Heritage Foundation is, in our view, making a newsworthy move in trying to foil the efforts by the Democrats to pull President Biden from the ticket. The conservative think tank, as our Novi Zhukovsky reports, has issued a new memo outlining state-by-state laws for swapping out a presidential nominee. It warns that any effort to replace Mr. Biden will be tough. Heritage has been preparing for this scenario for the past four months. 

Should Mr. Biden choose — or more likely, be forced — to drop out, “the process for substitution and withdrawal presents many election integrity issues,” the memo reads. The executive director of the Oversight Project, an arm of Heritage, Mike Howell, says that not only would replacing Mr. Biden be “extraordinarily difficult” but that “we would make it extraordinarily difficult.” There might, we can imagine, be some legal hurdles in respect of standing.

In any event, in several states, including certain key election states, the deadline for swapping the candidate has already passed, says senior legal fellow at Heritage, Zach Smith. And for others, he notes, “the process for replacing a candidate currently on the ballot just isn’t clearly defined because it happens so rarely.” The memo calls out Wisconsin, Nevada, and Georgia as likely states in which litigation might be used to prevent a candidate swap. 

In the case of Wisconsin, Heritage says, the statute is quite explicit — the state bars the withdrawal of a candidate except in the case of death. If Heritage chose to target the case via litigation, the memo notes, it “would likely bear some fruit.” Conversely, the legal situations in other states, which have murkier laws, could raise “the possibility that states will be complicit in an improper withdrawal or substitution,” the memo warns. 

Following the release in March of special counsel Robert Hur’s report on Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents, which expressed concern about the president’s fitness for office, the Oversight Project began investigating the laws for replacing a nominee. Meanwhile, the Democrats were occupied with convincing the public of Mr. Biden’s hardiness. That unraveled as soon as he took the debate stage. 

Most Democrats in office — aside from Congressmen Lloyd Doggett and Raúl Grijalva, who have called for Mr. Biden to step aside — have steered clear of pushing for a new nominee since the watershed debate, with reports suggesting they are waiting for fresh polls to drop. Given that the latest numbers position Trump ahead by 8 percentage points among registered voters, the calls for the president to drop out of the race can only be expected to grow. 

One could argue that the Heritage report underscores the need for the Democrats to move quickly on the choice of a new standard-bearer. If they nominate a different candidate before their convention, some of the ballot problems Heritage cites could be obviated. These columns, though, reckon that the harder the Democrats work to chase him off the ballot, the more shocking the spectacle becomes.

It’s breathtaking to read the liberal columnists hectoring to get off the ballot the candidate whom they’d been all too happy to support and whom millions of voters have supported during a long primary season. It’s one thing for Mr. Biden to come to his own conclusion that he’s no longer fit for the job, but it’s quite another to see so many prominent Democrats ignoring the primary voters. What are those loyal Democratic Party voters — chopped liver?