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      US supreme court weakens statute cited by January 6 prosecutors

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      Conservative bloc
      Alito – Majority
      Barrett – Minority
      Gorsuch – Majority
      Kavanaugh – Majority
      Roberts – Majority
      Thomas – Majority
      Liberal bloc
      Jackson – Majority
      Kagan – Minority
      Sotomayor – Minority
      The US supreme court has narrowed the statute that prosecutors have relied in the cases over hundreds of rioters who took part in the January 6 Capitol attack for obstruction of an official proceeding – in a ruling with profound implications for hundreds of other participants on that day in 2021.The 6-3 ruling in the case of Fischer v United States could also affect the federal criminal case against Donald Trump, who is charged with similar offences in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the assault. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the conservative justices in the case, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.More details soon… More

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      The only silver lining to Biden’s painful performance? US voters had already made up their minds | Emma Brockes

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      Who could have foreseen that the scariest thing about the presidential debate on Thursday night wouldn’t be the lies, the bombast or the threats to democracy, but the spectacle of Trump’s slightly wolfish restraint. Heading into the encounter, Democrats felt the kind of anxiety more usually endured before watching a child perform, with that same crushing sense of raw emotions. That Trump barely mocked Biden, or went after his age or his son, seemed less rehearsed than a shrewd response to what all of us were seeing: a president so compromised that all Trump had to do was grin, lean back and let the optics work for him.And still, despite the evidence, it feels wanton to say this. Biden, whose voice was hoarse from a cold, rushed his delivery, fought to find words and stumbled in a style not entirely new to him. The difference on Thursday night was one of degree. “Oh my God” was the general consensus, texted around the country, when the debate opened in Atlanta. While Trump’s remarks were predictably ludicrous, full of lies and inflated claims, nothing he said could distract from the image of Biden saying sensible things in a manner so crepuscular that the entire event jumped from politics to tragedy. It made me think of a line from Rilke: “It had almost hurt to see.”This was the near-universal response among Democrats on Friday morning. Spoken with slightly too much relish and accompanied by a lot of “we’re doomed” hand-waving, it drew attention once again to everything that’s wrong with political discourse. There was Trump, claiming, crazily, that in Democratic states something he called “abortion after birth” was endorsed, while Biden soberly listed his achievements in job creation, managing inflation and proposals to better tax those paid more than $400,000. The president pushed back against Trump’s lies as best he could, unaided by the two CNN moderators who, scandalously, were far more corpse-like in their affect than the president. It didn’t matter. The gut response of everyone watching was not “here are two men, one vastly superior to the other”. It was simple shock at how Biden has aged.There was anger here, too. A point widely made on social media on Thursday night was that this is what a race for the most powerful job in the world looks like when people won’t vote for a woman. Two elderly men, in various states of impairment, addressing each other as “this guy”, squabbling over who has the better golf handicap and accusing each other of being sore losers. It was like one of those bad 90s satires involving Warren Beatty, in which the joke is too broad to land. Trump thinned his lips, repeated the phrase “kill the baby”, and accused Biden of running the worst administration in history, to which Biden, correctly but uselessly, in effect responded “no, you are”.And still there was worse to come. For me, the hardest parts of the 90 minutes were the brief flashes of Biden as he once was, full of easy charm and conviction. It was clear that the president was operating in a mode less professional than personal; that his unfiltered state was, on occasion, less strategic than the result of some other, inhibition-suppressing dynamic. But in those moments of pure, visceral response to Trump’s awfulness, Biden seemed like a stand-in for all of us.Several times, one saw Biden look across at Trump with pure, unmoderated hatred. “He didn’t do a damn thing,” he said in reference to Trump and 6 January. “Such a whiner, he is,” said Biden, the odd syntax removing the remarks from the context of a presidential debate to what felt like an honest and off-camera response. “Something snapped in you when you lost,” he said and it was an extraordinary moment, watching a man present Trump with a flat truth about himself. When Biden cracked a huge smile in response to the audaciousness of yet another Trump lie, the pathos was almost unbearable. There he was, fully himself for a moment, the man we recognise as a capable and charismatic leader.Trump, in these moments of confrontation, pursed his lips and smiled thinly. You could almost see the machinery of his personality working, the split-second flare of his wounded narcissism, followed immediately by denial and attack. By the end of the debate, while Democrats started talking, pointlessly, about replacing Biden on the ticket, the only consolation was in the broken political system itself. These debates don’t move the needle. They exist in the absence of any better ideas on how to engage the electorate. Americans are so polarised that no one is changing their minds. If Biden’s performance was terrible, one could self-soothe with the observation that it hardly matters at this stage; which is, of course, the most terrifying conclusion of all.
      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      The abortion ruling hides conservative justices’ partisan agenda | Moira Donegan

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      The supreme court is a messy institution. It’s six conservative justices are mired in infighting over both the pace of their shared ideological project of remaking American law and life according to rightwing preferences, and over their preferred methodological course for doing so. Their squabbling is not helped by the fact that two of them, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, keep embarrassing the court with gauche public scandals, which draw attention to the court’s legitimacy crises like a vulgar flag waving above One First Street. For their part, the liberals are exhausted, impotent, and at times apparently publicly despairing. Their dissents have sometimes taken on tones of exasperation and peeved sarcasm, as if they’re turning to the country and asking: “Can you believe this?” Their most senior member, Sonia Sotomayor, recently told an interviewer that over the past several terms, since the court’s conservative supermajority was sealed under the Trump administration, she has sometimes gone into her chambers after the announcement of major decisions and wept. She says she anticipates having to do so again: in one recent dissent, she warned ominously about the future of gay marriage rights.The court’s partisans like to point out that it controls neither the military nor the federal budget; the court’s legitimacy, they say, comes merely from the fact that people believe it to be legitimate. But increasingly, many of them don’t. The court’s approval rating remains at record lows, and the justices’ conduct over the past several years has punctured the mystique of scholarly seriousness that the institution once pretended to. They don’t seem like wise legal scholars, carefully and dispassionately deliberating the merits of competing interests and claims. Instead, they seem more like a bunch of bumbling partisan hacks – perhaps just more cynical and less clever than the average Republican operatives stuffed into suits throughout DC.The court did not appear particularly competent, for instance, when on Wednesday, a draft opinion in Moyle v United States, was briefly uploaded to the court’s web page. The case concerns Idaho, which has one of the most extreme and sadistic anti-choice legal regimes in the nation, and asks whether states’ attempts to ban abortions even in cases of medical emergencies can be preempted by Emtala, a federal law regulating emergency rooms. After it was uploaded, the opinion was quickly taken down; in a statement, a supreme court spokesperson said that the opinion had been uploaded briefly by mistake. By then, Bloomberg news had already obtained the full text of the draft, and it was published soon thereafter.This makes the third time in recent memory that an opinion in a high-profile supreme court case was leaked before its official release. The first was when Justice Alito reportedly told a conservative movement activist friend of his upcoming decision in 2014’s Burwell v Hobby Lobby, a case that struck down the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate for religious employers; the second was when the draft of Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs was leaked to Politico almost two full months before it was ultimately issued by the court. All three of these leaks have been in cases pertaining to women’s reproductive rights.But if the court is bumbling in their functioning, embarrassing in their public personas, and obviously fractious in their internal relations, then the leaked order in Moyle also shows that the conservative majority can be quite calculating in their political strategy. In the draft decision, issued per curium (that is, unsigned), the court dismisses the case as improvidently granted, and sends it back down to the lower courts. They include the restoration of a lower court order that had allowed emergency abortions to continue in Idaho hospitals while the case proceeds. For now, that means that women experiencing failing pregnancies in Idaho will still be able to get the care they need to preserve their health, their fertility and their lives; hopefully, emergency room doctors there will feel safe enough to actually perform the procedures, and patients will no longer have to be air lifted out of state to receive the routine care that will stabilize them. That’s what’s most important for the American public: that for the time being, lives will not be needlessly lost in service to the anti-choice agenda.But to the court’s conservative majority, what seems to be most important is pushing the abortion issue – and an inevitable ruling that eventually will allow states to ban emergency abortions – past the November election. The decision in Moyle was transparently a compromise between the court’s three liberals, who wanted to preserve women’s lives, and the three more pragmatic conservatives – John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – who wanted to preserve Donald Trump’s electoral chances. These conservatives know that a ruling saying that states can allow women to bleed out, suffer septic infections, have seizures from eclampsia, lose the function of their uterus, and ultimately die – out of deference to preserving what by then are already doomed, futile pregnancies – would hurt Republican candidates in this November’s elections. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to issue such a murderous ruling; it means that they want to do so at a more politically convenient moment.So three of the court’s conservatives are acting like Republican political strategists, working to conceal their own legal agenda in order to minimize harm to their preferred party in an election year. That would be bad enough. But not all of the court’s conservatives can exercise even this degree of cynical, self-interested restraint. Although the order was issued per curium, Alito dissented, arguing that the state ban on emergency abortions should be enforceable under federal law; he was joined by Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Some of his reasoning was echoed by Barrett, whose concurrence, studded with handwringing concerns as to whether Emtala sufficiently protected the conscience rights of anti-abortion doctors and whether it could preempt a state criminal law, read like a road map for anti-choice lawyers seeking to re-argue the issue at a later, more politically amenable time. (Another sign of the court’s dysfunction – how often opinions are now accompanied by a flurry of dissents and concurrences, with each of the justices seemingly very eager to publicly distinguish their own thinking from that of their colleagues.)Together, their writings made it clear that though the court’s conservatives are split – sometimes fiercely and peevishly so – over how fast to proceed, they agree over their ultimate goal: one day, probably sooner than we think, this case will come back, and the supreme court will allow states to ban emergency abortions. What follows will be blood on their hands. More

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      Most Americans have no idea how anti-worker the US supreme court has become | Steven Greenhouse

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      Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the supreme court has been supremely pro-corporate – one study even called the Roberts court “the most pro-business court in history”. Not only have many justices been groomed and vetted by the business-backed Federalist Society, but Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have taken lavish favors from billionaire corporate titans. Thomas has even spoken at two Koch network fundraising “donor summits”, gatherings of rightwing, ultra-wealthy business barons.While the court is decidedly pro-corporate, most Americans probably don’t know just how anti-worker and anti-union it really is. The justices have often shown a stunning callousness toward workers, and that means a callousness toward average Americans. One of the most egregious examples was a 2014 ruling – with an opinion written by Thomas – that held that Amazon, which holds workers up to 25 minutes after the ends of their shifts waiting to be screened to ensure they didn’t steal anything, doesn’t have to pay them for that time.Or take this month’s decision in which the court ruled in favor of Starbucks by making it harder for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to win rapid reinstatement of workers who are illegally fired for supporting a union. In that case, Starbucks fired five of the six baristas who were heading an effort to unionize a Memphis Starbucks. After NLRB officials found that the workers had been fired unlawfully for backing a union, a federal judge agreed to the NLRB’s request to issue an injunction to quickly reinstate them. Many labor relations experts say it’s important for the NLRB to be able to win quick reinstatement after companies fire workers who lead unionization drives, as Starbucks has repeatedly done, because those firings often terrify co-workers and cause union drives to collapse.Writing the court’s majority opinion, Thomas ignored all that, oblivious to the injustices and suffering that many workers face when they exercise their right to form a union. Thomas said that federal judges, when issuing such injunctions, should follow a more exacting four-part test, rather than the worker-friendly two-part test the NLRB favored. Thomas’s opinion also ignored some glaring facts: the union has accused Starbucks of firing 150 pro-union baristas, and the NLRB has accused Starbucks of an astoundingly high number of violations of the law – 436 – in its efforts to block unionization.In contrast to Thomas, Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a partial concurrence and partial dissent, acknowledged the injustices and delays that pro-union workers often face. She wrote that “Congress, in enacting the National Labor Relations Act, recognized that delay in vindicating labor rights ‘during the “notoriously glacial” course of NLRB proceedings’ can lead to their defeat”. Jackson noted that the litigation over reinstating the Memphis baristas had dragged on for two years. (It was dismaying that Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor signed Thomas’s soulless, unsympathetic majority opinion rather than Jackson’s.)A 2022 study found that of the 57 justices who have sat on the court over the past century, the six justices with the most pro-business voting records are the six members of today’s 6-3, rightwing super-majority, all appointed by Republican presidents: Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The study found that Donald Trump’s three appointees – Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett – were the three most pro-business justices of the 57 evaluated. (That study also found that the court’s Democratic appointees at the time – Kagan, Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer – were among the top 20 pro-business justices.)All this is a far cry from when some justices were true champions of workers. Arthur Goldberg had been the general counsel of the United Steelworkers and served as secretary of labor under John F Kennedy. Justice William J Brennan Jr, whose father was a union official, was famous for going to bat for workers. As a lawyer, Louis Brandeis filed famous, detailed supreme court briefs in cases that sought to uphold pro-worker laws.In sharp contrast, today’s conservative judges seem to almost reflexively rule against workers and unions. They seem to view workers and unions as unwelcome nuisances that are seeking to make life difficult for corporations as they pursue their noble mission of maximizing their profits and share prices.Take the court’s 5-4 Epic Systems ruling of 2018. Gorsuch’s majority opinion blessed corporations’ efforts to prohibit workers from filing class-action lawsuits. It instead let employers require employees to pursue their grievances through individual, closed-door arbitrations, which greatly favor employers, according to various studies. Because lawyers are far less willing to take individual worker cases than class actions, Epic Systems gutted workers’ ability to vindicate their rights against sexual harassment, racial discrimination and wage theft.In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the majority opinion “egregiously wrong”. She also said the ruling would result in “huge under-enforcement of federal and state statutes designed to advance the wellbeing of vulnerable workers”. Ginsburg added that it’s difficult and potentially perilous to pursue small claims individually. “By joining hands in litigation,” she wrote, “workers can spread the costs of litigation and reduce the risk of employer retaliation.”Another case that showed shocking insensitivity toward workers’ concerns was the 2007 Lilly Ledbetter case. Ledbetter was a supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama, where for years she earned substantially less than the 16 men at the same management level. That pay discrimination was hidden from her, and she learned of it only after more than 15 years on the job. Alito wrote the court’s inflexible, unsympathetic 5-4 majority opinion, ruling that her case should be thrown out because she had failed to file her complaint within 180 days after her pay was set, as the law called for.Ginsburg angrily dissented, writing that the ruling “is totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination Congress intended Title VII to secure”. Ginsburg added that Alito’s majority opinion “does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination”.There have been some recent anti-union cases. Last year, in Glacier Northwest, the court made it easier for corporations to sue unions for any financial damage they suffer when workers go on strike – a ruling that could discourage workers from using their most powerful form of leverage. In 2021, in the Cedar Point Nursery case, the court put property rights far above worker rights and union rights when it overturned part of a California law, inspired by Cesar Chavez, that granted union organizers a right to go on farm owners’ property to speak with farm workers.By far the most important anti-union decision in recent years was Janus v. AFSCME, a 5-4 ruling, written by Alito, in which the court held that requiring government employees to pay fees to their union violated their first amendment rights. That ruling allowed any federal, state or local government employees to opt out of paying union fees – and was immediately seen as a blow that would weaken unions and their treasuries. Ten minutes after the court issued that decision, then president Trump tweeted: “Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!”The Janus case was underwritten by rightwing foundations and billionaire corporate powerhouses, including Richard Uihlein and the Koch Brothers. (Remember, Clarence Thomas attended their “donor summits”.)The supreme court’s approval ratings have fallen to a record low. Many Americans think the court is corrupt and has lost its way – its justices take all-expenses-paid vacations with billionaires, fail to disclose gifts, ignore blatant conflicts of interest, and one justice’s home hung an upside-down flag apparently showing sympathy for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement.One easy step the court can take to begin an effort to regain respect and popularity would be to be stop ruling so often in favor of multibillion corporations and instead side with workers, eg typical Americans – and with labor unions, institutions that fight to improve the lives of average Americans. It just might help, and would further the cause of justice, if the court were to show that it cares more about embattled workers than about billionaires and faceless corporations.
      Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer More

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      ‘Morals of an alleycat’: who won the debate meme wars, Biden or Trump?

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      Winning a presidential debate is one thing, but coming out victorious in the meme wars is something else.Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump understand how important it is to go viral. According to NBC News, Biden’s campaign headquarters enlisted 18 influencers with a combined following of 8 million to post about the event, amounting to a “post-debate social media clip sharing battle”.Both contenders delivered soundbites. During Trump’s presidency, “everything was rockin’ good”, according to him. Biden hit back at Trump’s felony convictions, saying the former president “has the morals of an alleycat”.US elections 2024: a guide to the first presidential debate
      Biden v Trump: 90 miserable minutes
      Who won the meme wars?
      Biden’s performance sends Democrats into panic
      Six who could replace Biden
      Trump and Biden’s claims – factchecked
      Though Biden’s voice grew stronger as the debate went on – a low bar, considering how weak he sounded at the start – it was impossible for viewers to ignore, especially as concerns about his age are a constant source of stress for Democrats this election.“I’ve watched a lot of Biden talks. I’ve never heard him sound this frail,” Vox correspondent Zack Beauchamp wrote on X. “Someone has to pull a fire alarm and help Biden out here,” writer Bhaskar Sunkara added, referencing Jamaal Bowman’s infamous congressional incident.X users wondered: did the president need a cough drop? An energy drink – maybe Panera’s infamous charged lemonade? What about the “secret sauce” he posted a photo holding shortly before the debate, a canned water containing, according to the label, “zero malarky”? (Actual cans later hit the Biden campaign’s official store, costing $4.60 each.)On social media, people were obsessed with performance-enhancing drugs – and how it appeared that Biden needed to take some. “The Adderall shortage is tearing this country apart and it has finally hit Biden,” read one tweet. “They accidentally injected Biden with ketamine instead of adrenaline,” another wrote. Some fantasized about feeding Biden Adderall through the TV screen.According to CBS chief White House reporter Nancy Cordes, a “source close familiar to the president’s debate prep” confirmed he’s been “battling a cold” in the past few days.Despite CNN’s rule of turning off the candidates’ mics to deter petty arguments, Trump was able to get in one diss during a moderated rebuttal: “I don’t know what he’s talking about and I’m sure he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about.”The empty-eyed, uncomfortable stare Biden kept for much of the debate got parodied online, with some saying he looked like he kept seeing ghosts, or like a dog does when it’s been caught misbehaving.Neither candidate faced rigorous, or even cursory, factchecking from the debate moderators, CNN’s Dana Bash and Jake Tapper. Trump spoke of “post-birth abortions”. No pushback after that. Ditto when Trump blamed Nancy Pelosi for turning down a chance to deploy the national guard on January 6. And no one spoke up when Trump called Biden a “Palestinian” as if it were a slur.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile speaking on immigration, Trump said that migrants were “taking away” “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs”. On X, users wondered what, exactly, he meant, spurring jokes and memes about searching for “Black jobs” on LinkedIn or writing a resume for a “Black job”.Biden’s official campaign TikTok account posted through the debate. Their strategy: have staffers, or friendly influencers, make videos praising his performance. In one clip, a young man shares a moment where Biden called Trump a “sucker” and a “loser”. “Biden just slammed Trump,” he claims – a bold statement, considering Biden’s overall shaky performance. People in the comments weren’t buying the TikTok, though. “Did we just watch the same debate?” one asked.Watching the two candidates bicker proved exhausting, depressing, and downright terrifying. It felt as if the entire nation – or at least people who care about debates –was sitting in front of their TV screens, preparing for the worst. One meme of Simpsons character Ralph Wiggums sitting on a bus, chuckling to himself while saying “I’m in danger” struck a chord. “All of the US right now,” read a caption to the photo posted on X.Post-debate pundits suggested that Biden performed so terribly, he should be replaced by a new candidate. Social media users echoed the sentiment, and many agreed when the rapper Ja Rule, of all people, tweeted: “This can’t be our only choice of candidates… WTF.” More

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      Calls for Biden to stand aside grow after shaky debate performance against Trump – live

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      Could there be a contested Democratic convention? How would that even work? Replacing the president may not be an option, they said, but many acknowledged Democrats are talking about it, spurred by Biden’s troubling debate performance.MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace laid out how a candidate could release their delegates. Joy Reid said someone sent her the rules.“The rules are circulating,” Wallace laughed.“No one is saying it’s going to happen, it’s very unlikely,” Reid reiterated.The fact that a liberal network would broach the idea of whether an incumbent president running for re-election could be replaced after they’ve won the nomination shows how Democrats are scrambling after the debate to affirm Biden’s ability to lead the nation. Many are questioning whether the party should have serious conservations about what else could be done instead.David Plouffe, a Democratic strategist and former Obama campaign official, called the debate “kind of a Defcon 1 moment”.“The biggest thing in this election is voters’ concerns – and it’s both swing voters and base voters – with his age, and those were compounded tonight,” Plouffe said.Read the full story:Guardian US columnist Rebecca Solnit has also delivered her verdict, saying the American people were the true losers last night:Debates exist so that people can hear from the candidates, which makes sense when they’re relative unknowns. We’ve heard plenty from both of them for 40 years or so, since Biden was a young congressman and Trump was a young attention-seeker in New York City’s nightclubs and tabloids, and both of them have had the most high-profile job on earth for four years.We didn’t need this debate. Because 2024 is not like previous election years, and the reasons it’s not are both that each candidate has had plenty of time to show us who they are and because one of them is a criminal seeking to destroy democracy and human rights along with the climate, the economy and international alliances. If you are too young to remember 2017-2021, this would not help you figure that out.Much has been said about the age of the candidates, but maybe it’s the corporate media whose senility is most dangerous to us. Their insistence on proceeding as though things are pretty much what they’ve always been, on normalizing the appalling and outrageous, on using false equivalencies and bothsiderism to make themselves look fair and reasonable, on turning politics into horseraces and personality contests, is aiding the destruction of the United States.Read more from Rebecca Solnit here: The true losers of this presidential debate were the American peopleJess Bidgood, writing for the New York Times On Politics newsletter, summed it all up as “Well, that was ugly” and said the main takeaway was “mostly, they fought about each other.”She writes:
      Both Biden and Trump are deeply unpopular, and voters have for months been telling pollsters that they did not want this rematch even as they sent the candidates to the top of the ticket. Watching the debate last night, as each cast the other as the reason that he is running again, it seemed clear that the two Americans who most want this rematch were standing onstage.
      “I wish he was a great president because I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be at one of my many places enjoying myself,” Trump said, adding, “The only reason I’m here is that he’s so bad as a president”. Biden portrayed Trump as a unique threat to the country, castigating him in deeply personal terms and repeatedly calling him a liar. The deep enmity on display – and the messiness of the night – may have damaged them both.
      David Smith was in Atlanta for the Guardian, and this is his sketch of what was a terrible debate night for the Biden campaign:That sickening thud you heard was jaws hitting the floor. That queasy sound you heard was hearts sinking into boots. That raspy noise you heard was a US president embodying what felt like the last gasp of the ailing republic. Say it ain’t so, Joe.The first US presidential debate in Atlanta on Thursday was the night that Democrats went from “Don’t panic!” to “OK, time to panic!” After months of preparation and expectation, they got to the altar and suddenly realised they were marrying the wrong man.In 90 miserable minutes, Joe Biden achieved two things that had seemed impossible. He lived down to expectations that were already rock bottom. And he managed to make Donald Trump sound almost coherent. Trump did not win the debate but Biden certainly lost it.Democrats had been lulled into a false sense of security by Biden’s high energy performance at the State of the Union address. They expected Superman again. Instead they got Clark Kent in his dotage.Read more of David Smith’s verdict here: ‘You’re the sucker, you’re the loser’: 90 miserable minutes of Biden v TrumpShould Joe Biden decide not to go for reelection in November after all, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which takes place 19-22 August, would have to nominate somebody else. There isn’t a clear frontrunner, but there would be some of the potential options.Kamala HarrisThe most obvious default pick would be Biden’s vice-president. She has been widely criticised for not carving out her own role in the Biden administration and has poor polling approval ratings, suggesting she would struggle against Donald Trump in the glare of an election campaign. The 59-year-old was backing Biden after the debate, but would also be maybe the easiest for the party to install as a replacement. She would automatically become president if Biden resigned from the White House, but that would not automatically make her the nominee.Gavin NewsomThe 56-year-old California governor was in the spin room last night talking down any alternatives to Biden being the nominee, saying it was “nonsensical speculation”. He had a primetime debate with Florida gov Ron DeSantis last year, which could be a presidential match-up of the future, and has made a point of supporting Democrats in elections away from his home state, which looked, at times, like a shadow White House campaign.J B PritzkerThe 59-year-old governor of Illinois would be one of the wealthiest of potential picks, but also can flourish the credentials of having codified the right to abortion in Illinois and declaring it a “sanctuary state” for women seeking abortions. He has also been strong on gun control, and legalised recreational marijuana.Gretchen WhitmerThe Michigan governor was on the shortlist for VP pick for Biden in 2020, and a strong showing in the midterms for the Democratic party was in part put down to her governership. The 52-year-old has been in favor of stricter gun laws, repealing abortion bans and back universal pre-kindergarten.Sherrod BrownThe 71-year-old would be the most elderly of the alternate picks, but still seven years younger than Donald Trump. It was considered a surprise when he didn’t have a tilt for the Democratic nomination for 2020, at the time saying he saw remaining as Ohio’s senator as “the best place for me to make that fight” on behalf of working people. A strong voice on labor rights and protections, he has also spoken out on protections for IVF and abortion.Dean PhilipsThe main contender to Joe Biden during the primaries earlier this year has already demonstrated an inability to appeal to the broader party, and so is unlikely to be a factor.Democratic strategist Theryn Bond has told Sky News that the party needs to replace Joe Biden as presidential nominee, but that it should not be Kamala Harris as the “country is not ready” for a Black woman to be president.She said that California governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer could be candidates, explaining:
      Unfortunately as much as I want the US to be ready for Black woman to be president, they are not ready. This country is not ready. This country is too divisive, unfortunately, we’re just not there. I don’t think she would be the one to take the Democratic Party to victory.
      Joe Biden does not become the party’s nomination for president until endorsed at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which takes place 19-22 August.There is no formal mechanism to replace him as the presumptive nominee, and it would be the first time a party has attempted to do so in modern times. Effectively the only option is that he would have to agree to step aside.He won through the primaries almost uncontested, and has about 95% of the delegates who choose the nominee pledged to vote for him. There isn’t a legal requirement that they vote for who won in the primaries, but they are asked to vote in a way that “in all good conscience reflects the sentiments of those who elected them”.Were Biden to step aside as a candidate, he might try to nominate someone – most likely vice-president Kamala Harris – as his preferred alternative, which would carry some weight with delegates, but which would not be binding.The most drastic course of action open to Biden – resigning the presidency itself – would make Harris president. But that would not automatically make her the Democratic nominee for 2024.The party would still have to carry out an open, contested convention, leaving about 700 party insiders the choice of picking someone, and then having only three months to unite behind and campaign for them.And here are the top (by which I mean terrible) moments from that debate. Warning: there’s a lot of golf talk.On that note, this is Helen Sullivan, doing whatever the opposite of teeing off is on this live coverage. My colleague Martin Belam will be with you for the next while.It’s worth watching this from MSNBC analyst Claire McCaskill (you’ll hear her use the word “surrogate” a lot – that is a person who speaks on behalf of a candidate, usually to promote them):Politico has this explainer for how the Democrats could replace Biden (again: this is extremely unlikely to happen – not quite as unlikely as it was before this debate):
      If Biden agreed to decline his party’s nomination, it would kick off an open and unpredictable process of picking his replacement.
      Other names — from Vice President Kamala Harris, to Govs. Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer and JB Pritzker, to numerous others — could be placed in nomination. The candidates, who could span the Democratic Party’s geographic, ideological and generational wings, would be working to sway the thousands of Democratic delegates to support them on the first ballot.
      The pledged delegates aren’t the only ones who have a say. The Democratic Party has stripped “superdelegates” — elected officials and party leaders who can vote for anyone they please — of most of their power since the contentious 2016 primary. These superdelegates would be free to vote if no candidate won a majority of delegates on the first ballot. An open, contested convention would give more than 700 party insiders a major role in picking the new nominee.
      Here is Jon Stewart on how that went:Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist-turned ardent Biden supporter, told the AP in the spin room after the debate, “That was the worst performance in the history of televised presidential debates”. More

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      ‘You’re the sucker, you’re the loser’: 90 miserable minutes of Biden v Trump

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      That sickening thud you heard was jaws hitting the floor. That queasy sound you heard was hearts sinking into boots. That raspy noise you heard was a US president embodying what felt like the last gasp of the ailing republic.Say it ain’t so, Joe.The first US presidential debate in Atlanta on Thursday was the night that Democrats went from “Don’t panic!” to “OK, time to panic!” After months of preparation and expectation, they got to the altar and suddenly realised they were marrying the wrong man.In 90 miserable minutes, Joe Biden achieved two things that had seemed impossible. He lived down to expectations that were already rock bottom. And he managed to make Donald Trump sound almost coherent. Trump did not win the debate but Biden certainly lost it.There was a suitably funereal silence as the president, wearing blue tie and flag pin, and Trump, wearing red tie and flag pin, entered CNN’s red, white and blue studio. This was the first presidential debate without an audience since John F Kennedy v Richard Nixon in 1960 (those two candidates had a combined age of 90; this time they had a combined age of 159).Journalists in Atlanta were forced to watch on TV like everyone else. But the mutual animosity and contempt between the men exuded through the screen. It was clear neither was even thinking about shaking the other’s hand.Democrats had been lulled into a false sense of security by Biden’s high energy performance at the State of the Union address. They expected Superman again. Instead they got Clark Kent in his dotage.The crisis was clear almost as soon soon as Biden opened his mouth. His voice was hoarse and hard to hear. Clear your throat, man! His team later claimed that he had a cold. Or had he over-prepared?Early on, he bumbled: “We have 1,000 trillionaires in America – I mean billionaires in America.” Then: “ … making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the – with – with – with the Covid. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with … ”His voice trailed away. “Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.”Trump pounced: “Well, he’s right. He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”Trump is only three years younger, but is a creature of television. When Biden spoke, the former president, hair hovering above his head like a shiny cloud, could be seen frowning, pursing his lips or revving up for a reply. But when Trump spoke, the white-haired Biden stared into the middle distance, his mouth open, looking as feeble and frail as the democracy that now rests on his shoulders.It was a Greek tragedy because the Biden campaign pushed for this debate, the earliest in history, to “drag Trump into Americans’ living rooms” and wake them up to the threat. They set rules, including muted microphones and no studio audience, that seemed to backfire and work to his opponent’s advantage.The restrictions helped Trump stay relatively controlled and disciplined, at least by his own epically low standards. He did not constantly interrupt as he did in the first debate in 2020. He did not play to a crowd and get carried away with unhinged stories about sharks.Not that Trump should be let off the hook. This was an unwatchable debate between an old man who could not finish a sentence and an old man who could not tell the truth. It was Rip Van Winkle versus Pinocchio.Biden failed to push back on Trump’s lies. But so did CNN’s moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. This gave the impression of Trump’s falsehoods carrying just as much weight as Biden’s facts, especially to viewers who are just tuning in to the election. Expect Democrats to use this argument to deflect attention from their own man’s failings.More than an hour after the debate, when most people had turned off and gone to bed, CNN factchecker Daniel Dale came on air and said Biden made nine false claims while Trump made 30. Trump’s included some Democratic states wanting people to execute babies after birth; the US currently having the biggest budget deficit ever; Biden getting a lot of money from China; no terrorist attacks during Trump’s presidency; Biden wanting to quadruple taxes; the US providing way more aid to Ukraine than Europe; Nancy Pelosi turning down Trump’s offer of 10,000 national guard troops on January 6; “ridiculous fraud” in the 2020 election; Nato going out of business before he became president; Biden indicting him; his tax cut being the biggest in history.First impressions – and viral clips – are everything, so voters will forget that, as the debate wore on, Biden gradually became stronger on style and substance. He went for Trump’s character: “The only person on this stage who is a convicted felon is this man I’m looking at right now.”Angry and glowering, Biden insisted: “My son was not a loser, was not a sucker. You’re the sucker, you’re the loser.”And again: “How many billions of dollars do you owe in civil penalties for molesting a woman in public, for doing a whole range of things, of having sex with a porn star on the night – and while your wife was pregnant? I mean, what are you talking about? You have the morals of an alley cat.”Trump shot back: “I didn’t have sex with a porn star, number one.” An immortal line, never before uttered in a presidential debate. Carve it in marble!Biden and Trump debated which of them is the worst president in history. And which is the better golfer. Trump boasted: “I just won two club championships, not even senior, two regular club championships. To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way. And I do it. He doesn’t do it. He can’t hit a ball 50 yards. He challenged me to a golf match. He can’t hit a ball 50 years.”Biden retorted: “Look, I’d be happy to have a driving contest with him. I got my handicap, which, when I was vice-president, down to a six. And by the way, I told you before I’m happy to play golf if you carry your own bag. Think you can do it?”Trump: “That’s the biggest lie that he’s a six handicap, of all.”Biden: “I was eight handicap.”Trump: “Yeah.”Biden: “Eight, but I have – you know how many … ”Trump: “I’ve seen your swing, I know your swing.””As Bash tried to interject, Trump said: “Let’s not act like children.” Biden shot back: “You are a child.”Tellingly, once the horror show was over, it was Trump’s surrogates who flooded the “spin zone” at the media centre. Standing on a bright red carpet on what is normally a basketball court, former housing secretary Ben Carson said of Biden: “I really felt sorry for him. He struggled to come up with answers. He was trying to remember the things that they’d told him.”Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said: “I think President Trump was strong and coherent and I think President Biden was weak and confused most most of the time. What started out as a policy debate is turned into a capability debate … It’s pretty hard to believe that President Biden can continue in this job.”After a while, Biden’s surrogates emerged, including California governor Gavin Newsom and his beaming smile. It is still highly, highly unlikely he will be the Democratic nominee in November. But a little less unlikely than it used to be. More