James.galbraith

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Today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was back in a very familiar building. Not only was he making his fourth address to a joint session of Congress — breaking Winston Churchill’s record for foreign leaders — he’s also been a presence in the building’s halls since serving as a diplomat in the early 1980s. Since he made his first speech to Congress in 1996, Netanyahu has been almost as much a fixture of politics in America as in Israel. 

Things felt different today. It’s not just that Netanyahu is a controversial figure, one who drew thousands of protesters onto the streets of Washington. That’s not new; Netanyahu’s 2011 speech to Congress was interrupted by a pro-Palestinian protester in the chamber. What is new is that he has become an increasingly marginalized one.

Even a few weeks ago, when Netanyahu’s speech was announced, it had the makings of a marquee political event. Today, it was overshadowed by President Joe Biden’s highly anticipated Wednesday night speech to address his decision to drop out of the presidential election. Dozens of lawmakers — around half of Congress’s Democrats — skipped Netanyahu’s speech altogether. 

Soon-to-retire Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin’s presence behind Netanyahu on the rostrum attested to how much of a partisan figure Netanyahu has become. Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate President Pro Tempore Patty Murray, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, one of whom would normally have been in that seat, all declined the role. Netanyahu, who has been Israel’s prime minister for 17 of the last 30 years, has done more than anyone to make support for the country an increasingly partisan issue in the United States, in part through actions like his speech to Congress in 2015. That time, he was invited by congressional Republicans to lobby against the Iran nuclear deal then being negotiated by the Obama administration in what was considered a remarkably partisan speech for a foreign leader.

In today’s address, by contrast, Netanyahu made little news. It was a speech that gave little indication of a plan to end the war in Gaza, and likely undermined diplomatic efforts underway to do so. It was a notably defensive speech for Netanyahu, devoted more to refuting criticism of Israel than to charting a way forward out of the morass it has found itself in. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”

What Netanyahu said — and what he’s doing

Netanyahu recounted the horrors of Hamas’s October 7 attacks and vowed to the families of hostages currently being held in Gaza that he “would not rest until all their loved ones are home.” Not all of those families may be inclined to take him at his word. Many of them are calling for the prime minister to accept a ceasefire deal to secure the hostages’ release, but today Netanyahu vowed that “Israel will fight until we destroy Hamas’s military capabilities and its rule in Gaza and bring all our hostages home,” adding, “That’s what total victory means and we will settle for nothing less.” 

Netanyahu also said, as he has in several previous remarks, that “[Israel] must retain overriding control [in Gaza] to ensure that Gaza never again poses a security threat to Israel” — a demand likely to be a nonstarter for any ceasefire deal.

Despite that, Netanyahu has said in recent days that a ceasefire deal may be near, and the deal currently being negotiated is likely to be the focus of the prime minister’s meeting at the White House with Biden on Thursday. The Biden administration has tended not to respond directly to Netanyahu’s public statements on the deal, and this time was no exception. Asked if Netanyahu’s remarks made that deal less likely, a senior US administration official told reporters on Wednesday afternoon, “We were in the Situation Room doing some other stuff, so I have not seen the speech.”

Netanyahu didn’t indicate any specific asks beyond continued US military support. “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster,” he said, riffing on a famous Churchill line from World War II. As he has in all three of his previous addresses, going back to the mid-1990s, Netanyahu kept the focus on Iran, which he mentioned before Hamas. He made the case that Israel’s fight against Iran-backed groups like Hamas and Hezbollah serves to “keep American boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East.”

He pushed back against criticism of Israel over civilian casualties and preventing food from entering Gaza. He ripped into anti-Israel protesters in the United States, accusing them of being “useful idiots” for Iran, criticized university presidents, and compared “gays for Gaza” to “chickens for KFC.” This was likely the first speech on Mideast policy that included a shout-out to the “fraternity brothers of the University of North Carolina.” 

How to lose friends and influence

Netanyahu praised President Biden for his “half a century of friendship to Israel” and noted that the president describes himself as a “proud Zionist.” But that only served to highlight the shrinking number of Democratic politicians who would publicly describe themselves that way. Polls have consistently shown a deep partisan divide opening up over sympathy toward Israel.

He also thanked former president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump for actions in support of Israel during his presidency, including recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu will be traveling to Florida to meet with Trump (and possibly celebrate the birthday of his son, who lives in Miami). Still, while Trump has not exactly turned on Israel, he has clearly soured somewhat on Netanyahu, who he is still angry at for congratulating Biden on his election victory in 2020. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Trump posted a friendly letter from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on the day he announced the Netanyahu meeting. 

From a purely visual standpoint, Netanyahu may have gotten what he wanted today: rapturous standing ovations, even if mainly from Republicans. But more than 70 percent of Israelis now say that Netanyahu should resign. His own defense establishment is turning on his handling of the war and he’s under fire over issues ranging from his long-running legal troubles to the controversial question of whether the ultra-Orthodox should serve in the country’s military. 

In the past, Washington has served as a sort of relief valve for Netanyahu, a place he could count on strong support, even when his political position looked rocky at home. In that first speech back in 1996, after receiving a five-minute standing ovation from Congress, he quipped, “If I could only get the Knesset [Israel’s parliament] to vote like this.”

Today, though, “the magic is gone,” Nimrod Novik, a former senior Israeli foreign policy official who is now an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, told Vox. “The fellow that mastered verbal acrobatics to the point that different audiences could hear different messages in the same speech — that’s over. Those who were in awe of his verbal skills now take it with a grain of salt.”

In more than 40 years of coming to Washington, Netanyahu has surely grown used to being a controversial figure. He may have to get used to being an irrelevant one. 

Correction, 7 pm ET: An earlier version of this story referred to Netanyahu as a former ambassador to the US. He was a deputy chief of mission.

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Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick is backfiring on him—big time. Appearing on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” Tuesday evening, data analyst Harry Enten dug into the polling and found bad news for Ohio Sen. JD Vance and the GOP. The numbers do not lie: Vance is the least liked running mate in 44 years. 

“I have gone all the way back since 1980. He is the first guy immediately following a convention—a VP pick—who actually had a net negative favorable rating, that is underwater,” Enten told Burnett. “The average since 2000 is plus 19 points. JD Vance—making history in the completely wrong way.”

“Frankly, I don’t really understand the pick,” Enten said. “And apparently, neither do the American voters because we take a look at the net favorable rating for JD Vance—that’s the favorable minus unfavorable. It’s in negative net territory. Look at that. Negative 6 points.”

Vice presidential candidates usually enjoy a nice bounce following their party’s convention, and polls reflect the favorable opinions. There’s sort of a “new car smell” shininess to them, thanks to their big introduction on the national stage in all the hoopla of a convention. But as Enten says, “in this case, he’s dragging Trump down.” 

Tapping Vance for the Republican ticket was a questionable decision in the first place, Enten points out. He performed far below other GOP candidates in his Senate win two years ago, even among the voters he and Trump most rely on—working-class white men. 

“He was the worst performing Republican candidate in 2022 up and down the ballot in the state of Ohio,” Enten said. “He adds nothing there.”

It’s not likely to get better for the Republican ticket as the campaign continues and voters find out a lot more about Vance, who is a relative newcomer to the political scene.  

They’ll be seeing things like this People Magazine headline at the checkout counter and in their dentist’s waiting room: “J.D. Vance Isn't the Bridge-Building VP That Moderates Wanted: What He's Said About Women, Voting and Project 2025.”

That article includes such gems as:

• “Vance wants to end abortion, and once called rape and incest exceptions 'inconvenient'”

• “Vance suggested that people should stay in 'violent' marriages to preserve their kids' happiness”

• “Vance said he wants to ban pornography, and blamed it for low birth rates”

• “Vance opposes LGBTQ+ rights and has pushed harmful 'groomer' rhetoric about gay people”

•  “Vance is the VP candidate that Project 2025's leaders wanted”

(By the way, a shout out to People Magazine for putting Project 2025, the far-right government blueprint crafted by Trump cronies, out into the mainstream.)

It’s no wonder Trump allies are increasingly nervous about this pick.

Let's make the hole the GOP put itself in deeper. Donate now to help put Kamala Harris in the White House!

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In a response to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority's investigation into cloud services and licensing, Microsoft has defended its practices, asserting that its terms "do not meaningfully raise cloud rivals' costs." The Windows-maker emphasized Amazon's continued dominance in the UK hyperscale market and noted Google's quarter-on-quarter growth, while also highlighting the declining share of Windows Server relative to Linux in cloud operating systems and SQL Server's second-place position behind Oracle. [...] The CMA's inquiry primarily focuses on the pricing disparity between using Microsoft products on Azure versus rival cloud platforms, with most surveyed customers perceiving Azure as the more cost-effective option for Microsoft software deployment. The Register adds: Microsoft's bullish take on this is that AWS and Google should be grateful that they even get to run its software. In its response, the company said: "This dispute on pricing terms only arises because Microsoft grants all rivals IP licenses in the first place to its software that is of most popularity for use in the cloud. It does this not because there is any legal obligation to share IP with closest rivals in cloud, but for commercial reasons."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign on Sunday and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the next Democratic nominee, Vote.org reportedly registered 38,500 new voters over the next 48 hours. This represents a 700% surge over the previous 48 hours, with most of those voters being ages 34 and younger.

That beats the previous best day of the 2024 cycle, which came on National Voter Registration Day in September when pop superstar Taylor Swift posted an Instagram story urging her followers to get registered. That message helped spur over 35,000 new voter registrations. 

The latest surge in registrations comes as Harris and other Democratic candidates see a flood of donations. Since Harris entered the race, ActBlue has recorded $179 million in donations to Democratic candidates and causes. That's just part of a historic flood of over $250 million that poured in since Harris became the nominee-apparent.

It all reflects a genuine, pent-up demand for something new. And Harris is meeting that demand.

Even before it was clear there would be a Biden vs. Donald Trump rematch, voters were begging for something, anything, other than a Biden vs. Donald Trump rematch. In a December poll by the Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, over half of Americans said they would be dissatisfied if the race were a repeat of the 2020 matchup. 

The lack of enthusiasm was notable at ActBlue, where contributions were not only running behind the 2020 election cycle but also trailing contributions during the 2022 midterm elections.

That big spike on the far right of the chart reflects the sharp increase in contributions since Harris started running for president. This article was written early Wednesday morning, and this week already rivals the top weeks at the very end of the 2020 presidential election cycle. That’s big.

Democrats are excited about Harris. That’s reflected in the contributions.

Young voters, who tend to be more Democratic than other age groups, are excited about Harris. That’s reflected in the registrations.

Those young voters are particularly energized and enthusiastic over the change in the ticket. As WGBH Boston reported on Sunday, some young Democrats were willing to turn up for Biden. But they’re willing to work for Harris.

“This is the most energized I have felt as a young Democratic voter in so long,” 22-year-old Democrat Audrey Grant told WGBH. “I think this is one of the first times that the Democratic Party has seized control of a media narrative and really changed the tide.”

That younger demographic—and in particular, younger voters of color—was critical to carrying Biden and Harris over the top in 2020. It could be even more critical this year.

That Harris could pull in the kind of registration numbers associated with someone like Swift is encouraging. But the real power that such cultural figures have to move the needle shouldn’t be ignored. 

On Tuesday, Beyoncé gave Harris permission to use her popular 2016 song “Freedom" in her campaign. Harris made it her entrance song in her first campaign appearance in the swing state of Wisconsin.

Swift’s obvious political clout and concerns that she would endorse Biden drove Republicans to distraction earlier in the year, leading to a host of conspiracy theories. Since Harris kicked off her campaign, the surge of Democratic zeal is already generating speculation over what might happen if Swift publicly rallies around Harris.

If Swift did so, she’d be in good company among pop stars. British singer—and the summer’s it-girl—Charli XCX declared that “kamala IS brat,” referring to the title of her latest album, and the Harris campaign quickly adopted the album’s lime-green cover art as the backdrop on their X (formerly Twitter) account.

There’s plenty of room for more synergy between Harris and singers whose impact is great enough to shift economies. A 2018 post from Swift in which she endorsed two candidates in Tennessee helped propel a surge of roughly 65,000 new signups at Vote.org in just 24 hours. 

Official endorsements from Swift, Beyoncé, and others might break the internet—and the will of Republicans who see the tide turning against them.

Help Harris keep the energy high with a donation of $10.

Convicted felon Donald Trump and his new running mate, Ohio senator and hillbilly profiteer JD Vance, sat down with Fox News’ Jesse Watters for their first tandem interview on Monday. Watters’ opening question: Why, out of all the bootlicking GOP hopefuls, did Trump choose Vance to be his running mate?

“We've always had a good chemistry,” Trump said, adding, “originally JD was probably not for me, but he didn't know me.” 

One might say that “probably not for me” is a bit of an understatement. Vance once argued that Trump has “dragged down our entire political conversation” and could be characterized as “America’s Hitler.”

But that’s all water under the proverbial bridge, Trump explained. 

“When we got to know each other, he [Vance] liked me, maybe more than anybody liked me.” This groveling loyalty is what the former president, who was just one disloyal minion away from creating a constitutional crisis on Jan. 6, 2021, found most appealing. 

We've always had a good chemistry. And, originally JD was probably not for me, but he didn't know me. And then when we got to know each other, he liked me maybe more than anybody liked me. And he would stick up for me, and he'd fight for the worker as much as I fight for the worker. We just had an automatic chemistry, and I actually endorsed him in Ohio for the Senate, and he ended up winning against a very tough field, very tough field.

And he wrote a book which was a classic, as you know, and it was all about the working men and women and how they aren't being treated fairly. And he was right about that. And I understood that maybe better than anyone else. And, we just have had a great relationship.

Inspiring stuff!

Help Kamala Harris fight for our future by donating what you can today.

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According to Politico, Washington D.C., is a city shrouded in fear of violence. But not violence from foreign terrorists or crime. Like many cities, Washington has seen a large drop in violent crime over the last year. 

The violence that has the citizens of the nation’s capital terrified is political violence, the kind often inspired by politicians wielding violent rhetoric. And most of that rhetoric has its origin in one man.

Last week, Donald Trump and his Republican Party tried to curtail that rhetoric, distance themselves from the violence that recently threatened Trump’s life and lay claim to calls for national unity. But the problem for Trump and his MAGA Republicans is that violence is all they have. Turning the spotlight on other policies requires first having other policies.

And their biggest idea could be the single largest act of political violence in the history of the United States.

As Politico reports, political violence has always been something that holds a place in the capital. However …

[I]n the 45th and possibly 47th president, America has a leading political figure of unprecedented rhetorical violence. He talked about a “blood bath” if he doesn’t win. He suggested retired Gen. Mark Milley deserves execution. He amplified a social media post accusing Republican critic Liz Cheney of “treason” and calling for her to face a military tribunal. He’s made reference to enemies as “vermin” and said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

The insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, happened less than four years ago. D.C. residents don’t worry that Trump can inspire violence—they know that he can.

Trump’s defenders can claim that his shouts of “I am your retribution” are nothing but rhetoric. However, that doesn’t mean everyone gets the message. It takes only one person and their far-too-common AR-15 to turn a phrase borrowed from Hitler into an action … that also might have been borrowed from Hitler.

It’s no surprise that this kind of talk is frightening in Washington. As Politico points out, members of Congress might have been the primary target on Jan. 6, but it was local police and Capitol Hill staffers who took the brunt of physical abuse.

Add in how Project 2025 calls for a purge of federal employees, or how thoroughly Trump and his associates have bought the idea that the government is pervaded by deep-state operatives who are acting against him, and fear seems like the right reaction.

Trump and Republicans are trying to put forward a mock unity that mostly consists of mouthing platitudes while reducing calls for retribution. But as the hall of yawning Republican delegates showed at the Republican National Convention this week, without their calls for violence, they have nothing else. They were forced to put on a circus act, just to kill time and try to stir the listless crowd.

As the RNC also showed, Trump can’t keep his mouth shut. During his speech on Thursday night, he could have stepped up to the podium for half an hour, given his thanks for the bullet that missed, said something halfway magnanimous about President Joe Biden, cribbed a few lines from Abraham Lincoln, and stepped off the stage. 

If Trump had done that, he’d have finally given the media that “changed Trump” they’ve been searching for so long. But he didn’t do that. He couldn’t.

Trump loves the sound of his own voice too much, and he loves it best when it’s either making threats or whining. Trump cannot stay quiet.

Neither could Sen. Ron Johnson, who blamed his remarks about how Democrats represent a “clear and present danger” to the nation (a phrase meaning a risk that justifies immediate action) on loading the wrong speech into the teleprompter. 

It's not that Republicans have stopped wanting to put their political opponents in front of firing squads. They're just trying a little harder not to talk about it.

That doesn’t mean that Republicans are actually interested in reaching out to a more diverse set of voters. As The Atlantic notes, Trump has nothing to sell except a kind of faux nostalgia and the same anti-immigrant sentiments he’s expressed since he entered the race in 2015. 

As The Bulwark reports, the selection of Sen. J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate is a defensive move, locking down Trump's aggrieved white male base. It’s this group that Trump advisers see as the key to the election.

“Trump wins white men in 2024 the way he did in 2016, he wins. There’s no question,” said one Trump adviser. It’s that absolute dependence on the white male vote that has Trump’s campaign constantly cranking out signs that say “Blacks for Trump” or “Women for Trump” even when it’s white males who may end up waving them. Those groups are a shiny object to distract the press from the racist, misogynist core of the campaign.

“You guys [in the press] would just love us to print ‘Whites for Trump’ T-shirts and call us racists,” the adviser said, echoing others involved with the campaign. “We want the media focusing on the other stuff and the media can’t help itself but oblige.”

Trump needs white men. He especially needs white men who feel that white men aren’t getting a fair shake in a world where other people are considered equal. The key to securing that white male vote is telling those men that women are their property and that other people are here at their discretion.

From his first appearance, Trump has nurtured that white male base on a diet of red meat that always seems to involve locking someone up or threatening them with death. How are they going to keep those white men happy without maintaining the calls for vengeance? 

Don’t worry—they won’t. Now that the RNC is over, expect the full panoply of Republican calls for violence to return. It’s not like anyone is going to call them on it, not when they have Democrats in disarray to fill the headlines.

Even when they were pretending to be nicer in Milwaukee, Republicans didn’t stop waving signs for their biggest and most important act of political violence. Just how many people would be affected by the mass deportation plan being pushed by Trump (and by Project 2025) isn’t known. But it’s a fair bet it would far exceed the 100,000 Native Americans who were forced onto the Trail of Tears or the 120,000 Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. Some suggestions have put the number as high as 12 million.

Ripping that many people from their homes, throwing them in mass detention camps, and then deporting them to nations where they may face retribution from governments or gangs is an enormous act of state violence. It might even be enough to satisfy Trump’s white male followers, although it won’t give them that gallows-at-the-White-House thrill of seeing Trump’s perceived enemies marched in front of military tribunals.

So maybe he’ll do both.

But can those supporters get by over the next three and a half months if Republicans try to go vengeance-light in their rallies and statements?

Republicans are trying to pretend that they are concerned about politicians urging violence. But don’t be surprised to see their calls for violence to return to above-normal levels in short order.

Violence is what they have. They might try running on policy—but first they’d hate to make some.

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Four days after the end of the Republican National Convention, it suddenly looks like a very different event. I watched it intermittently, on television, along with perhaps 25 million other Americans (a relatively small number, though enough to matter). I focused on the highlights, like most viewers did. I read the analysis and thought I understood what had happened. But in the light of President Joe Biden’s brave and unprecedented decision to drop out of the race, my memory of what Donald Trump and his party were doing and saying has permanently shifted. I suspect this will be true for at least some of the other 25 million of us too.

Whatever happens next, the frame has altered. Now it is the Republicans who are saddled with the elderly candidate, the one who can’t make a clear argument or finish a sentence without veering off into anecdote. Now the Democrats are instead proposing something new. Now it is the many pundits who were already bored by the race and ready to wrap it up who look foolish.  

Remember, if you still can: The Republican convention was a carefully curated, meticulously planned presentation. As my colleague Tim Alberta has said, the theme was “strength.” Strength was expressed by exaggerated, absurd, comic-book figures: Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock. The latter chanted “Fight, fight!” and “Trump, Trump!” while pumping his fist. Then he sang “American Bad Ass,” an unlistenable work of profound dissonance. Trump himself walked into the convention hall to the strains of James Brown’s famously misogynistic anthem “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”  

[Read: This is exactly what the Trump team feared]

Strength was implied by the equally choreographed demonstrations of debasement. Nikki Haley, who had repeatedly questioned whether Trump is “mentally fit” to be president—and had declared that “the first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate” will win the election—offered her “strong endorsement.” The vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, who had previously compared Trump to Hitler and described him as “cultural heroin,” performed a kind of kowtow, appearing at the convention in the form of supplicant, acolyte, prodigal son. Like so many other Republicans, he bowed to the power of Trump, to the vulgarity of Hulk Hogan, to a whole host of things he used to say he didn’t like, and maybe still doesn’t like. He even made a peculiar, strained attempt to link his children and his wife, the daughter of South Asian immigrants, to a cemetery in East Kentucky where he said they will be buried, as if none of this will make sense until all of us are dead.

But then Trump himself appeared, and it was as if the emperor with no clothes had taken the stage. There was nothing strong about an overweight, heavily made up yet nevertheless shiny-faced elderly man who rambled and babbled for an hour and a half, completely undermining the slick image created in the previous four days. He began by sticking to his script, solemnly referencing the failed assassination attempt against him days before. But even when telling that story, he could not master the appropriate tone and almost immediately changed the subject. “And there’s an interesting statistic,” he said: “The ears are the bloodiest part. If something happens with the ears, they bleed more than any other part of the body. For whatever reason, the doctors told me that.”

Eventually, instead of sounding like an “American Bad Ass,” he digressed into pure gibberish. One example:

They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. I—you know the press is always on because I say this. Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen.

Another:

In Venezuela, Caracas, high crime, high crime. Caracas, Venezuela, really a dangerous place. But not anymore, because in Venezuela, crime is down 72 percent. In fact, if they would ever in this election, I hate to even say that, we will have our next Republican convention in Venezuela because it will be safe. Our cities, our cities will be so unsafe, we won’t be able—we will not be able to have it there.

On Thursday evening, this performance seemed deranged, sinister, and frightening. Now, following Biden’s decision to halt his own campaign, it just looks deranged. On the one hand, we have a sitting president who understood his limitations and, in an act of patriotism, selflessness, and party unity, decided to step away from power. On the other hand, we have a former president clinging to power, holding on desperately to the myth of a lost election, evoking the same predictable descriptions of carnage and disaster he served up eight years ago. Today, he is still attacking Biden, who is no longer his opponent.  

[Read: A searing reminder that Trump is unwell]

In retrospect, the Republican Party’s convention looks not just staged but also hollow and false. By contrast, the Democratic Party’s convention will be substantive and maybe even spontaneous. In the hours that have passed since Biden’s announcement, a million different Kamala Harris memes, music mixes, and clips have appeared online, not orchestrated by her campaign or by any campaign, just put together by random people, some of whom like her and some of whom do not. One mash-up of her wackier speeches, her laugh, and a Charli XCX soundtrack had 3.4 million views by this morning. We don’t know yet whether Harris will be the candidate or, if she is, whether she will be a good one, but the energy has already shifted from the men trying to impose their image of their party on the country to online Gen Zers who can flip the script any way they want.    

I don’t know what will happen next, and that’s the point. The heavy sense of inevitability that surrounded the RNC has lifted. The cadres of people organized by the Heritage Foundation and a dozen offshoots, all quietly preparing to dismantle the rights of American women, to replace civil servants with loyalists, to take apart pollution controls, and to transfer more money into the hands of Trump-friendly billionaires—they are no longer marching inexorably toward the halls of power. The people who spent a week trying to bend reality to fit their flawed, vengeful candidate became too confident too soon.

On Monday, Ohio state Sen. George Lang introduced Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, at a rally by saying, “I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County's J.D. Vance are the last chance to save our country politically.” Fair enough. 

“I'm afraid if we lose this one,” Lang continued, “it's going to take a civil war to save the country.”

It seems the new and improved MAGA message of “unity” lasted less than 72 hours.

The rally was held in Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio, at the high school he attended. As for Vance’s speech? He attempted to make a joke about liberals being oversensitive about race.

You nailed it, Vance!

All joking aside, this isn’t the first time a Trump ally has threatened violence if the majority of Americans don’t comply with the MAGA agenda. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts recently said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

In May, ABC News reported that it was able to find 54 cases of violence, threats of violence, and alleged assaults against Americans where Trump’s name was invoked. The 54 cases were linked through both law enforcement and court documents.

Only the best people, from the bottom to the top.

Donate $5 or whatever you can to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign to save our democracy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Boeing-owned Wisk Aero expects its pilotless air-taxi to begin carrying passengers "later in the decade" as it works with the U.S. regulator to secure approvals, its CEO said on Monday, amid skepticism among industry analysts about certification timelines. Wisk is one of several electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft makers that have emerged over the last few years with a promise to provide an environmentally-friendly mode of transport in congested cities. But the industry faces technological hurdles such as making batteries powerful enough for companies to make more trips on a single charge. They also need to convince regulators and the public that the aircraft are safe, a barrier that is higher when the aircraft is autonomous. Wisk is developing a four-seater autonomous aircraft that will have a range of 90 miles (145 km). "We are right now testing and producing the elements of this aircraft that we will hope to fly around the end of this year," CEO Brian Yutko told reporters at the Farnborough Airshow. Wisk's strategy is a departure from other major air-taxi makers, which are developing models that will require a pilot to fly the aircraft. The company has said operators of its aircraft will save on pilot costs. But industry experts at Bain say a full autonomous passenger flight is not expected before the late 2030s and pilotless aircraft will face competition from autonomous vehicles on the road. "Maximizing passenger occupancy and avoiding return trips with empty aircraft will be crucial for operator profitability," said Mattia Celli, one of the authors of the Bain report.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Windows users are being notified that their systems aren't backed up with the built-in Windows backup solution. A corresponding message appears with the advice that it's best to make backups so that all data is stored "in case something happens to the PC." It almost reads like an indirect threat, but Microsoft is actually just pointing out the option to store file backups on its own OneDrive cloud service. And it's also advertising more storage space.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just a few hours before President Joe Biden announced that he will not seek a second term in the White House, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson threatened lawsuits to try to force Biden to appear as the Democratic candidate on at least some state ballots.

“Every state has its own system,” Johnson told ABC News, “and in some of these, it’s not possible to simply just switch out a candidate.”

In a system governed by the rule of law, Johnson’s threats are empty. Though Biden was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee until he decided to withdraw from the race, he would not legally have become the Democratic nominee until he was formally nominated by delegates to the party’s convention, which is scheduled to begin August 19. So there’s no need to “switch out” Biden for another candidate because Biden was never formally on any state’s 2024 ballot.

Still, the world we live in is post-Trump v. United States (2024), the Supreme Court decision holding that former President Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for any crimes he committed using his official authority as president. That decision had no more basis in law than a decision forcing Democrats to run Biden for president would have. So the possibility that a GOP-controlled Supreme Court will make up some reason to sabotage Democrats’ chances of holding the White House cannot be entirely ruled out.

The Court would struggle to justify such sabotage, in part because its own decisions benefiting Trump undercut the kind of lawsuits envisioned by Johnson. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. Anderson (2024), which reversed Colorado’s attempt to remove Republican Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot because of Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection, also cuts against allowing any state to overrule the Democratic Party’s choice of candidate.

Anderson relied heavily on US Term Limits v. Thornton (1995), which held that “powers over the election of federal officers had to be delegated to, rather than reserved by, the States.” That means that, even if a state wanted to remove the Democratic presidential nominee (who will almost certainly be Vice President Kamala Harris) from the ballot and replace her with Biden, it would have to point to a federal constitutional provision or law permitting it to do so.

State laws generally do not prevent Democrats from putting Harris on the ballot instead of Biden

Though Speaker Johnson did not identify which state laws might prevent Democrats from nominating Harris instead of Biden as their presidential candidate, the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank closely aligned with the GOP, published a memo claiming that three states — Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin — may have laws that will frustrate the Democratic Party’s transition from Biden to Harris.

But none of these states’ laws should be read to prevent Harris from appearing as the Democratic Party’s nominee on the 2024 ballot.

Georgia law does require some presidential candidates to file a “notice of candidacy” in early July, but that same law exempts the nominees of political parties that held “a national convention and therein nominated candidates for President and Vice President of the United States.” In case there is any uncertainty about what the Georgia law means, Gabriel Sterling, a high-ranking state elections official, confirmed on X (formerly known as Twitter) Monday morning that whoever Democrats choose at their August convention will appear on the Georgia ballot.

Similarly, in Nevada, regulations promulgated by the secretary of state’s office provide that “each major political party must provide the names of the party’s respective candidates for president and vice president of the United States to the secretary of state by not later than 5 pm on the first business day of September of the year of a presidential election.” The first business day of September has not happened yet.

Wisconsin law, meanwhile, provides that “nominees chosen at a national convention” must be certified “no later than 5 pm on the first Tuesday in September preceding a presidential election.” So, much like in Georgia and Nevada, Biden was never certified as the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee, and the party has plenty of time to choose a different candidate.

So that should be the ball game. In all three states flagged by Heritage, major party presidential nominees are determined after each party’s convention takes place. So there is no need to switch the Democratic Party’s nominee from Biden to Harris because Biden never formally became the Democratic nominee.

That said, there is one possible vehicle the Supreme Court could use to sabotage Harris. The normal rule is that state Supreme Courts have the final word on all questions of state law, so the US Supreme Court should play no role in deciding which candidate qualifies for each state’s ballot. In Moore v. Harper (2023), however, the Supreme Court said that it could overrule a state court’s interpretation of a state election law if a majority of the justices thought that the state court’s decision “exceed[s] the bounds of ordinary judicial review.”

The Court, however, has never actually invoked this self-given power, and it’s unclear how the justices would defend a decision overruling state law. 

Republican lower court judges could wreak havoc before the Supreme Court weighs in

One risk Democrats should be prepared for is that a lower court judge closely aligned with the Republican Party might issue a court order forcing Biden’s name back on the ballot. It’s far from clear what the legal basis of such a decision would be, but there are judges — think of figures like Christian Right crusader Matthew Kacsmaryk or Aileen Cannon, the trial judge who has behaved like a member of Trump’s criminal defense team — who’ve shown an extraordinary willingness to bend the law to achieve Republican goals.

It’s also trivially easy for Republicans to bring a lawsuit before a friendly judge. Any lawsuit filed in Amarillo, Texas, for example, automatically lands in Kacsmaryk’s courtroom.

Would the Supreme Court affirm a decision by someone like Kacsmaryk or Cannon which sought to rig the 2024 election for Donald Trump? Again, such a decision would require an unusual amount of cynicism by the justices, even by the standards of this unusually cynical Supreme Court.

Even if everything works out for the Democratic Party in the end, Democrats should at least be ready for a Trump-aligned judge to temporarily throw the election into chaos.

A cartoon by Clay Bennett.

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Those who thought that President Joe Biden standing down from the 2024 campaign would lead to some kind of free-for-all are about to be disappointed. In the hours since Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, that announcement has been met with a level of Democratic enthusiasm that exceeds all expectations.

Back in May, Donald Trump’s campaign bragged that they had experienced Trump’s biggest fundraising day, hitting $52.8 million following his conviction on 34 felony counts. But Trump’s big day is about to be blown away.

Biden endorsed Harris shortly after 2 PM ET on Sunday. By 9 PM, ActBlue was announcing the biggest day of the election cycle, with $46.7 million. Later, Harris’ campaign reported that it had taken in $49.6 million, still on Sunday. But the night wasn’t over. By midnight, ActBlue had collected $66.8 million, with almost all of that coming after Biden’s endorsement of Harris. Since midnight, another $14.4 million has come in. 

There’s a good chance that ActBlue will hit over $100 million in small donations within 24 hours of the endorsement. And Harris did it all without committing a crime.

Just as impressive as the funds streaming in to support the campaign is the list of officials, party leaders, and organizations that have lined up to express their support for Harris.

As of Sunday night, Daily Kos had identified these senators, representatives, governors, and organizations as standing behind Harris:

Governors (10)

Andy Beshear, Gavin Newsom, Janet Mills, Jared Polis, John Carney, Josh Shapiro, Kathy Hochul, Ned Lamont, Phil Murphy, and Roy Cooper.

Senators (20)

Alex Padilla, Ben Cardin, Bob Casey, Brian Schatz, Chris Coons, Chris Murphy, Debbie Stabenow, Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren, Jon Ossoff, Laphonza Butler, Mark Kelly, Mark Warner, Martin Heinrich, Michael Bennet, Patty Murray, Ron Wyden, Tammy Baldwin, Tim Kaine, and Tina Smith. 

Representatives (130)

Abigail Spanberger, Adam Schiff, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ami Bera, Amy Klobuchar, Andrea Salinas, Andy Kim, Annie Kuster, Ayanna Pressley, Barbara Lee, Becca Balint, Ben Ray Lujan, Bennie Thompson, Betty McCollum, Bill Foster, Bill Keating, Bobby Scott, Brad Schneider, Brad Sherman, Brendan Boyle, Catherine Cortez Masto, Cori Bush, Dan Goldman, Dan Kildee, Danny Davis, David Trone, Debbie Dingell, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Deborah Ross, Delia Ramirez, Dina Titus, Don Beyer, Dutch Ruppersberger, Emilia Sykes, Eric Swalwell, Frank Pallone, Frederica Wilson, Gabe Amo, Gabe Vasquez, Gerry Connolly, Grace Meng, Greg Casar, Greg Landsman, Greg Stanton, Gregory Meeks, Gwen Moore, Hank Johnson, Haley Stevens, Hillary Scholten, Nikema Williams, Ilhan Omar, Jahana Hayes, Jake Auchincloss, Jamaal Bowman, Jamie Raskin, Jared Huffman, Jared Moskowitz, Jasmine Crockett, Jason Crow, Jeff Jackson, Jennifer McClellan, Jennifer Wexton, Jerry Nadler, Jill Tokuda, Jim Clyburn, Jim McGovern, Joaquin Castro, Joe Neguse, John Garamendi, Jonathan Jackson, Joyce Beatty, Judy Chu, Julia Brownley, Kathy Castor, Katherine Clark, Katie Porter, Kevin Mullin, Kweisi Mfume, Lisa Blunt Rochester, Lizzie Fletcher, Lois Frankel, Lori Trahan, Lucy McBath, Marilyn Strickland, Mark Pocan, Mark Takano, Mary Gay Scanlon, Maxine Waters, Maxwell Frost, Melanie Stansbury, Mike Levin, Mike Quigley, Nanette Barragan, Nikki Budzinski, Nydia Velázquez, Paul Tonko, Pramila Jayapal, Raul Grijalva, Raul Ruiz, Ritchie Torres, Ro Khanna, Robert Garcia, Robin Kelly, Rosa DeLauro, Ruben Gallego, Salud Carbajal, Sara Jacobs, Sean Casten, Seth Magaziner, Seth Moulton, Shontel Brown, Shri Thanedar, Stacey Plaskett, Steny Hoyer, Steve Cohen, Steven Horsford, Summer Lee, Susan Wild, Susie Lee, Suzanne Bonamici, Sylvia Garcia, Sydney Kamlager, Ted Lieu, Teresa Leger Fernandez, Terri Sewell, Troy Carter, Val Hoyle, Veronica Escobar, Yadira Caraveo, and Yvette Clarke.

Other party leaders and officials

Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Pete Buttigieg.

Organizations

American Federation of Teachers, Congressional Black Caucus, LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, and SEIU.

And of course, Daily Kos.

We have a real chance to shatter our country’s centuries-old glass ceiling. Imagine our great nation finally electing a woman—and a Black and Asian American woman at that! Holy crap, that gets me excited, and hopefully, it gets you excited, too! We are going to have something real to fight for: the major accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration and a groundbreaking candidate as well.

Please donate $10 or whatever you can to ensure Kamala Harris holds the White House!

Not long after President Joe Biden announced he was stepping aside from the presidential race Sunday, pro-Trump social media influencers had settled on one line of attack: that Democrats had carried out a coup against their own president. 

Biden “has now been deposed in a coup,” Trump-backing venture capitalist David Sacks wrote. “Undermining Democracy should never be condoned,” Trump ally Richard Grenell posted. “The coup is complete,” wrote Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). 

“What you just witnessed is proof positive that when the most powerful Democrat institutions and oligarchs unite to topple an American regime, they expect to succeed,” conservative activist Charlie Kirk wrote.

From people who support Donald Trump, the man who tried to steal the 2020 election, this is obviously a ridiculous and absurd thing to say. Yet it echoes a self-interested argument made by Biden himself just two weeks ago, when he argued that him dropping out would be tantamount to ignoring democracy.

“The voters — and the voters alone — decide the nominee of the Democratic Party,” Biden wrote in a July 8 letter. “Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned.” 

What’s unfolded in the two weeks since has been a steadily intensifying pressure campaign from various members of the press, pundits, donors, and current and former elected officials aimed at making Biden quit. Some of these entreaties were made in private — and, when Biden didn’t appear to be listening, more spilled out into public view. They argued that he couldn’t win and, eventually, he listened. 

There may arguably be something a bit uncomfortable about the role of Democratic power brokers and donors in pushing Biden aside after his primary win. But while they’re doing this without voters’ explicit say, they’re doing so in an attempt to (belatedly) respond to voters’ beliefs that Biden is too old to serve another term.

So it may be undemocratic in practice, but in a sense it’s democratic in intention. Because the party isn’t avoiding an election, they’re trying to win one, by picking a nominee who (they hope) can win more people’s votes.

How democratic were the 2024 Democratic primaries?

Democratic Party elites didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree after the debate. Up until that disaster, they’d been fully behind Biden, and their support of him was one major reason Democratic voters were presented with no credible alternatives in this year’s primaries. 

Because in reality, Biden won the primaries well before the people got to vote. Back in 2022 and 2023, some polls showed a majority of Democratic voters saying he shouldn’t run again. The president never seems to have seriously considered bowing out, though. He ran again and (as is normal for an incumbent) solidly locked down support from Democratic elites. As a result, Democratic rising stars were deterred from challenging Biden, believing they likely would have lost, and then been blamed if Trump won in the general. 

So, yes, 15 million people did indeed end up voting in those primaries. But how democratic was that process? Biden won the primaries because he won the inside game. It was party elites who determined the (few) options available to voters. Polls showed the voters would in theory have preferred someone else, but they weren’t offered a realistic opposing candidate.

Furthermore, asserting that the primary result is all that matters, and that taking anything else into account is “undemocratic,” is a very limited and blinkered definition of democracy. After all, those 15 million people are a paltry sum compared to the 150 million people who may vote in the general election — people who, according to polls, overwhelmingly think Biden is too old to serve another term. Many of those people wanted another candidate — shouldn’t their views matter?

The “new information after the primaries” problem

Another issue is that primary voters did not have the information that Biden would perform so poorly in the debate when they cast their votes.

And though what key Democratic Party figures just did to Biden is in some ways unprecedented, in other ways it’s very familiar. That is: it’s the standard playbook for how to force out a suddenly scandal-plagued elected official who is believed to be hurting the party.

This playbook involves a ratcheting up of pressure and condemnations as co-partisans gradually condemn or abandon that official, making sure they know that the battering will continue unless they quit — basically what we’ve seen over the past few weeks.

New York Democrats successfully employed it against Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2021, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in 2018, and Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2008. Senate Democrats did it against Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) in 2017. (Though it doesn’t always work, as shown in the cases of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, and 2016 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.)

Your mileage may vary in how much you view Biden’s bad debate performance as a full-on scandal. But it was certainly new information that wasn’t clear during the primaries. Back then, Biden refused to participate in any debates and skipped some high-profile interview opportunities, leaving it ambiguous how he might perform in a high-stakes setting.

But the truth is that party elites didn’t just casually abandon the choice of the voters right after they made that choice. They defected later, because of new information — information that those primary voters did not have.

Party loyalty is a two-way street

Finally, it is also worth noting that party elites didn’t push Biden off the ticket in an effort to steal the power of the presidency from him. They abandoned him because they fear he is hurting the party’s electoral chances — that is, because he’s lost support from voters. 

Party loyalty is a two-way street — it is not, or at least should not be, a blood oath or a cult of personality. Leading Democrats backed Biden when they thought he could win, and they ditched him when they thought he couldn’t. 

Now, they’re trying to substitute a nominee they hope the American public will like a lot better. And there’s something very democratic about that. They are (finally, belatedly) trying to listen to the voters, who, according to polls at least, keep saying they don’t want to support Biden again.

So maybe it would have been nice if Democrats had had an actual presidential primary process rather than this mess. But that didn’t happen — and, considering the options, party officials abandoning Biden to try and nudge him aside in favor of someone who can win was a reasonable response.

I'm gonna be at Gencon this August! I'll have some books and stuff and will be doing sketches and complimenting your pet photos. SEE YOU THERE???

Allow me to summarize the response from outside America to the news that President Joe Biden is not running for reelection: Thank God.

Here in Britain, the most common reaction in the minutes after the news broke was sheer relief. Relief that Donald Trump will not be allowed an easy path to a second term. Relief that the Democrats will put forward a candidate who is able to bear a full campaign schedule—defending the party’s record and advancing its best arguments. Relief, too, that the party would not be insulting the intelligence of voters by insincerely pushing a candidate that its leaders must have understood was a lemon.

The last of those has dominated my thinking since the disastrous CNN debate in June. Imagine that Biden’s staffers had gently shepherded him over the line, coaching him through interviews and propping him up through public events. Imagine that Biden had somehow won the election despite the evidence of the polls—and then, disaster. Within months or weeks, it surely would have become apparent that he was unable to serve a full term.

If all of that happened, then the American people would have, quite rightly, felt that they had been duped. Any sense of the moral high ground—something the Democrats have been keen to claim in the face of Trump’s very real outrages—would have disappeared. How can you ask the voters to trust you when you don’t trust them enough to tell them the truth?

[Peter Wehner: Joe Biden made the right choice]

My colleague Mark Leibovich first wrote in 2022 that Joe Biden should not run again. To many of us watching from outside America, this seemed like an entirely reasonable argument, and we couldn’t understand why it got so little traction. But we looked at Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Grassley and Bernie Sanders and wondered if indulging extremely venerable politicians was just another of those inexplicable American things, like combining peanut butter and jelly. Even one of Britain’s most staid politicians, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, joked about the issue in January. Asked whether he would ever make a comeback, the then-72-year-old replied: “I’m too old to be a British politician and too young to be an American politician.”

Then came the Department of Justice’s decision not to prosecute Biden in a classified-documents case, saying that he would present himself to any future court as he did to prosecutors, as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” I wrote an article for The Atlantic confidently declaring that the issue of Biden’s age was now “unavoidable.”

I was wrong. So very wrong.

Many people found the issue only too easy to avoid. Over the next few days, I saw every possible coping strategy to ignore the argument. Trump is old too! (True, but I think he is also a terrible candidate.) This was a right-wing meme, the new Hillary Clinton’s emails! The special counsel in the classified-documents case was a Republican patsy, intent on smearing a Democratic president! Why were we discussing this, and not “Trump’s fascism”?

The answer to that last question at least was simple. If Trump is a danger to the republic, then he should face the strongest possible opponent. It has been grim to watch prominent Democratic politicians make the calculation that they should stay quiet, chalk this one up as a loss, and hang on for 2028. This complacency has also undermined the White House’s campaign message that this election is about the survival of democracy. What they said: America’s future hangs in the balance in November. What they clearly thought: This is a mere preliminary to the more interesting contest in four years’ time.

Those Washington journalists who shrugged off their peers’ attempts to raise this issue also need to reflect on their actions. The signs of Biden’s unfitness were there to see, for those who wanted to look. Too many didn’t. He was reluctant to do sit-down interviews or appear in the traditional pre–Super Bowl slot. He gave fewer press conferences than his predecessors. For more than a year, the news service Axios has run frequent stories, presumably based on leaks from worried members of his team, about Biden’s decision to wear sneakers rather than dress shoes, about his “proprioceptive maintenance maneuvers,” and about his reduced schedule. The reporting got little traction, but most of it has now been confirmed. (On one recent call meant to soothe wavering supporters, Biden instead told his audience he was not very sharp after 8 p.m. Relatable, yes. Reassuring? No.)

After the CNN debate in June, the groupthink switched from denying the problem to bewailing it. This must have felt odd to casual readers, as if everyone had been visited by the same divine revelation overnight. The legacy media, feeling chastened—and in some cases, personally humiliated—corrected with vigor. “The media is right now campaigning hard for a Democratic party loss,” the Guardian columnist Rebecca Solnit wrote on July 6 about the slew of panicked editorials. No, they were making up for lost time.

[Read: The White House’s Kamala Harris blunder]

The Substack author Matt Yglesias is one of the few writers to have since revisited his reluctance to believe there was a problem. “I was, of course, aware that Joe Biden was old and showed signs of aging,” he wrote on July 8. “But I was also aware that a large share of the video ‘evidence’ of Biden’s incapacity was flagrantly clipped or cropped to give a dishonest impression.” This is polarization in action, and a reminder that liberals can’t assume that everything on Fox News is untrue.

By this summer, Joe Biden had become an 81-year-old man who whispered, frequently lost his train of thought, and had trouble with proper nouns. The idea that he should not run for a second term was not a controversial opinion here in Britain, where the new Labour government would prefer to deal with anyone other than Trump. The last Trump administration’s wild mood swings made life difficult for America’s allies, and this time, with the Ukraine war locked in a bitter stalemate, the stakes are even higher.

Well beyond Labour insiders, Trump is not popular in Britain. In fact, in favorability ratings here, he ranks below not just Barack Obama but also Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, George W. Bush, and Albert II, Prince of Monaco. Of course he should face a proper opponent: Biden has endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, while Obama has posted a statement calling for “a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” Frankly, either a Kamala coronation or a chaotic contest at the Democratic National Convention is preferable to the totter toward oblivion that the party has just avoided. If the Democrats now run a campaign that does not nuke their downballot races or insult the intelligence of American voters, I will join the sigh of relief heard around the world, from London to Kyiv and beyond.

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It was a very hard thing for President Joe Biden to do, and it was the right thing for him to do.

Biden announced today that he would step aside as the Democratic presidential nominee.

In a letter to the nation, America’s 46th president said, “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President.”

The decision by the 81-year-old Biden was very nearly inevitable, as his chances to defeat Donald Trump collapsed and the odds of a Republican landslide victory increased, but its announcement was nevertheless a stunning moment. In an instant, Democrats were liberated from an issue, Biden’s age, that had hung like a millstone around their necks. This will unleash an enormous amount of energy within the party. What was looking like a rout is now a race.

There will be plenty of commentary on what this means for both parties. But I find my thoughts this afternoon going to President Biden and his family—and to this agonizing denouement for a man who was first elected to public office more than half a century ago, at the age of 29.

Biden was clearly reluctant to make this decision; it was in many ways forced upon him, and by a particularly painful process. The party he loved and to which he has dedicated his entire adult life turned on him, including former colleagues and trusted friends. They were right to urge Biden to step aside—it had to be done, and those in Biden’s party took no delight in doing it—but from the president’s perspective, this felt like a betrayal.  

I imagine this triggered Biden’s insecurities, the sense that he was never taken as seriously as he should have been. He has created a narrative about himself, and not without reasons, as Comeback Joe. His political career was declared finished multiple times, including in 1987, when he withdrew from the presidential campaign because he was caught plagiarizing the life story of Neil Kinnock; in 2016, when President Barack Obama pushed his own vice president aside in favor of Hillary Clinton; and in 2020, when his campaign was flat on its back until it was resurrected in South Carolina. So it’s not surprising that Biden, facing the worst crisis of his political life, would tell himself that this is just another obstacle to overcome, another chance for the scrappy kid from Scranton to prove the experts wrong, and in doing so, it would only add to his legend.

But this is different. This is a story without a comeback. Persistence, determination, and grit have nothing to do with this. Biden is in the midst of a rapid and irreversible physical and mental decline. This was evident even before the June 27 debate with Trump, but on the CNN stage in Atlanta, his debilities were on excruciating display. Many Americans, including those who have been most supportive of Biden, felt that night should never have been allowed to happen; that those who loved him should have protected Biden from the unforgiving glare of the spotlight; that Biden in this state should have been seen only within the privacy of family, not broadcast to the world.

His public appearances since then haven’t been quite as bad as what we saw on the debate stage, but they have been bad enough.

Biden’s withdrawal, then, wasn’t simply necessary because he had lost the confidence of the country and even his own party. For him to agree to step aside means, on some level at least, he is acknowledging that he is entering a difficult final chapter of his life. There is grief in that. Coming to that point will of course stir up powerful emotions—denial, anger, bitterness that those he trusted have betrayed him. That isn’t true, but it feels true to him, as it might to many of us.

Coming to terms with mortality is never easy. We rage against the dying of the light. Many elderly people face the painful moment of letting go, of losing independence and human agency, when they are told by family they have to give up the keys to the car; Biden was told by his party to give up the keys to the presidency. Of course this proud man would fight to hang on.

But in the end, and to his credit, Joe Biden got to where he needed to be, and not a moment too soon. Staying in the race would have been an act of monumental selfishness. As it is, what he did will be seen as an act of impressive selflessness.

It’s not clear whether Trump can be beaten. Democrats have dug themselves into a deep hole. But at least they now have a fighting chance.

One of the last remaining birthing units in southern Alabama will close next month to qualify for federal funding that will save the hospital’s emergency services, but doctors warn the move may cost newborns and pregnant patients essential access to obstetric care.

Nestled in rural Clarke County, the small, nonprofit Grove Hill Memorial Hospital will discontinue its labor and delivery services in mid-August, the governing board announced earlier this month.

The board said closure was necessary for the hospital to qualify for much needed federal funding that is designated for rural emergency hospitals, defined as facilities with fewer than 50 beds that provide 24/7 emergency care and no inpatient services, including obstetrics.

But the federal funding comes at a steep cost. The closure marks the fourth labor and delivery unit to close statewide in less than a year, including a facility in a neighboring county that referred many patients to Grove Hill after closing in November.

In the coming months, a large part of southern Alabama will no longer have close access to hospital obstetric delivery services.

Dr. Max Rogers, the obstetrician-gynecologist who runs the labor and delivery unit at Grove Hill Memorial, sees an average of 300 women a month and delivers 10 to 15 babies. Rogers said the lack of local care could put some mothers and babies at risk.

“I used to say that outcomes are gonna be worse,” Rogers said. “And that’s a nice, polite euphemism for ‘babies are going to die and mothers are going to die in emergency rooms’ because of a lack of prenatal care and a lack of obstetrical care.”

This would apply to a small but significant fraction of births involving serious complications. Although emergency rooms are equipped to handle the vast majority of normal births, some conditions require rapid transportation to a facility with a doctor qualified to operate on pregnant patients, Rogers said.

Anna Retic, 26, has been driving 45 minutes from her home near Pine Hill to Grove Hill for all seven months of her pregnancy because it was the closest facility offering both birthing and prenatal services. 

She considered herself lucky. She works as a bank teller and is able to take time off to make the trip to her monthly appointments, which were scheduled to increase to once every two weeks as her October delivery date gets closer.

Now, the closest option for her to give birth is a hospital almost twice as far away.

“It’s crazy,” Retic said. “If you’re in labor, you have to rush two hours away, you might have that baby in the car. I don’t know. I pray that doesn’t happen to me.”

Alabama’s delivery health outcomes already lag far behind the rest of the country. One study found Alabama had a maternal mortality rate of 64.63 deaths per 100,000 births between 2018 and 2021, nearly double the national rate of 34.09 per 100,000 births. That jumps to 100.07 deaths for Black women in the state.

Rural hospitals have struggled to maintain labor and delivery units for decades. Experts cite declining births, low Medicaid reimbursement, and staffing shortages as significant causes of financial decline.

But some of the strain is more particular to Alabama, which is one of 10 states nationally that has not expanded Medicaid.

Dr. Donald Williamson, president of the Alabama Health Association, said a major challenge for rural hospitals in the region is a significant number of patients that come through the front door are uninsured.

The expansion of Medicaid would improve reimbursements and hospital revenue, Williamson said, and until then he expects more hospitals across the state to make the same difficult decision made at Grove Hill.

Nationwide, 28 hospitals have converted to the rural emergency designation since the program was rolled out in 2023, according to the University of North Carolina’s Sheps Center for Health Services Research. But Grove Hill will be the first that will have to close a labor and delivery unit to become a rural emergency hospital, according to the National Rural Health Association.

While the program has offered a unique lifeline to rural hospitals on the brink of collapse, experts and legislators have warned it might come at the cost of essential services like inpatient psychiatric or other rehabilitative care.

U.S. Senators Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas, and Tina Smith, a Democrat from Minnesota, introduced legislation in May to allow rural emergency hospitals to maintain some inpatient services, including obstetrics.

Ultimately, Rogers in Grove Hill said he supports the conversion to a rural emergency hospital, even if the change means closing the obstetrics department where he has formed close relationships with many patients. He believes it is the hospital’s only financial option and important in maintaining emergency services.

Still, Rogers has significant concerns about the future of the federal program.

“Every single one of us needs to understand that while this REH status may protect a lot of rural hospitals, it’s coming with a price. And that’s what I don’t want everybody to gloss over,” he said.

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In 1983, an ambitious young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department wrote a memo about a hypothetical constitutional amendment to reform the judiciary. “Setting a term of, say, fifteen years would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence,” he wrote. “It would also provide a more regular and greater degree of turnover among the judges.”

That lawyer’s name was John Roberts. He is currently in his 16th year as chief justice of the United States. The past five justices to leave the Supreme Court, whether via death or retirement, each served nearly three decades or longer.

But Roberts’s younger self has found a new and unlikely ally: our nation’s oldest president. Although Joe Biden remains opposed to expanding the number of justices or impeaching them, as some Democrats have called for, the president is reportedly set to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court, most notably term limits and an enforceable code of ethics. Biden cannot make his proposed changes unilaterally. They would need to be passed into law by a majority of the House and 60 senators (or 50 willing to scrap the filibuster), and would face constitutional challenges before the Court itself.

Even so, if Biden lays out a plan for the two elected branches of government to check the judicial one, it may prove to be among his presidency’s most consequential acts.  

[Nicholas Bagley: The big winners of this Supreme Court term]

Ever since 1937, when Franklin D. Roosevelt tried and failed to pack the Supreme Court, presidents seeking to change the Court’s composition have taken a passive approach. They waited for justices they didn’t agree with to retire or die, then nominated their preferred judges to the open seats. They did so with the expectation that the Senate would vote on whether to confirm, regardless of which party controlled the chamber at the time.

In 2016, then–Majority Leader Mitch McConnell broke the Senate’s end of this implicit deal by refusing to let President Barack Obama (for whom I’d worked as a speechwriter) fill a vacant seat. In 2020, after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, McConnell rushed Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation through less than two months before a presidential election. This pushed many Democrats to become far more open to reforming the Court. But Biden was not among them. If his party were to pack the Court, he warned during the 2020 primaries, “we’ll live to rue that day.”

Biden was less outspoken about reforms other than Court-packing, but he was no less dismissive of them. Upon taking office, he outsourced the consideration of Supreme Court reform to a bipartisan commission, promised to review its findings, and never seriously addressed them. When asked, before the release of the commission’s report, whether he supported term limits for Supreme Court justices, Biden gave a one-word answer: “No.”

The Court’s right-wing majority responded not with restraint but with impunity. Thanks to the judiciary, many of the most sweeping right-wing policy victories in modern history—on abortion, voting rights, guns, and environmental regulations—came with Democrats in control of the White House and one or both houses of Congress. In 2023, it emerged that Justice Clarence Thomas had received an estimated $4.2 million worth of gifts from wealthy conservative benefactors, some with interests before the Court. Earlier this year, news broke that an upside-down flag associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement had flown at Justice Samuel Alito’s house soon after January 6, 2021. Alito also failed to disclose gifts he had received. Both justices declined to recuse themselves from cases in which they might have had a conflict of interest.  

As the Court has become more politicized, its conservative judges have insisted that checks and balances ought not apply to the judicial branch. Chief Justice Roberts declined an invitation to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, citing separation of powers. Alito went further, arguing that Congress doesn’t have the ability to set rules and guidelines for the Court at all. Meanwhile, although no one has formally declared the change, it has become generally accepted that no justices will be confirmed while the Senate and the White House belong to opposite parties, and that justices will not retire while a president of the opposite party is in office. When you combine these two factors, the old method of checking the Court—winning elections and letting time take its toll—has been rendered unworkable.

The Court is thus, to use a phrase popularized by Game of Thrones and embraced by Donald Trump and his movement, demanding that the American people bend the knee. It is asking them to accept that their country will continue to become more conservative for decades, maybe forever, no matter what they want or whom they vote for.

In proposing checks on the Court, Biden is refusing to capitulate to this new arrangement. This is particularly notable given his former opposition to such changes. He is going beyond a single decision or appointment and taking on the structure of the Court itself.

Yet even as he takes an unprecedented step, Biden is providing fellow Democrats with a blueprint to demand Court reform in a politically savvy and responsible way. While expanding the Court is divisive among voters, imposing term limits on justices is a popular idea. It’s supported not just by Democrats and independents but, for now at least, by about half of Republicans.

[Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan: The Supreme Court is not supposed to have this much power]

No less important, although Congress has changed the size of the Court before, adding seats now is particularly risky for our republic. It’s not hard to imagine how a cycle of expansion and counter-expansion could protect democracy temporarily only to end it permanently. If a Democratic administration adds four justices, for example, a future MAGA administration could add four of its own—and the new far-right majority could give the president absolute power to overturn elections, toss out valid votes, or order the military to arrest political opponents. The Biden plan, while not without risk, comes with an endgame—one in which neither the right or left gets everything it wants, but each feels essentially comfortable with the new arrangement, not least because the American people support it.

Now that Biden has touched what was once a third rail, the issue should have more staying power. Which means that Americans who care about issues such as abortion rights, gun safety, campaign-finance reform, and political corruption have new hope that the will of the people still matters. The path laid out by President Biden won’t be easy or quick to implement. But it is achievable, it would bolster our democracy, and it would reassert the American belief that ours is a government of, by, and for the people.

In 1948, Harry Truman ran against a do-nothing Congress. Joe Biden—and every Democratic candidate for the foreseeable future—will be running against a do-everything activist Court. Embracing checks and balances is good politics and even better policy. After all, one of the central promises of democracy is that we, the people, can correct our government’s course. This may be our last, best chance to do so.

A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.

Campaign Action

A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.

Campaign Action

Updated at 3:40 p.m. ET on July 19, 2024

Republicans view President Joe Biden as old, feeble, and, most importantly, beatable. Members of the GOP badly want him to remain in the race. This much was clear from my conversations with delegates on the grounds of the Republican National Convention this afternoon.

Vice President Kamala Harris, should she replace Biden as the 2024 Democratic nominee, is likewise not seen by this crowd as a formidable threat to Donald Trump. “She’s not articulate. She doesn’t know America. She doesn’t know Americans,” Anthony Kern, an Arizona delegate and a state senator, told me. “I don’t know if the country could stand four years of that laugh.”

Many believed that Harris may be just as weak an opponent as Biden (a plus), and therefore didn’t want to see a brand-new ticket take shape. However, according to some delegates, if both Biden and Harris were nudged aside, that outcome would be a counterintuitive advantage for the GOP. “It’s not going to bode well for their party leadership, or the entire apparatus, for them to pass over the opportunity for a first female Black president,” Jerry DeWolf, a Maryland delegate, told me.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Step aside, Joe Biden]

When it comes to the other Democrats who could potentially compete in a “mini primary” before the party’s convention next month, opinions diverge. Multiple people even suggested (or trolled) that Hillary Clinton might reemerge to make this year’s election a proper 2016 rematch.

More seriously, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s name kept coming up on a small list of politicians who might fare well in a presidential election. “With J. D. Vance attacking the ‘blue wall’—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—you have to counter that,” Alan Swain, a North Carolina delegate and a candidate for the state’s Second Congressional District, told me. Other delegates I spoke with mentioned Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, noting that his swing-state pull is essential for the Democrats’ survival. Ryan Campbell, an alternate Washington state delegate who grew up in Southern California, told me that California Governor Gavin Newsom looks and sounds the part of a president, but that his policies have ruined “the most beautiful state” in America. “The man is a dumpster fire, as far as policy goes,” Campbell said.

No Republican I spoke with today would characterize themselves as afraid of any candidate on the Democratic bench. Most simply view the situation as a mess. Trump’s co–campaign manager Chris LaCivita, speaking with Politico’s Jonathan Martin in a live interview this morning, referred to the current Biden situation as “nothing more than an attempted coup by the Democratic Party.” Conservative Political Action Conference chair Matt Schlapp scoffed that Democrats are scheming “in a tofu-filled room.”

Many RNC attendees I spoke with believe that Trump and his newly minted vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, are on track for a landslide, rendering any discussion about an updated Democratic ticket moot.

Nothing seems to hurt Trump’s standing in the polls in any meaningful way. Tonight, he’ll appear onstage, a white bandage on one ear, with members of the crowd wearing their own bandages in solidarity. Trump is a living martyr currently running against someone who has been derided as a dead man walking. The Biden-replacement question will continue, but, for now, Republicans are already thinking ahead to Trump’s inauguration.

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An earlier version of this article misstated Anthony Kern’s last name.