February 27, 2024 09:32 AM UTC

Ken Buck Still Groping Blindly For a Legacy

• 3 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Retiring Rep. Ken “KenSNBC” Buck has substantially reduced his stockpile of friends on the right side of the aisle through his “evolution” away from support for the impeachment of President Joe Biden and more recently Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, while at the same time contributing greatly to the present state of historically unproductive disarray in the U.S. House with Buck’s vote to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House last October. These two positions have given both corporate and MAGA Republicans reason to despise Buck, though it’s also had the effect of increasing Buck’s popularity as a cable news talking head–the career path most observers expect Buck to follow after he leaves office.

Last week, after the impeachment “case” against President Biden was blown out of the water with the key source arrested and admitting his misinformation came from Russian intelligence, Buck took another swipe at fellow Republicans James Comer and Jim Jordan on CNN:

Collins: So Comer and Jordan knew that this was not corroborated information yet they still went public with it, talked about on your on television used it to fuel these investigations regardless?

Buck: That’s what it appears pic.twitter.com/0woa8sm3zT

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 22, 2024

Although Comer and Jordan have since deleted references to the source in question and insist now that he wasn’t central to the case (even though he plainly was), the impeachment case has nonetheless been seriously damaged, and a successful vote to move the process to the Senate where it faces certain death is less likely than ever.

So at this point, it’s time for Rep. Buck to ride off into the sunset of cable news retirement secure on the moral high ground of history, right? If you thought this would be the end of Buck’s trolling contribution to the debate this presidential election year, you haven’t been paying attention to his years of zigs and zags. As the Washington Examiner reports through the Colorado Springs Gazette’s political blog, Buck has one more legacy-salvaging trick up his sleeve to convince fellow Republicans he’s still at least sort of on the team:

Rep. Ken Buck, R-CO, is set to introduce a resolution calling on members of Biden’s Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, which would effectively remove Biden from the presidency and instate Vice President Kamala Harris to the Oval Office in his place. The push comes after a special counsel report released earlier this month called into question Biden’s cognitive abilities, particularly his memory.

“Numerous instances were articulated in the report, and have played out in full public view, showing President Biden’s apparent cognitive decline and lack of mental stamina,” Buck told Fox News. “The societal challenges and security threats our country faces are innumerable and require a chief executive with both strong mental and physical faculties. The time has come for the vice president and the Cabinet to put our country first and move forward on invoking the 25th Amendment.”

The resolution comes after special counsel Robert Hur released the long-awaited findings of his investigation into whether Biden mishandled classified documents after leaving the White House in 2017. Although the report did not result in criminal charges, the special counsel noted that was partly due to Biden’s ability to portray himself as “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

We could dive at this point into the stilted debate over the relative fitness of Biden versus fellow near-octogenarian ex-President Donald Trump, but that’s not our interest today. The point is that this resolution calling for Biden’s Cabinet to remove him is no more likely to succeed than impeachment in the Democratic-controlled Senate would have been. At the same time, the Freedom Caucus is so hellbent on impeachment that they might consider this resolution meekly calling on Biden’s Cabinet to do something everyone knows they’re not going to do an impediment to their own designs. When you consider all the tangible steps Buck could be taking to leave behind a competent (or even coherent) legacy, this is just more time wasted in the historically unproductive Republican Congress otherwise known as the capstone of Buck’s career.

Either way, this cheap shot is the kind of maneuver we’ve come to expect from Buck. In his aimless quest to please everybody, he ends up making no one happy.