, you need a commander in chief to be able to make decisive and immediate decisions,” Turner said in an interview. “In this instance, where the president seems unable to digest complex information and render a decision, we’re left with our national security environment being adrift.”
Turner stopped short of calling for Biden to step down, but a growing chorus of Republicans have done so after Biden’s shaky performance in the June 27 debate.
The Ohio Republican, who has criticized the administration’s aid to Ukraine as inadequate, argued that Biden showed an unwillingness to make decisions about that aid even before he exited the race. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and NATO officials have pressed Biden to remove restrictions on how Ukraine can use U.S.-supplied weapons, “and he’s been unable to make a decision to do so,” Turner said of Biden.
“My concern is that as there are more evolving national security issues, his indecisiveness will leave the White House without a president and a commander in chief,” Turner said.
“His staff has sort of devolved into a NATO-style committee decision-making process,” Turner added. “If they all agree, then it does appear that decisions get made, but if they don’t all agree, like NATO, they dissolve into a lack of consensus, which I think gives the president no direction, and indecisiveness is a really great threat at this point.”
Partnership for Public Service CEO Max Stier, meanwhile, raised other election-related national security concerns about Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Stier said they are both potentially putting the country at risk because neither has presidential transition organizations up and running to handle national security issues effectively.
The organization’s Center for Presidential Transition advises candidates to start transition planning at least six months before the election, to ensure a smooth transition of national security responsibilities to an incoming administration.
Historically, Stier said, the “handoff of power is a moment of maximum vulnerability for a country,” but the Partnership for Public Service’s recommendation is also based on the 9/11 Commission’s findings that slow transitions and unconfirmed senior leaders were obstacles ahead of the attacks.
“In the modern world, where the risk portfolio is so large and fast-moving, a presidential candidate has a responsibility to prepare for the possibility of winning and having to take over the government a lot earlier than historically had been done,” Stier said.
