Dems to Biden: ‘The Clock Has Run Out'

Dems to Biden: ‘The Clock Has Run Out'

Reuters
By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey
Friday, July 19, 2024

Happy Friday! As we head into the weekend, President Joe Biden continues to grapple with a growing chorus of calls from lawmakers in his own party urging him to drop his re-election bid and pass the torch to a new generation.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, Donald Trump leaves what was widely considered to be a well-staged party convention in Milwaukee with the GOP unified behind him despite an acceptance speech that veered into dark territory. The former president and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, plan to appear together Saturday at a rally in Michigan.

Here’s what’s happening and why this weekend could be a pivotal one in the election.

Biden Digs In as More Dems Call for Him to Drop Out

Nearly a dozen Democrats added their names Friday to the list of lawmakers calling on President Joe Biden to step aside as their party’s nominee in the November election. The tally of Democratic members of Congress publicly asking Biden to step aside now tops 30, including three senators. The latest defections include Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico as well as Rep. Marc Veasey of Texas, the first member of the Congressional Black Caucus to jump ship.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, an ally of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, joined the group as she released a letter she sent to the president outlining her concerns about the risk of losing the election, which she said is looking likely according to the polls.

“As a Member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol I know, perhaps as well as anyone, how unsuitable Donald Trump is to be President,” she wrote. “His character is unprincipled and corrupt. He remains as grave a threat to the Constitutional order and rule of law that he was on January 6, 2021 when he incited insurrection. And, if he is elected President again, he will dismantle all that Democrats have achieved for the American people.”

A megadonor says Biden’s time is up: More major donors are pushing Biden to step down, as well, including Michael Moritz, a billionaire tech investor. “Sadly, President Biden has a choice — vanity or virtue,” he told The New York Times Friday. “He can either condemn the country to dark and cruel times or heed the voice of Father Time. The clock has run out.”

Biden's camp says he's still running: Even as speculation swirls about when Biden might surrender to the pressure, the president insisted that he will return to the campaign trail next week and his campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that he is “absolutely” staying in the race and “he’s in it to win it.” She acknowledged, though, that support for the president has slipped. “We have a lot of work to do to reassure the American people that, yes, he’s old, but he can win,” she said.

The bottom line: The Democratic National Convention is now one month away, and the party is still looking to hold a virtual roll call vote before then to choose its nominee. This weekend could be pivotal. The intraparty clash is expected to intensify further this weekend as a defiant Biden, isolating with Covid at his Delaware beach house, weighs his path forward and Democrats who have lost confidence in his ability to win step up their efforts to oust him from the ticket.

Meet the New Trump, Same as the Old Trump

Football fans likely remember an angry postgame press conference rant by Arizona Cardinals Head Coach Dennis Green in 2006. His team had just blown a 20-point halftime lead to the Chicago Bears, leading Green to an uncharacteristic blowup in front of reporters. “They're what we thought they were,” Green shouted. “Now if you want to crown them, then crown their ass! But they are who we thought they were! And we let 'em off the hook!”

The rant earned a moment of pop culture prominence and a spot in the annals of all-time coaching meltdowns. Now, Democrats could be excused for busting out that old meme in discussing former President Donald Trump’s rambling, record-long 92-minute speech Thursday night accepting the GOP presidential nomination. For all the talk of Trump being changed by surviving an assassin’s bullet, for all the spin and speculation about a “new softness to the man” and a potential push to unify the country, Trump is who we thought he was.

“Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0,” analyst Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report said in a post on X.

Trump tried. For about 28 minutes he spoke in a subdued yet still meandering fashion, recounting Saturday’s assassination attempt and claiming that he wants to be president for all of America. “The discord and division in our society must be healed,” he said early on. “We must heal it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.”

Then he went off script and off the rails, attacking President Joe Biden and “Crazy Nancy Pelosi,” listing his grievances, decrying the “partisan witch hunts” against him and delivering a slew of false claims while eliciting expressions of sympathy for his teleprompter operator. As Axios’s Zachary Basu writes, “the old Trump returned and bellowed, barked and bored America for 64 minutes more.”

Trump called the United States “a nation in decline,” plagued by inflation and a flood of immigration and “teetering on the edge of World War III.” He essentially promised it would quickly become a utopia under his renewed leadership. “No nation will question our power. No enemy will doubt our might. Our borders will be totally secure. Our economy will soar. We will return law and order to our streets, patriotism to our schools, and importantly, we will restore peace, stability and harmony all throughout the world.”

Trump touched on fiscal issues briefly, promising to start paying off the national debt even as he cuts taxes further. He also repeated false claims that his tax cuts were the largest in history and that President Joe Biden wants to raise taxes “by four times what you’re paying now.”

But it’s hard to focus on any such falsehoods when Trump also confirmed himself to be an autocrat in waiting, again raising baseless claims that the election was somehow stolen from him. “Iran was going to make a deal with us,” Trump said. “And then we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again. The election result. We’re never going to let that happen again. They used Covid to cheat.”

Democrats have had a miserable three weeks since Biden’s feeble debate performance on June 27, and the stream of party officials urging Biden to step aside has continued to gain force. But Trump’s performance last night reminded them, and many voters, that he remains a supremely flawed and potentially dangerous candidate — one whose newfound belief that he was saved by divine intervention and has God on his side could reinforce his determination, and that of his supporters, to remake the country and its institutions as they see fit.

Yet it also gave Democrats renewed hope, showing that Trump could be eminently beatable. “This is the first good thing that happened to Democrats in three weeks,” former Obama adviser David Axelrod said on CNN. But Democrats would be wise to remember the last part of that football coach’s rant in 2006, as he fumed that his game plan was right, but his team failed anyway: “They are who we thought they were,” he said. “And we let 'em off the hook!”

Student Loan Payments Suspended for Millions as Court Blocks Biden Plan

A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked President Joe Biden’s student loan repayment plan, known as SAVE. The Biden administration said the ruling affects more than 8 million borrowers participating in the program.

In response, the Department of Education said Friday that student loan payments will be paused while the legal status of the SAVE program remains in flux.

“Borrowers enrolled in the SAVE Plan will be placed in an interest-free forbearance while our administration continues to vigorously defend the SAVE Plan in court,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

The SAVE plan reduces the required monthly payment for many participants and cuts the amount of time required to earn loan forgiveness. More than a dozen Republican-led states have sued the federal government to stop the program.

The Biden administration says it has provided $169 billion in student loan debt relief for nearly 4.8 million Americans.

Op-Ed of the Day: Farewell to Trickle-Down?

Writing at Bloomberg Opinion, Nir Kaissar says that the choice of JD Vance for the Republican ticket could mark a significant turning point in the party’s reliance on the economic theory that has driven its policy choices for decades.

Kaissar argues that the choice of Vance is a better-late-than-never recognition by the GOP that trickle-down economics hasn’t worked, and that tens of millions of Americans simply can’t afford to raise a family on the wages that are offered by employers.

“The reality is that wages have been stagnant for so long that workers who fall short of a living wage would need a substantial pay raise in today’s dollars to catch up — an average of 35% for a family of four with two adults working and 85% for the same household with one working adult,” he writes.

Here’s his overview of the basic history:

“Since at least the 1980s, the party has pursued what is popularly and sometimes derisively known as trickle-down economics. In short, it’s a theory that posits that a growing economy benefits everyone, and that the best path to growth is policymaking that supports corporations and rich Americans.

“It’s not a crazy idea, but at this point it’s crazy to believe it can still work. The past four decades provided an ideal test case: Corporate, individual and capital gains tax rates have trended lower; interest rates fell to historic lows from record highs, handing bond investors a windfall and giving businesses an ever-cheaper source of capital; corporate profit margins tripled; and asset prices from stocks to homes shot higher. It’s hard to imagine a bigger bounty for corporations and the wealthy.

"And yet, all that good fortune doesn’t appear to have boosted the economy, and it certainly didn’t trickle down. Economic growth has trended lower during the past four decades. Gross domestic product grew by 2.6% a year after inflation since 1980, down from 3.8% a year from the end of World War II through the 1970s. Meanwhile, real wages have grown by just 0.3% a year since 1980, a fraction of the economy’s already deflated growth rate.

“So, not only has economic growth slowed but almost none of that slower growth trickled down to workers.”

Whether the Republican shift toward the concerns of working Americans is anything more than rhetoric remains to be seen, Kaissar says. But there are plenty of policy options available to raise worker pay, and the proof will be in whether workers’ paychecks grow significantly over the course of the next administration.

Read Kaissar’s op-ed here.

Send your feedback to yrosenberg@thefiscaltimes.com.

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