Politics

President Joe Biden did not assuage Democratic anxieties about his 2024 reelection bid against former President Donald Trump during a highly-anticipated ABC News interview on Friday night, his first televised interview since his fumbling debate performance in June.

On Saturday, House Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., officially called on Biden to bow out of the presidential race.

“This is not a decision I’ve come to lightly, but there is simply too much at stake to risk a second Donald Trump presidency,” Craig said in a statement on Saturday morning. “That’s why I respectfully call on President Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee for a second term as President and allow for a new generation of leaders to step forward.”

Craig is now the fifth House Democrat to call on Biden to exit. Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Il., made his own announcement during an MSNBC interview Friday, just before the full ABC News 22-minute interview aired.

They join a growing choir of Democratic lawmakers, donors and strategists losing faith in Biden’s ability to wage a successful campaign against Trump. Reps. Lloyd Doggett, D-Tx. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz. and Seth Moulton, D-Mass. have also publicly called on Biden to step down.

“The president is rightfully proud of his record,” said David Axelrod, who served as a senior advisor to former President Barack Obama, after the ABC News interview aired. “But he is dangerously out-of-touch with the concerns people have about his [capacities] moving forward and his standing in this race.”

Earlier this week, former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., some of Biden’s closest allies, publicly validated concerns about Biden’s fitness for reelection. Pelosi, for example, said it was “legitimate” to ask whether Biden’s debate performance was simply a one-off episode or representative of a more long-term condition.

Both Pelosi and Clyburn noted that they still support the president as he vies for a second term.

On Wednesday, Biden held a host of calls and meetings, including with Pelosi, Clyburn and a gathering of Democratic governors to try and reassure his concerned supporters.

While the list of Democrats stepping forward with their qualms about Biden grows, much of the panic is playing out behind closed doors.

Several Democratic lawmakers and their staff spoke to NBC News anonymously Friday night and Saturday morning, doubling down on their concerns about Biden even after the ABC News interview.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., is working to organize a Sunday virtual meeting of Democratic committee ranking members where Biden will likely be a topic of discussion, NBC News reported.

On the other side of Capitol Hill, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., is trying to convene a meeting of Democratic senators next week to talk about Biden’s reelection concerns and the impact it might have on down-ballot races, according to the NBC News report.

Meanwhile, the donor class has been sounding its own alarm bells on Biden.

“We need to move beyond the gerontocracy!!” Galaxy CEO Michael Novogratz, a crypto billionaire and Democratic donor, posted on social media Saturday morning. “We need to sweep the floor of the team that’s been in charge the past 30 years and pass the reigns!! It’s time.”

Novogratz previously backed the campaign of long-shot Democratic challenger Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., before he dropped out of the race.

But Novogratz is part of a swelling wave of Democratic donors losing support for Biden. Some of them, like Disney heiress Abigail Disney, have embargoed their future donations to the party until the president bows out of the race, CNBC previously reported.

A flurry of polls including from the New York Times/Siena College and the Wall Street Journal have found Biden losing ground against Trump following his debate flop on June 27. His debate performance has been remembered mostly for moments where he tripped over his words, failed to piece together coherent sentences at times or spontaneously paused mid-answer appearing to gather his thoughts.

“It was a bad episode. No indication of any serious condition. I was exhausted. I didn’t listen to my instincts in terms of preparing and a bad night,” Biden told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos during the Friday interview.

The president added staunchly that he is not planning to drop out of the 2024 race.

“If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race,” Biden said. “But the Lord Almighty’s not coming down.”

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Donald Trump has “presumptive immunity” for official acts he performed as president, complicating but not killing special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case.

The court also ruled that Trump is not immune for “unofficial acts.” And “not everything the President does is official,” the majority determined.

But the decision effectively erases any chance that the high-profile criminal case against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will head to trial before the Nov. 5 election.

The 6-3 ruling, which was opposed by the court’s three liberal justices, sends the case back to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan.

“The President is not above the law,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.

“But Congress may not criminalize the President’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the Executive Branch under the Constitution,” Roberts ruled.

That means the president is “absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority,” Roberts wrote.

That covers actions such as granting pardons or removing presidentially appointed executive officers, he wrote.

The president also enjoys “at least a presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution” for acts performed “within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility,” the majority concluded.

That standard “is required to safeguard the independence and effective functioning of the Executive Branch,” the chief justice explained.

In practice, that means that the president is immune from prosecution “unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch,'” Roberts wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a blistering dissent wrote, “this majority’s project will have disastrous consequences for the Presidency and for our democracy.”

“The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” she wrote.

“When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution,” Sotomayor wrote.

“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” she wrote.

Trump celebrated the ruling soon after its release Monday morning.

“BIG WIN FOR OUR CONSTITUTION AND DEMOCRACY. PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN!” he wrote on Truth Social.

Trump is charged in a four-count indictment with illegally conspiring to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

The case in Washington, D.C., federal court has been on pause while Trump argues that he is immune from prosecution for any official acts he performed while he was president. Lawyers for Trump contended that an ex-president cannot be charged for their official acts in office unless they are impeached and convicted by Congress.

Trump was impeached in the House for inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and temporarily blocked lawmakers from confirming Biden’s electoral victory. He was acquitted in the Senate, where the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to secure a conviction.

The pause of the election case forced Chutkan to postpone Trump’s trial, which was initially set to start March 4.

Critics fumed when the high court decided to take up the immunity question, rather than let stand an appellate court ruling rejecting Trump’s immunity claims.

The Supreme Court’s intervention guaranteed months of additional delay and threatened to push any trial past the Nov. 5 election.

The election case is often considered the most serious of the four criminal indictments that have been filed against Trump while he seeks another term as president.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling on Monday sends the federal case accusing Donald Trump of attempting to overturn his 2020 defeat back to Judge Tanya Chutkan for critical decisions that will shape the future of the historic prosecution.

Chutkan, a judge on the U.S. District Court in Washington, will have to decide whether a pair of Supreme Court rulings requires some of the allegations against the Republican presidential candidate be tossed out.

She will also decide on the timing of the trial, which will determine whether a jury hears evidence that Trump sought to subvert the last election before his Nov. 5 election rematch with Democratic President Joe Biden.

Chutkan has previously promised to give Trump about 90 days to prepare for trial once the case returns to her courtroom, with a trial expected to last six to eight weeks.

Trump was convicted of falsifying business records in New York in May and faces two other criminal prosecutions in addition to the federal election subversion case, which many legal observers see as the only one with even a slim chance of going to trial before the election.

Chutkan, born in Jamaica and nominated as a judge by former Democratic President Barack Obama, was assigned to oversee the Trump case in August 2023. She has had little to do for more than six months as Trump’s bid for presidential immunity stalled any activity until the Supreme Court ruled.

Chutkan, who gained courtroom experience as a public defender representing people accused of murder and sexual assault, has previously shown little patience for Trump’s delay tactics and his attacks on the criminal justice system.”

The fact the defendant is engaged in a political campaign is not going to allow him any greater or lesser latitude than any defendant in a criminal case,” Chutkan told Trump’s lawyers during a hearing last year.

Chutkan, a graduate of University of Pennsylvania law school, spent more than a decade representing indigent defendants in Washington, D.C. She moved to top-flight law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner before being confirmed as a federal judge in 2014.

“She’s intense. She’s brilliant. She’s no-nonsense,” said Heather Shaner, a Washington criminal defense lawyer who has appeared before Chutkan. “She doesn’t countenance fools.”

Even before Trump’s case landed in her courtroom, Chutkan drew attention for giving some defendants who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, during a riot by Trump supporters harsher sentences even than those sought by prosecutors.

“There have to be consequences for participating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government, beyond sitting at home,” Chutkan said at one hearing, ordering a defendant to serve prison time.

‘Presidents are not kings’

Chutkan’s remarks about the Capitol attack, which is part of the indictment against Trump, led to an unsuccessful effort by Trump’s lawyers to recuse her from the case. Trump, who has frequently lobbed verbal attacks at judges in his legal cases, called Chutkan “VERY BIASED & UNFAIR” in a social media post last year.

This case is not Chutkan’s first involving Trump. In 2021 she rejected a civil lawsuit he filed seeking to block the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack from accessing White House records, writing “Presidents are not kings, and plaintiff is not president.”

Chutkan’s handling of the Trump case has stood in stark contrast to Florida-based U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing Trump’s other federal criminal case over his retention of classified documents after leaving office in 2021.

Cannon, who was nominated by Trump, has been receptive to arguments in Trump’s defense and indefinitely delayed the start of a trial while considering his array of legal challenges to the charges.

Chutkan swiftly rejected Trump’s argument that he cannot face prosecution for official actions he took as president, writing in a December 2023 ruling that the U.S. presidency “does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.”

But the judge will now have to revisit that issue after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority found that former presidents are immune for official acts. The ruling requires Chutkan to apply its new standard to the case against Trump.

Chutkan will also likely need to determine the impact of a separate Supreme Court ruling raising the legal standard for a federal obstruction charge against people accused of rioting at the Capitol. Two of the four counts against Trump were brought under the same law, but prosecutors previously indicated they intend to move ahead with those charges in his case.

It may be an uphill climb for Trump’s lawyers. During a hearing last year, Trump attorney John Lauro credited Chutkan, saying she “hit the nail on the head” while making a point from the bench.

“That may be the last time you say that for a while,” Chutkan responded, drawing laughs in the courtroom.

Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan laid out grim visions of U.S. democracy in their joint written dissents to the court’s Monday decision on former President Donald Trump’s claim of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.

“In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” Sotomayor wrote. “This majority’s project will have disastrous consequences for the Presidency and for our democracy.”

Jackson echoed her warning: “If the structural consequences of today’s paradigm shift mark a step in the wrong direction, then the practical consequences are a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance and the normal operations of our Government.”

As written opinions go, the dissenters’ alarm was “definitely striking,” said Alison LaCroix, a legal historian at the University of Chicago.

“It’s a darker tone. It’s more of a warning,” LaCroix told CNBC in an interview about the three dissents, written by the only three justices nominated to the court by Democratic presidents.

In a 6-3 opinion along partisan lines, the Supreme Court on Monday ruled presidents are immune from criminal prosecution on a case-by-case basis, that they are exempt when charges relate to “official” presidential acts and not exempt from charges of “unofficial” acts.

The immediate effect was to send special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal election fraud case against Trump back to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan. She will have to rule on whether the criminal charges pertain to official acts Trump carried out as president, granting him immunity, or his private conduct.

The added complexity will almost certainly delay the trial until after the Nov. 5 election, a victory for Trump, the presumptive nominee, and the Republicans.

Chief Justice John Roberts attempted to present the majority opinion as a modest move, which is why the dissenters felt a need to deliver such notably fiery pushback, LaCroix said.

“Chief Justice Roberts, in the way that he often does, tried to occupy a kind of middle ground of moderation and the court as an institution,” LaCroix said. “The dissents really point back at that and say, ‘Listen, you need to acknowledge or own that this is as big of a deal as it is.'”

Sotomayor wrote, “The long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding.”

The dissenters, all of whom were appointed by Democratic presidents, argued the ruling will expand executive power beyond anything the justices can imagine today.

They also laid out several hypothetical scenarios of presidential crimes that they claimed would now be difficult or impossible to prosecute.

For example, if the president “orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune,” wrote Sotomayor. “Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

Whether a president is immune “from legal liability for murder, assault, theft, fraud, or any other reprehensible and outlawed criminal act” will now “always and inevitably be: It depends,” wrote Jackson.

“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done,” Sotomayor added.

LaCroix said that while these hypotheticals are extreme and “obviously rhetorical,” they are not complete hyperbole.

“I think what we’ve seen in the last five or six years is that anything someone can come up with as a hypothetical, increasingly, is something that actually happens or might happen,” she said.

“We’ve seen a lot of norms just get blown away. I feel like the lesson of the last half-decade or so has been, don’t assume that anything is completely off the table.”

The Biden administration proposed a new rule Tuesday to address excessive heat in the workplace, as tens of millions of people in the U.S. are under heat advisories due to blistering temperatures.

If finalized, the measure would protect an estimated 36 million U.S. workers from injuries related to heat exposure on the job — establishing the first major federal safety standard of its kind. Those affected by excessive heat in the workplace include farmworkers, delivery and construction workers, landscapers and indoor workers in warehouses, factories and kitchens.

President Joe Biden planned to highlight the rule on Tuesday when he gets a briefing on extreme weather and delivers remarks.

Despite increased awareness of the risks posed to human health by high temperatures, extreme heat protections — for those routinely exposed to heat index readings above 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius) — have lagged.

Under the proposed rule, employers would be required to identify heat hazards, develop emergency response plans related to heat illness, and provide training to employees and supervisors on the signs and symptoms of such illnesses. They would also have to establish rest breaks, provide shade and water, and heat acclimatization — or the building of tolerance to higher temperatures — for new workers.

Penalties for heat-related violations in workplaces would increase significantly, in line with what workplaces are issued for violations of Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules, a senior White House administration official said.

An estimated 2,300 people in the U.S. died from heat-related illness in 2023. Workers with prolonged exposure to extreme heat are among the most vulnerable to related health risks, such as heatstroke and other illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

As the hottest month of the year gets underway, millions of Americans will be at greater risk of heat strokes, dangerous dehydration and heat-related heart stress.

The Labor Department has been developing a standard for how workplaces deal with heat since 2021, with OSHA having held meetings last year to hear about how the proposed measures could affect small businesses.

Heat protection laws in the U.S. have faced steady industry opposition, including from chambers of commerce and other business associations. Many say a blanket mandate would be difficult to implement across such a wide range of industries.

California, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota and Washington are the only states with workplace standards for heat exposure. Some regulations have recently come under attack by Republicans. Over the past year, Florida and Texas, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis and Gov. Greg Abbott, both Republicans, passed legislation preventing local governments from requiring heat protections for outdoor workers.

If finalized, the Democratic administration’s rule would override state measures, and states with existing procedures to deal with heat would have to institute measures that are at least as stringent as the finalized federal rule.