US supreme court

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Justice Neil Gorsuch: Americans are ‘getting whacked’ by too many laws

      by

      US supreme court justice Neil Gorsuch has said ordinary Americans are “getting whacked” by too many laws and regulations in a new book that underscores his skepticism of federal agencies and the power they wield.“Too little law and we’re not safe, and our liberties aren’t protected,” Gorsuch told the Associated Press in an interview in his supreme court office. “But too much law and you actually impair those same things.”Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law is being published Tuesday by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Gorsuch has received a $500,000 advance for the book, according to his annual financial disclosure reports.In the interview, Gorsuch refused to be drawn into discussions about term limits or an enforceable code of ethics for the justices, both recently proposed by Joe Biden at a time of diminished public trust in the court.Supreme court justice Elena Kagan, speaking a couple of days before the president’s proposal, separately said the court’s ethics code, adopted by the justices last November, should have a means of enforcement.But Gorsuch did talk about the importance of judicial independence. “I’m not saying that there aren’t ways to improve what we have. I’m simply saying that we’ve been given something very special. It’s the envy of the world, the United States judiciary,” he said.Gorsuch echoed that stance in an interview Sunday on Fox News, remarking: “I just say: Be careful.“The independent judiciary … What does it mean to you as an American? It means that when you’re unpopular, you can get a fair hearing.”The 56-year-old justice was the first of three supreme court nominees confirmed during Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump’s appointees have combined to entrench a conservative majority that has overturned the federal abortion rights once granted by Roe v Wade, ended affirmative action in college admissions, expanded gun rights and clipped environmental regulations aimed at climate change, as well as air and water pollution more generally.In July, the supreme court completed a term in which Gorsuch and the court’s five other conservative justices delivered sharp rebukes to the administrative state in three major cases, including the decision that overturned the 40-year-old Chevron decision that had made it more likely that courts would sustain regulations. The court’s three liberal justices dissented each time.Gorsuch also was in the majority in ruling that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution in a decision that indefinitely delayed the election interference case against Trump. What’s more, the justices made it harder to use a federal obstruction charge against people who were part of the mob that violently attacked the US Capitol on January 6 2021 in an effort to overturn Trump’s defeat by Biden in the 2020 election.Gorsuch defended the immunity ruling as necessary to prevent presidents from being hampered while in office by threats of prosecution once they leave.The court had to wrestle with an unprecedented situation, he said. “Here we have, for the first time in our history, one presidential administration bringing criminal charges against a prior president. It’s a grave question, right? Grave implications,” Gorsuch said.But in the book, co-authored by a former law clerk, Janie Nitze, Gorusch largely sets those big issues aside and turns his focus to a fisherman, a magician, Amish farmers, immigrants, a hair braider and others who risked jail time, large fines, deportation and other hardships over unyielding rules.In 18 years as a judge, including the past seven on the supreme court, Gorsuch said, “There were just so many cases that came to me in which I saw ordinary Americans, just everyday, regular people trying to go about their lives, not trying to hurt anybody or do anything wrong and just getting whacked, unexpectedly, by some legal rule they didn’t know about.”The problem, he said, is that there has been an explosion of laws and regulations, at both the federal and state levels. The sheer volume of Congress’s output for the past decade is overwhelming, he said, averaging 344 pieces of legislation totaling 2m to 3m words a year.One vignette involves John Yates, a Florida fisherman who was convicted of getting rid of some undersized grouper under a federal law originally aimed at the accounting industry and the destruction of evidence in the Enron scandal. Yates’s case went all the way to the supreme court, where he won by a single vote.“I wanted to tell the story of people whose lives were affected,” Gorsuch said.

      Guardian staff contributed. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump 2020 election interference case resumes after immunity decision

      by

      Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election was set to resume on Friday with narrowed charges, after the US supreme court ruling that gave former presidents broad immunity took effect and the case returned to the control of the presiding trial judge.The formal transfer of jurisdiction back to the US district judge Tanya Chutkan means she can issue a scheduling order for how she intends to proceed – including whether she will hold public hearings to determine how to apply the immunity decision.The nation’s highest court issued its ruling on Trump’s immunity claim last month. But the case has only now returned to Chutkan’s control because of the 25-day waiting period for any rehearing requests and an additional week for the judgment to be formally sent down.How Chutkan proceeds could have far-reaching ramifications on the scope of the case, and the presidential election in November.Trump is accused of overseeing a sprawling effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, including two counts of conspiring to obstruct the certification of the election results, conspiring to defraud the government and conspiring to disenfranchise voters.The alleged illegal conduct includes Trump pressing US justice department officials to open sham investigations, Trump obstructing Congress from certifying the election, including by trying to co-opt his vice president, Trump helping prompt the Capitol attack, and Trump’s plot to recruit fake electors.But the supreme court decided that criminal accountability for presidents has three categories: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.View image in fullscreenTrump’s lawyers are expected to argue that Chutkan can decide whether the conduct is immune based on legal arguments alone, negating the need for witnesses or multiple evidentiary hearings, the Guardian first reported, citing people familiar with the matter.Trump’s lawyers are expected to argue the maximalist position that they considered all of the charged conduct was Trump acting in his official capacity as president and therefore presumptively immune – and incumbent on prosecutors to prove otherwise, the people said.And Trump’s lawyers are expected to suggest that even though the supreme court appeared to contemplate evidentiary hearings to sort through the conduct – it referenced “fact-finding” – any disputes can be resolved purely on legal arguments, the people said.In doing so, Trump will try to foreclose witness testimony that could be politically damaging, because it would cause evidence about his efforts to subvert the 2020 election that has polled poorly to be suppressed, and legally damaging because it could cause Chutkan to rule against Trump.Trump’s lawyers have privately suggested they expect at least some evidentiary hearings to take place, but they are also intent on challenging testimony from people such as Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and other high-profile White House officials.For instance, if prosecutors try to call Pence or his chief of staff, Marc Short, to testify about meetings where Trump discussed stopping the January 6 certification, Trump would try to block that testimony by asserting executive privilege and having Pence assert the speech or debate clause protection.Trump has already been enormously successful in delaying his criminal cases, principally by convincing the supreme court to take the immunity appeal in the 2020 election subversion case, which was frozen while the court considered the matter.The delay strategy thus far has been aimed at pushing the cases until after the November election, in the hope that Trump would be re-elected and then appoint as attorney general a loyalist who would drop the charges.But now, even if Trump loses, his lawyers have coalesced on a legal strategy that could take months to resolve depending on how prosecutors choose to approach evidentiary hearings, adding to additional months of anticipated appeals over what Chutkan determines are official acts. More

    • 213 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Joe Biden is politicizing US supreme court reform – and that’s a good thing | Austin Sarat

      by

      “Better late than never” is a useful maxim in all of life and in politics as well. On Monday, Joe Biden caught the “better late than never” bug when he unveiled a series of proposals to reform the US supreme court.Those proposals come more than two and a half years after the US president’s presidential commission on the supreme court issued its recommendations, and more than 40 years after Biden called former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to impose term limits on the court “boneheaded”.In 2020, during his quest for the White House, Biden again distanced himself from people who were pushing for significant institutional reform at the court.How times have changed. That was before the court overruled Roe v Wade, the ethics scandals of justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas came to light, and before the court gave the president almost blanket immunity from criminal prosecution.Biden announced his new thinking in a Washington Post op-ed, in which he detailed what he called “three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy”. They begin with a constitutional amendment designed to reverse the supreme court’s Trump v United States decision granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts.Biden calls it the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment”. It would “make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office”.The second of Biden’s reform proposals would impose term limits on the justices who sit on the supreme court. It would institute “a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court”.Third, Biden called for enacting “a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court”. Justices, Biden wrote, “should be required to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest”.While each of these proposals is a wise response to the current crisis of the supreme court, none of them has any chance of being enacted in the near future. Still, Biden has done a service by going public with these ideas and politicizing the court reform question.His op-ed and speech on court reform at an event commemorating the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act will help ensure that supreme court reform is a live issue during the remainder of the 2024 presidential campaign.The first of Biden’s proposals, the call for a constitutional amendment, is the most important but also the most difficult to achieve among his three ideas. Like earlier versions of the same idea, it offers an important vehicle for engaging the public in resisting yet another exercise of judicial supremacy by our increasingly rogue supreme court.America has a long history of using the amendment process to reverse repugnant supreme court decisions, like Trump v United States. But as Harvard Law’s Jill Lepore notes, over the long arc of American history, amending the constitution has “become a lost art”.In fact, Lepore noted elsewhere: “The US Constitution hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1971.”However, by supporting an amendment to reverse Trump v United States, Biden has teed up a winning issue for Kamala Harris. Polls show that 65% of Americans do not think presidents should have immunity for actions taken in office.Among independent voters, that number is 68%.Even larger majorities support 18-year term limits for supreme court justices. As the Biden commission noted: “Up until the late 1960s, the average term of service was 15 years. It has now risen to roughly 26 years, and a number of Justices have served three or more decades, spanning numerous election cycles and presidential administrations.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis may be why a Fox News Poll conducted earlier this month found that 78% of the respondents favor that idea. That is up from 66% in 2022.While term limits are popular, it is unclear whether Congress could impose them by ordinary legislation or whether this proposal would also require a constitutional amendment. Even Biden’s supreme court commission was divided on that question.As an article in Forbes explains: “Article III of the Constitution states judges ‘shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,’ which has been interpreted to mean justices have to hold lifetime appointments. The commission said Congress could get around the issue by having only the most recent justices hear most cases, which originate in lower courts, while still keeping the older ones on to hear cases that originate in the Supreme Court.”“That strategy … would create the ‘effective equivalent’ of term limits without actually violating Article III by kicking justices off the court.”What is clear is that Donald Trump is on the wrong side of the supreme court term limits idea. Earlier this month, the former president branded court reform proposals such as term limits “illegal” and “unconstitutional”.“The Democrats are attempting to interfere in the Presidential Election, and destroy our Justice System, by attacking their Political Opponent, ME, and our Honorable Supreme Court,” he posted on Truth Social. “We have to fight for our Fair and Independent Courts, and protect our Country.”Trump is even out of step with his supporters on the idea of term limits for justices. Newsweek says: “Among those who voted for Trump in 2020, 54% supported term limits, while 20% opposed them.”Finally, a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted last September showed that “three-in-four voters want the justices bound to an ethics code, the most popular reform proposal in the survey”. This figure reflects what Politico calls “a bipartisan consensus of 81% of Democrats, 72% of Republicans, and 69% of independents”.Here, too, Maga world is on the wrong side politically, as well as on the wrong side of history. Just last month, as NBC News reported, Senate Republicans “blocked a Democratic-sponsored bill that would have required Supreme Court justices to adopt a binding code of conduct”.In the end, no matter how Biden’s proposals play out in the presidential contest, by politicizing the issue, by going public with them in a high-profile manner, the president has offered the people of the United States a chance to make their voices heard about the kind of supreme court they want. It is now up to all of us to take him up on that offer and use our votes to weigh in on this most important question.

      Austin Sarat is a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College and the author of Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden calls for supreme court changes and decries Trump immunity ruling

      by

      Joe Biden, in a Monday address calling for sweeping reforms of the US supreme court, said the recent decision granting some immunity to presidents from criminal prosecution makes them a king before the law.Speaking in Austin at the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Biden said a president was no longer restrained by the law and that this was “a fundamentally flawed [and] dangerous principle”.The decision in Trump v United States, which gives broad immunity from later prosecution for a president exercising his authority in his official capacity, is one of several recent court rulings – from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to casting down Roe v Wade as the precedent on abortion rights – that stands in stark contrast to the era 50 years ago in which civil rights legislation passed, Biden said.“The extreme opinions that the supreme court has handed down have undermined long established civil rights principles and protections,” Biden said, invoking the specter of Project 2025 as a looming threat.“They’re planning another onslaught attacking civil rights in America,” he said.“For example, Project 2025 calls for aggressively attacking diversity, equity and inclusion all across all aspects of American life. This extreme Maga movement even proposes to end birthright citizenship. This is how far they’ve come.”Biden said he is proposing a new constitutional amendment that explicitly applies the criminal code to presidents. The conduct of Donald Trump demands legislative changes, he said.“No other former president has asked for this kind of immunity and none should have been given it,” Biden said. “The president must be accountable to the law … We are a nation of laws, not kings and dictators.”A constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of both the US House and Senate to agree to it, followed by the government of three-quarters of the states.Biden also said that the scandals involving supreme court justices have caused public opinion to question the court’s fairness and independence and impeded its mission.He said: “The supreme court’s current code of conduct is weak and even more frighteningly voluntary.”Biden called for a binding code of conduct for the supreme court and term limits for justices, noting that the United States was the only western democracy that gives lifetime appointments to its high court.The term limiting proposal would create staggered 18-year terms for justices, beginning with the next justice to leave the court.The idea for term limits and a binding code of ethics for the court is not new but has perhaps become more urgent. Biden’s proposal closely resembles legislation first proposed by Georgia representative Hank Johnson, the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee and the likely banner carrier for legislative movement on this issue if he regains the committee chairmanship in a Democratic House.Johnson’s Term Act would apply term limits to existing supreme court justices, giving each president appointments in the first and third year of their administration.“Right now, three justices have already served in excess of 18 years,” Johnson said. “And so, those judges would be replaced over a six-year period.”Johnson described term limiting legislation as “important foundational, structural change that will prevent the court from becoming the kind of court that this one is; one that, because of tenure, has become unaccountable, arrogant, and destructive to our democracy.”Johnson also has proposed the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act, legislation binding supreme court judges ethically.But what if the court rules that this legislation itself is unconstitutional?“There would be nothing that would stop them from ruling it unconstitutional,” Johnson said. “But if we get to that point, we could have we would say goodbye to the rule of law in this country.”Johnson likened the prospect to the reaction of President Andrew Jackson rejecting a supreme court ruling on Native American removals in Georgia nearly two centuries ago, with a federal government effectively ignoring the court. Ruling “something that’s clearly constitutional was unconstitutional would really be the end of our democracy, because there would no longer be respect for the rule of law”, he said. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump ally asks supreme court to move Georgia election case to federal court

      by

      Attorneys for the White House chief of staff during Donald Trump’s presidency, Mark Meadows, have asked the US supreme court to move the Georgia 2020 election interference case to federal court.The petition cites the recent supreme court ruling that granted Trump immunity for any acts deemed official – which came as part of a 2020 election subversion case in Washington DC’s federal courthouse. Meadows’s attorneys claimed that a federal forum was needed to address their client’s actions as the White House chief of staff.“It is hard to imagine a case in which the need for a federal forum is more pressing than one that requires resolving novel questions about the duties and powers of one of the most important federal offices in the nation,” the Meadows legal team’s petition argued.That filing is the most recent attempt by Meadows’s attorneys to move the Georgia election interference case from an Atlanta state court to US district court. In December 2023, a three-judge appeals court panel denied their effort to move the case to federal court, ruling that former federal officials are ineligible to move their charges.Meadows and his attorneys have undertaken that effort in hopes of asserting immunity from prosecution on charges related to unlawfully attempting to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory in Georgia in the 2020 presidential race. If successful, they would affect Fulton county, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis’s prosecution of Trump, Meadows and other co-defendants.The judges on the appeals panel ruled that – even if the transfer process known as removal extended to former federal officials – Meadows did not demonstrate he was acting in his official role as White House chief of staff. The ruling blocked a path for Meadows to assert immunity and other federal defenses.And it prevented the jury pool from being broadened to areas of Georgia with lower percentages of Democrats while also getting case overseen by a member of the federal judiciary, which is appointed by presidents.Meadows is one of 19 defendants, including Trump, who were charged last August in the Georgia election racketeering case.The case’s proceedings have been televised in Georgia state court, and the plan is to do the same for the trial.“Simply put, whatever the precise contours of Meadows’s official authority, that authority did not extend to an alleged conspiracy to overturn valid election results,” the judge, William Pryor, an appointee of president George W Bush, wrote in the appellate court ruling.Attorneys for Meadows also requested the supreme court wipe away the appellate ruling and send the case back to the lower courts if they opt not to fully review his petition.Meadows faces charges that he allegedly entered a months-long conspiracy with Trump and other allies to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia during his winning presidential run in 2020.Meadows also faces a second charge alleging he sought to persuade the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to violate his oath of office. The charge references Meadows’s involvement in a phone call from Trump to Raffensperger – the top elections official in Georgia – asking him to find additional votes needed for the former president to win the state.The Georgia election interference case is halted for now as a state appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments in December over Trump’s efforts to remove Willis from the case.Meadows has also been charged in Arizona over his efforts to assist Trump to overturn election results, along with the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and 16 others.Meadows has pleaded not guilty in both the Arizona and Georgia cases. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden calls for supreme court reforms including 18-year justice term limits

      by

      Joe Biden has called for a series of reforms to the US supreme court, including the introduction of term limits for justices and a constitutional amendment to remove immunity for crimes committed by a president while in office.In an op-ed published on Monday morning, the president said justices should be limited to a maximum of 18 years’ service on the court rather than the current lifetime appointment, and also said ethics rules should be strengthened to regulate justices’ behavior.The call for reform comes after the supreme court ruled in early July that former presidents have some degree of immunity from prosecution, a decision that served as a major victory for Donald Trump amid his legal travails.“This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States,” Biden wrote.“I served as a US senator for 36 years, including as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. I have overseen more Supreme Court nominations as senator, vice president and president than anyone living today.“I have great respect for our institutions and separation of powers. What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.”Biden called for a “no one is above the law” amendment to the constitution, which would make clear that no president is entitled to immunity from prosecution by virtue of having served in the White House. Biden also said justices’ terms should be limited to 18 years, under a system where a new justice would be appointed to the supreme court by the serving president every two years.The president also called for stricter, enforceable rules on conduct which would require justices to disclose gifts, refrain from political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial interest.Last week Justice Elena Kagan called for the court to strengthen the ethics code it introduced in 2023 by adding a way to enforce it. That code was introduced after a spate of scandals involving rightwing justices on the court: Clarence Thomas was found to have accepted vacations and travel from a Republican mega-donor, while Samuel Alito flew on a private jet owned by an influential billionaire on the way to a fishing trip.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLegislation would be required to impose term limits and an ethics code on the Supreme Court, but it is unlikely to pass the current divided Congress.The constitutional amendment on presidential immunity would be even more difficult to enact, requiring two-thirds support from both chambers of Congress or a convention called by two-thirds of the states, and then ratification by 38 of the 50 state legislatures.Reuters contributed to this report More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden to announce plans to reform US supreme court – report

      by

      Joe Biden will announce plans to reform the US supreme court on Monday, Politico reported, citing two people familiar with the matter, adding that the US president was likely to back term limits for justices and an enforceable code of ethics.Biden said earlier this week during an Oval Office address that he would call for reform of the court.He is also expected to seek a constitutional amendment to limit immunity for presidents and some other officeholders, Politico reported, in the aftermath of a July supreme court ruling that presidents have broad immunity from prosecution.Biden will make the announcement in Texas on Monday and the specific proposals could change, the report added.Justice Elena Kagan on Thursday became the first member of the supreme court to call publicly for beefing up its new ethics code by adding a way to enforce it.“The thing that can be criticized is, you know, rules usually have enforcement mechanisms attached to them, and this one – this set of rules – does not,” Kagan said at an annual judicial conference held by the ninth circuit. More than 150 judges, attorneys, court personnel and others attended.The court had been considering adopting an ethics code for several years, but the effort took on added urgency after it was reported last year that Justice Clarence Thomas did not disclose luxury trips he accepted from a major Republican donor.Public confidence in the court has slipped sharply in recent years. In June, a survey for the Associated Press-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research found that four in 10 US adults have hardly any confidence in the justices and 70% believe they are more likely to be guided by their own ideology rather than serving as neutral arbiters.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden’s address was a moving piece of political theatre and a rebuke of Trump

      by

      There was 6 January 2021, and a violent coup attempt by a president desperately trying to cling to power. Then there was 24 July 2024, and a president explaining why he was giving up the most powerful job in the world.Joe Biden’s address on Wednesday night was a moving piece of political theatre, the start of a farewell tour by “a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings” who entered politics in 1972 and made it all the way to the Oval Office. For diehard Democrats it was a case of: if you have tears, prepare to shed them now.The speech was also a rebuke of his predecessor Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses in both word and deed. Although he never mentioned his predecessor by name, Biden laid out two radically different visions of the US presidency set to clash again in November.Last Sunday the 46th president bowed to a chorus of fellow Democrats questioning his age and mental acuity and announced that he would drop out of the presidential election. On Wednesday, recovered from the coronavirus, the 81-year-old made his first public remarks to explain why.Speaking against the backdrop of window, two flags, gold curtains and family photos including his late son Beau, Biden began by citing the Oval Office portraits of former presidents Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.“I revere this office but I love my country more,” he said. “It’s been the honour of my life to serve as your president. But in the defence of democracy, which is at stake, I think it’s more important than any title.”It was a definitive rebuke of Trump, a man who has slapped his name on countless buildings and for whom the title is everything. Backed by the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank, the Republican nominee is intent on an expansion of presidential power. But by giving power away – in what Hillary Clinton described “as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime” – Biden demonstrated he will always be the bigger man.Indeed, despite having months to prepare for this contingency, the Trump campaign has been struggling to find a strategy to take on the new Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. Perhaps they were not quite able to believe that Biden would step aside because they know Trump never would.Biden wore a dark blue suit, white shirt, blue tie and US flag pin. There were no major gaffes but there were slight stumbles over certain words. Sitting off-camera to his left were his son Hunter and other family members. According to a pool reporter in the Oval Office, at one point Biden’s daughter Ashley reached for the hand of her mother, Jill Biden, who was sitting next to her.(Trump, who claims he recently “took a bullet for democracy”, watched the address on his plane after a characteristically mendacious and narcissistic campaign rally in North Carolina.)Biden is the first incumbent to announce he would not seek re-election since Lyndon Johnson in 1968, although some historians argue that Johnson secretly hoped for a breakthrough in the Vietnam war and for his party to come begging for him to make a comeback.Still, some of the parallels are irresistible. For Johnson, coming after the younger, more glamorous John F Kennedy, remarkable legislative achievements at home were clouded by the war in Vietnam. For Biden, coming after the younger, more glamorous Barack Obama, remarkable legislative achievements at home have been clouded by the war on Gaza. Just as in 1968, expect protests at next month’s Democratic national convention in Chicago.But whereas Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election at the end of a long and winding 40-minute speech, Biden, recovering from Covid-19, first did so via Twitter/X. And he quickly anointed a successor in Harris.Biden reportedly has mixed feelings about being pushed aside by some of those same Democrats now singing his praises. The presidency had been his lifelong ambition – he first ran in 1988 – and his victory in 2020 was a vindication of everyman strivers everywhere. On top of that, he did the job rather well. Yet now they were telling him enough. In his Oval Office address, he buried those resentments deep in his soul, though he could not resist a pointed comment about his qualifications.“I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future, all merited a second term,” he said. “But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.”He made a call for generational change in a country facing its first presidential election without a Bush, Clinton or Biden on the ticket since 1976. “I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.“It’s the best way to unite our nation. I know there was a time and a place for long years of experience in public life. There’s also a time and a place for new voices, fresh voices, yes, younger voices. And that time and place is now.”That may seem to leave Biden a lame duck for his final six months. But he vowed to continue to pursue his agenda and slipped in an important line about calling for reform of the supreme court – a court that became embroiled in ethics scandals, overturned the constitutional right to abortion and declared presidents immune from prosecution for official acts.“The great thing about America is, here kings and dictators do not rule – the people do,” Biden concluded. “History is in your hands. The power’s in your hands. The idea of America lies in your hands. You just have to keep faith – keep the faith – and remember who we are.”In 2020, the year of a global pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and Trump trauma, Biden’s signature empathy born of personal tragedies made him the right man at the right time to heal hearts and defend democracy. In 2024, his time has passed. That he came to recognise it reluctantly, and decided to pass the baton, taught a lesson about the presidency that Trump will never learn. More