Raw Story

Democrats were jolted out of complacency about president Joe Biden's age with his alarming performance during his first debate against Donald Trump, and many party members are wondering what other options there might be.

The 81-year-old president and his supporters have brushed off concerns about his age by citing his accomplishments and pointing out that Trump is only three years younger, but the weaknesses cited by Biden's detractors were on clear display from the moment he first opened his mouth, reported Washington Post columnist Aaron Blake.

"The Democratic Party has spent much of the 2024 campaign burying its head in the sand over Americans’ concerns about President Biden’s age and mental sharpness," Blake wrote. "Rather than reckon with the problem, its most influential voices have cast it as an overblown media construct."

"But the party abruptly jerked its head out of that sand Thursday night, after a meandering, occasionally incoherent and almost universally panned first-debate performance from Biden," he added. "At its most pronounced, this has led to calls for Biden to step aside, including from those loyal to him."

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Biden has insisted he's staying in the race, but many Democrats who had been eager supporters and apologists for the octogenarian chief executive until he took the debate stage are suddenly looking past him for a new standard bearer.

"That instantaneous reaction is hugely significant, in and of itself," Blake wrote. "It’s the kind of conversation you avoid — and the party has strained to avoid — until you view it as absolutely necessary. Going there and then having Biden stay would only damage him further, because a bunch of allies would have said either implicitly or explicitly that he is not up to the task."

Blake listed 10 potential options starting, of course, with vice president Kamala Harris, who's about as unpopular as the president, but then moving on to a crop of likely contenders for 2028 whose timelines may be bumped forward by an election cycle.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer tops most lists as a female governor from a crucial state who already enjoys a national profile, while other governors like Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Gavin Newsom of California, Jared Polis of Colorado, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania are all likely to run for president in four years – if not sooner.

Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg nearly won both the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries in 2020 as the mayor of a midsize Midwestern city and can skillfully debate Fox News hosts and Republican lawmakers, and senators Rafael Warnock of Georgia and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota could make sense.

Michelle Obama "is the fantasy option for Democrats," Blake wrote, but she has expressed no interest in running for office at all.

"It’s truly a desperate plan and one that features many hurdles," Blake wrote. "It would almost surely require Biden’s assent to step aside — he holds almost all of the pledged delegates to August’s Democratic National Convention — and even then the process for replacing him is fraught. It’s not even clear that an alternative would render the party better off."

Attorney General Merrick Garland said that the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on how "obstruction of an official proceeding" can be used in Jan. 6 charges won't have much of an impact.

MSNBC contributor and Just Security fellow Adam Klasfeld quoted Garland saying, "The vast majority of the more than 1,400 defendants charged for their illegal actions on Jan. 6 will not be affected by this decision."

A pie chart from Just Security shows that of the 1,417 people charged, 71 defendants still awaiting trial have the law in question. This is approximately 5 percent of the charges. Most of those currently in prison are still facing charges and have other charges involved in their cases.

Read Also: Five unresolved questions surrounding the Jan. 6 attack

Donald Trump is also among those charged in the Jan. 6 cases, but the cases have not yet gone to trial.

"There are no cases in which the Department charged a January 6 defendant only with the offense at issue in Fischer. For the cases affected by today’s decision, the Department will take appropriate steps to comply with the Court’s ruling," Garland also said.

Of the defendants who face misdemeanors, just 2.3 percent, or 33 people, face charges using Section 1512(c)(2), the law the Court decided on Friday. Those defendants also face other crimes, but are also only misdemeanors.

“January 6 was an unprecedented attack on the cornerstone of our system of government — the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next," Garland said in the Justice Department statement. "I am disappointed by today’s decision, which limits an important federal statute that the Department has sought to use to ensure that those most responsible for that attack face appropriate consequences."

Garland also promised, "We will continue to use all available tools to hold accountable those criminally responsible for the January 6 attack on our democracy.”

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The U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 to allow an Oregon city to target homeless people for sleeping on public property.

The ruling handed down Friday overturns a 2022 decision by 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, with the court's conservatives finding that the measures enacted by Grants Pass city officials do not violate the Constitution's Eighth Amendment banning cruel and unusual punishment, reported NBC News.

The ordinances prohibit sleeping or camping on publicly owned property and impose fines of up to several hundred dollars and exclusion orders banning individuals from public property.

The appeals court had ruled 2-1 that the city cannot “enforce its anti-camping ordinances against homeless persons for the mere act of sleeping outside with rudimentary protection from the elements, or for sleeping in their car at night, when there is no other place in the city for them to go.”

ALSO READ: ‘This was awful’: Congressional Dems deflated after Biden debate disaster

That ruling had applied to all nine states in the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction, some of which have large populations of homeless people, including California.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor read from her dissent from the bench, saying "sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime."

"For some people, sleeping outside is their only option," Sotomayor said. "The City of Grants Pass jails and fines those people for sleeping anywhere in public at any time, including in their cars, if they use as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow. For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless. That is unconscionable and unconstitutional."

The Supreme Court ruled Friday on two pivotal cases that strip federal agencies of substantial power to interpret the law.

Supreme Court Justices issued rulings in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce — both challenges to a decades-old precedent that says courts must defer to government agencies’s interpretation of statutes.

The vote was 6-3 in the former and 6-2 in the latter, from which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was recused, to overrule the court's 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion and Justice Elena Kagan the dissent.

"Rather than safeguarding reliance interests, Chevron affirmatively destroys them," Roberts wrote, "Under Chevron, a statutory ambiguity, no matter why it is there, becomes a license authorizing an agency to change positions as much as it likes."

Kagan condemned the decision in no uncertain terms as blatant power-grab.

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"In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law," she writes.

"As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar. It defends that move as one (suddenly) required by the (nearly 80-year-old) Administrative Procedure Act. But the Act makes no such demand. Today’s decision is not one Congress directed. It is entirely the majority’s choice."

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday issued a ruling that could upend hundreds of January 6th-related cases.

In the ruling, the court ordered that prosecutors who charged rioters with obstructing or impeding an official proceeding must show that they tampered with physical evidence in order to meet the criteria met by the statute.

The vote was 6-3, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett dissenting, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

In the explainer, SCOTUS Blog wrote, "The court holds that to prove a violation of the law, the government must show that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or other things used in an official proceeding, or attempted to do so."

About 27 individuals are still in prison today and they could be released today because they haven't served their full charge.

ALSO READ: Rep. Byron Donalds, his gigantic Jim Crow myth and a forgotten fact about Black voters

The case the court was deciding involved Joseph Fischer, an off-duty Pennsylvania police officer who entered the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and was charged with obstruction of an official proceeding. It's the same crime many other Jan .6 defendants have been charged.

Fischer, Edward Lang, and Garret Miller were indicted for their role in the riot. They were charged with "assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers and misdemeanor offenses of disorderly conduct," the indictment read. All of the charges were involved in the broader attempt to obstruct a congressional proceeding.

But Fischer's lawyers argued before that Supreme Court that the obstruction of a congressional proceedings charge should be thrown out because the law that he was charged with violating was only intended to apply to evidence tampering.

The decision will have major impact on Jack Smith's election interference case against Donald Trump, who is charged with the same crime.

ALSO READ: ‘They could have killed me’: Spycraft, ballots and a Trumped-up plot gone haywire

A lower court agreed with him, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C. reversed it and it was ultimately sent to the Supreme Court.

"Some justices expressed concerns that the government’s interpretation of the law could sweep in too much conduct, while others appeared to agree with the government that the law was intended as a 'catchall' provision to cover all kinds of conduct," SCOTUSBlog said.

"And still others appeared to propose a narrower reading of the statute that would still allow the charge against Fischer to stand."

About 300 cases for Jan. 6 attackers will be impacted by the decision.

Trump’s supporters took an early victory lap Thursday as President Joe Biden stumbled through a debate performance that had onlookers shocked.

“Biden couldn’t get hired as a Walmart greeter and he has the nuclear codes,” wrote Marjorie Taylor Greene on X.

She added, “No stamina.”

“Can Joe Biden even live another 4 years, let alone be president?”

Even some Democrats expressed shock as Biden appeared old and confused during the CNN debate, frequently losing his train of thought and speaking with a raspy and weak voice.

“Heads are going to roll,’ wrote The Independent’s White House correspondent Andrew Feinberg.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a staunch Trump supporter, wrote on X, “Dems are going to dump Biden. Get ready for Michelle Obama as their nominee.”

ALSO READ: Rep. Byron Donalds, his gigantic Jim Crow myth and a forgotten fact about Black voters

“What is Joe looking at?” wrote Lauren Boebert (R-CO). “He’s literally staring off into space, lost.”

She added, “President Trump is eviscerating Jacked up Joe on his network, with his moderators, and under his rules."

“The choice couldn’t be clearer in November.”

J.D. Vance (R-OH), a favorite for Trump’s vice president pick, wrote, “Trump has so much more energy and clarity than Biden, it’s just an insane contrast."

“One guy can do the job and the other can’t," he then added.