Political publication Punchbowl is reporting that Gabe Vasquez, a New Mexico representative, has joined the ranks of Democratic party members calling on Biden to step aside for the November election.As of 1:51pm PT, Reuters counted that 32 of the 264 Democrats in Congress had openly called for Biden to end his campaign, while others continue to pressure the president behind the scenes.In an op-ed published by the Boston Globe on Friday, Seth Moulton, a Democratic representative, explains how he came to the “crushing” realization that Biden should not be the Democratic candidate facing Trump in November.Moulton had already expressed his opinion that Biden should step aside. But in the article, he recounts seeing Biden, whom he described as a treasured friend and mentor, at a recent event in Normandy observing the 80th anniversary of D-Day. He claims the president, with whom he had spent time with frequently since winning his House seat in 2014, seemed not to recognize him.“Of course, that can happen as anyone ages, but as I watched the disastrous debate a few weeks ago, I have to admit that what I saw in Normandy was part of a deeper problem,” Moulton said.Given Biden’s apparent state of health and the recent assassination attempt on Trump, Moulton said he is “no longer confident” Biden can win re-election. “The president should bow out of the race,” he said.“The harsh reality is that all the characteristics that have made Biden an irrepressible force – the energy, the vitality, the sharp, scrappy wit – are flickering,” Moulton added.Moulton is part of a growing group of Democratic lawmakers urging the president to exit. He urged more members of his party to come forward and “speak the truth about President Biden before it’s too late”.“We have a choice to make,” he said. “To my colleagues who are deeply concerned but who haven’t said so publicly: Let’s demonstrate the courageous, forward-looking leadership that Americans tell us they want in their politics and rob the Trump-Vance ticket of the opponent they want.”The White House has issued a statement on nationwide technology disruptions Friday due to outages of Microsoft devices caused by an update to security software CrowdStrike.Joe Biden will “continue to receive updates on the CrowdStrike global tech outage”, a senior administration official said, adding the White House is “in regular contact with CrowdStrike’s executive leadership and tracking progress on remediating affected systems”.“We have offered US government support. Our understanding is that this is not a cyber attack, but rather a faulty technical update,” the statement said. More below:
The White House has been convening agencies to assess impacts to the US government’s operations and entities around the country. At this time, our understanding is that flight operations have resumed across the country, although some congestion remains, and 911 centers are able to receive and process calls. We are assessing impact to local hospitals, surface transportation systems, and law enforcement closely and will provide further updates as we learn more. We stand ready to provide assistance as needed.
Joining the growing chorus of Democratic members urging Biden to take a backseat in the upcoming election, Morgan McGarvey, a representative of Kentucky, said in a post to X Friday that “the stakes are too high” for Biden to remain in the race.“There is no joy in the recognition that [Biden] should not be our nominee in November,” he said. “But the stakes are too high and we can’t risk the focus of the campaign being anything other than Donald Trump, his Maga extremists, and the mega-wealthy dark money donors who are prepared to destroy our path toward a more perfect union with Trump’s Project 2025.”Earlier on Friday, Kamarck, a member of the DNC’s rules committee, told delegates and reporters that the move to hold a virtual roll call was not an effort to “rubber stamp” Biden’s nomination but “born out of just paranoia about the Republicans in Ohio”.If the party were to formally nominate Biden and then he chose to drop out, she said they would simply adopt a new rule and hold a new roll call vote.“In other words, this doesn’t mean we’re stuck with one person if that person isn’t willing to run,” she said, adding that a misunderstanding of the process had “turned into sort of a mountain and a molehill” among anxious Democrats.Democratic officials pressed members of the Democratic national convention’s rules committee to move ahead with a virtual roll call vote ahead of the party’s August convention.The meeting took place on Friday, as the walls appeared to be closing in on Biden.The move to nominate Biden virtually sparked a backlash among Democrats who saw it as a way to jam through the president’s nomination before he could be pushed out. Responding to the outrage, the co-chairs of the rules committee said the vote would not take place before 1 August and would be completed by 7 August, previously the deadline for presidential candidates to qualify for the ballot in Ohio. Though the Ohio legislature has since changed the law, extending the deadline to accommodate the DNC’s mid-August convention, some Democratic officials say it would be foolhardy to take the risk, given that Ohio Republicans control the legislature and had to be arm-twisted by the state’s governor to address the issue in the first place.Dana Remus, an outside legal counsel for the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee, encouraged the convention to proceed with a virtual nomination in advance to avoid the possibility of a legal challenge by Ohio Republicans, according to the New York Times.“Unfortunately, at this moment in time, we have to assume that everything about the election process that Republicans and affiliated groups can challenge, they will challenge,” she said, according to the newspaper. “No matter the strength of their arguments.”The rules committee would hold another meeting later this month to decide on whether to adopt a virtual roll call vote.The webinar was hosted by Delegates Are Democracy and Welcome Party, organizations which are working to inform confused delegates about their options, said host Chris Dempsey. He has been speaking with dozens of delegates who say the process is opaque and that party leaders have been gatekeeping information. He stressed that Delegates for Democracy was not advocating for Biden to withdraw, but was instead trying to guide delegates who are often local volunteers without deep legal training about the rules.“We think that conventions are essential at putting forward strong nominees,” Dempsey said. “We can beat Donald Trump in November. But we know that we need credible sources of information to share with delegates. We want to be a place that delegates, the public, the media can come and get good information about how the process works.”A Biden withdrawal would set of a mad dash for delegates, Karmack said. A process would start on the floor, with potential candidates soliciting signatures on a petition to get on a nomination ballot – no more than 50 from any one state from 300 to 600 delegates. “They can’t sign every petition,” she said.“The people, these 4000-plus delegates, would have a lot of phone calls,” she said. “I suspect that somebody the DNC or the state parties would organize delegate meetings that would be open to the public – because all DNC meetings are open to the public – for the candidates to come and talk to the delegates, because they’d have to win over the delegates.”She likened the process to a mini-primary, with delegates as the voting audience, “scrunched into three weeks or something. It’d be incredibly tight.” The question at the convention would then become whether a consensus had formed on a new nominee.The nomination for vice president would be held on a separate vote, she said. “I imagine what would happen is that whoever emerged as the front runner – and maybe there’d be two or three of them – would all name their vice-presidential candidates. But then we’d have an open vote for vice president. It could get quite confusing. But this assumes all of this assumes that there’s a contest. And I for one am very skeptical that there’ll be much of a contest.”Ohio may still present a problem for any new candidate, because Ohio state law requires notice by August 9. Ohio lawmakers changed the law in July but it’s unclear if that change legally goes into effect in time for it to assist.Delegates to the Democratic national convention can more or less do whatever they want in a floor vote, rules experts said in a webinar about the process Friday morning.Elaine Karmack, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, founding director of Center for Effective Public Management, and a member of the DNC’s rules committee, discussed concerns delegates have been raising about a process that seems opaque, largely because it hasn’t been employed at all since 1980 and never under these conditions.Delegates are expected to vote for the person they’re pledged to. But the convention rules contain a loophole, she said. “The loophole ‘is in all good conscience’. That was added after the very, very difficult and bitter 1980 convention.”At that convention, Senator Ted Kennedy challenged President Jimmy Carter in primaries and then a floor fight. At the time, delegates could be removed by state leaders if they changed their vote. The conscience clause emerged after that, to prevent delegates from acting like robots, Karmack said.“On the Democratic side, there is no such thing as Joe Biden releasing his delegates,” Karmack said. “And Joe Biden gets this. I don’t know why the rest of the press doesn’t get it. Joe Biden said in his Nato press conference, he said, quote, the delegates can do whatever the hell they want to do. And that is basically true.”The delegate rules require their vote to “reflect the sentiments” of those who elected them. That phrase has never really been tested, Karmack said.Kamala Harris will participate in a call with major Democratic donors this afternoon at the request of senior advisors to the president, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to the Guardian.The New York Times first reported the vice-president will speak on a call “endorsed by Reid Hoffman”, a co-founder of LinkedIn who is one of the party’s biggest donors.“We continue to find ourselves in a rapidly evolving environment,” Hoffman wrote in an email obtained by the Times. “With the stakes as high as they are this cycle, we have to remain focused on the critical work that needs to be done to protect our democracy.”Her comments were expected to reflect comments made recently during a campaign stop in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Thursday, during which she called the looming contest against Donald Trump the “most existential, consequential and important election of our lifetime”.Two more House Democrats have called on the president to “pass the torch” and “release his delegates” as the president signals a defiant return to the campaign trail next week.The message is clear: the calls will not stop, despite Biden’s insistence he’s not going anywhere. Even if the president doesn’t believe he should step down, it is becoming increasingly difficult to see how he can continue without the support of so many in his own party.Minnesota representative Betty McCollum, said Biden should “release his delegates and empower Vice President Harris to step forward to become the Democratic nominee for president,” in a statement provided to the Star Tribune.Meanwhile, Kathy Castor, a Florida representative, told an NBC affiliate in Tampa that now was an “exciting time to possibly pass the torch”, during an interview with a Tampa-based news channel.“Kamala Harris is a fighter and I have full confidence in her,” she said.Joe Biden’s coronavirus symptoms are easing. He’s taking the anti-viral drug Paxlovid, as he isolates in Delaware after flying back early from events in Nevada on Wednesday, when he tested positive for Covid-19.He’s suffering from a non-productive cough and hoarseness, primarily, the White House said.It issued a statement, which you can read here. The variant of the virus that the president caught has not yet been identified.There is someone important hanging out in Washington, DC today though – US vice-president Kamala Harris.She didn’t have anything on her official White House schedule today but she’s materialized at the opening of a pop-up ice-cream shop owned by Tyra Banks.According to the pool report, Harris ordered the “Cap Hill Crunch” flavor. She was accompanied by her grandnieces, one of whom ordered the Chocolate GooGoo cake flavor.Not surprisingly, the vice president did not answer questions about Biden’s political future or her own.It comes to something when a president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the US armed forces makes news because someone said he asked pointed questions and “made decisions”, but, as Joe Biden would say, “Anyway…”Here’s the latest from Reuters:Joe Biden has been engaged and asked pointed questions, the top US general said on Friday, amid questions about the president’s health since he appeared frail and at times lost his train of thought in a recent debate against Republican Donald Trump.
On all the times I’ve engaged with the president, he’s been engaged. He’s asked very pointed questions, and made decisions,” said Gen CQ Brown, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.
Hello US politics blog readers, it’s been another extraordinary morning in political news even if Washington DC is a bit of a ghost town, with Joe Biden bunkering in Delaware, Congress on recess and Republicans wandering home from their convention in Milwaukee.But there couldn’t be more drama and the day feels young so stick with Guardian US and we’ll bring you the developments as they happen.Incidentally, we hope you can read this because you dodged the global IT failure, and you can also read all the developments in that story, live, here.Here’s where things stand in US politics:
High profile Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren of California and Ohio freshman representative Greg Landsman brought the number of members of Congress who have called on Joe Biden to get out of his re-election race to 30.
Joe Biden remained defiant, despite isolating out of the public eye in Rehoboth because he caught Covid, saying he’ll be back on the campaign trail next week. This despite pressure mounting for him to step aside from the top of the Democrats’ Biden-Harris 2024 ticket.
Mark Heinrich of New Mexico became the third sitting US Senator to call for Biden to quit the race, urging the president to step aside for the good of the country and pass the torch, saying the party needs a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump in November, for the sake of US democracy.
Biden also issued a statement condemning Russia for sentencing a Wall Street Journal reporter to 16 years for, as the US government and media continue to assert, simply doing his job. “Journalism is not a crime,” Biden said, as a Russian court found Evan Gershkovich guilty of espionage and sentenced him to 16 years in prison. The trial was widely viewed as a sham. Biden is pushing for his release.
Congressmen Jared Huffman of California, Marc Veasey of Texas, Chuy Garcia of Illinois, and Marc Pocan of Wisconsin wrote a letter addressed to the US president calling on him to step aside from the reelection race.
Before Joe Biden said he’s be back on the campaign trail next week, yet another media report bubbled up saying that members of Biden’s family has begun discussing an “exit” plan, citing “two people familiar” with the situation. The report suggests Biden has yet to make a final decision, but that his closest allies believe he is likely to step aside.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s reelection campaign chair, said he is the “leader of our campaign and the country” during an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the president’s favorite show. “He is the best person to take on Donald Trump and prosecute that case,” she said.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview in which he declined to make an endorsement in the 2024 election, but called Donald Trump’s reaction – raising a fist and mouthing fight, after his ear was bloodied by a bullet during an assassination attempt at one of his rallies, in Pennsylvania last weekend, “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life”.
Ohio representative Greg Landsman is a freshmen congressman, representing the state’s first district, which includes Cincinnati.He took office in January 2023 after being elected in the midterms and previously serving as a city councillor for almost five years until December 2022, so spanning the coronavirus pandemic.In a statement this afternoon he followed, in what is becoming almost protocol, showering Joe Biden with praise: “It is time for President Biden to step aside and allow us to nominate a new leader who can reliably and consistently make the case against Donald Trump and make the case for the future of America.” More
