President Joe Biden now has absolutely nothing to fear from picking up the phone and ordering SEAL Team Six to assassinate Donald Trump. Or perhaps (and more to the point) ordering them to take out two or three Supreme Court justices. These would all be "official acts" of a sitting United States president (the commander in chief giving an order to the military), and therefore Biden would be completely immune from any fear of prosecution afterwards. That is what the Supreme Court just ruled, today.

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I cleared the decks for this column, preferring to spend today reviewing the first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle instead of writing a standard "Friday Talking Points" column. But if I had gone with my weekly format, President Joe Biden would easily have won my Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award, hands down. His debate performance last night was not just disappointing, it was downright abysmal.

There's no other way to say it really -- Joe Biden lost the debate to Donald Trump. It was downright painful to watch, in fact. Most people I have spoken to afterwards didn't even make it through the entire thing, because they had to look away at some point.

How bad was it? Well, when the biggest subject Democrats (and most of the pundits) are talking about afterwards is the possibility of Biden stepping down so a new nominee could be chosen at the Democratic National Convention, that's pretty bad.

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The first 2024 presidential debate is now mere hours away. I am going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction for tonight: Donald Trump will announce his vice-presidential pick at some point during the debate. He could do so very early on, in an effort to rattle President Joe Biden and/or to distract from whatever question Trump had been asked (but didn't want to answer), or he could wait until his closing statement and go out with a bang. But my guess is that Trump's big reveal will happen at some point tonight.

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Once again, due to family events outside my control, there will be no column today. I will be posting both tomorrow and Friday, to cover the debates, however.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Four states hold primary elections today: New York, South Carolina, Utah, and Colorado. There are interesting races in all of them -- including a major Democratic showdown in New York -- but the one that interests me the most will happen in Colorado. Because the voters in one House district will have the choice of bringing an end to Lauren Boebert's congressional career.

Boebert's case is interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is her toxic personality (she is one of the queens of "anger politics," fighting hard for the reigning title with Marjorie Taylor Greene...). Her obnoxiousness is highly repellant and she deserves ejection from the House by Colorado voters on those grounds alone, in fact. More interesting to the politically geeky, however, is that she is attempting a rather astonishing bit of carpetbaggery in her current run. She is not running to be re-elected in the district she now represents, but instead a different district -- with a heavier Republican lean to it. It is an open seat, made possible by the voluntary midterm retirement of fellow Colorado Republican Ken Buck.

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For very personal reasons (family), there will be no column today. Regular columns will resume tomorrow.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Maybe it's just us, but this week seemed like a waiting game. Perhaps the midweek holiday had something to do with it, but everything in the political world right now seems to be on hold in anticipation of next Thursday's first presidential debate. The debate is going to be incredibly early in the campaign schedule, but nobody really knows what this will mean until after the dust settles. Who will benefit the most from the earliness of it all? Well, that all depends on how they do, of course.

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What is it with Donald Trump and sharks? He seems to be obsessing on the subject somewhat, which only goes to confirm a story Stormy Daniels told a while back. Of course, sharks are pretty scary critters in general, but Trump seems to be exhibiting what can only be called galeophobia -- or, to semi-translate that from the Greek, "sharkophobia."

Perhaps Trump was scarred for life when the movie Jaws first came out, almost 50 years ago? After all, that was when galeophobia sank its teeth (so to speak) into the American psyche in a big way for the first time. Jaws is a frightening movie that is arguably one of the best summer horror flicks of all time, pitting a giant man-eating shark against a peaceful seaside town and Captain Quint (a somewhat-crazed shark-hunter).

Or perhaps Donald Trump recently watched a foreign-language film that's been making a splash (again, so to speak), Under Paris -- which is a sort of cross between Jaws, Sharknado, and Les Miserables. But that's a little hard to fathom -- Trump actually watching a whole movie with subtitles? Sacre bleu! It is to laugh, non?

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President Joe Biden has had to walk a tightrope on the subject of immigration during his term in office. He has supported programs that were a holdover from the administration of Donald Trump, and just recently announced a tightening of the rules on claiming asylum at the border in an effort to slow the flow of people making such claims. Neither one of these policies went over very well with the progressives in his own party, but this week Biden shifted gears and announced a policy that will benefit the lives of approximately 500,000 people. Undocumented spouses of America citizens who have lived in the country for 10 years or more will have a much easier path to citizenship under Biden's new program. Politically, this may provide a balance to Biden's more restrictive moves on immigration.

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The Washington Post is now reporting that Robert F. Kennedy Junior will not meet the criteria that CNN instituted for inclusion in the first general-election presidential debate. This is not really all that surprising, since the criteria were essentially written to exclude Kennedy and other third-party candidates. And while Biden supporters might cheer the news that only President Joe Biden and Donald Trump will participate, it does highlight the hurdles built in to the American political system for those without a "D" or "R" after their names.

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