Joe Biden fires parting shot at Supreme Court amid fears Kamala Harris’ ‘honeymoon’ is ending
Joe Biden announced sweeping reforms that could remove presidential immunity from Donald Trump, as anxious Democrats brace for the end of Kamala Harris’ honeymoon.
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Joe Biden announced plans to drastically change the US Constitution in a move that would remove presidential immunity from Donald Trump.
In a parting shot on his way out of the White House, Mr Biden unveiled reforms that would up-end the conservative-leaning Supreme Court
It comes as the Democratic Party braces for the end of Kamala Harris’ “honeymoon phase” with the vice president transitioning into full campaign mode after all but locking up the party’s nomination.
Ms Harris has backed Mr Biden’s proposal to impose term limits on the court’s justices and introduce a constitutional amendment to reverse the court’s ruling in favour of Mr Trump’s claims of presidential immunity.
Mr Trump is using the Supreme Court ruling to challenge his criminal conviction on hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
The Supreme Court reforms are unlikely to be passed through the divided Congress but are seen as one of Mr Biden’s last major moves from the Oval Office to motivate Americans to vote for the Democratic Party in November.
Democrats are reportedly anxious about Ms Harris’ ability to defeat Mr Trump despite the outpouring of enthusiasm around her candidacy in the week after Mr Biden dropped out.
“I would call it a honeymoon phase,” former Democrat governor of Nevada Steve Sisolak told the New York Times on Monday. ”We’ve got to keep the energy going. You got it started — now you’ve got to keep it going. It’s going to be a challenge for everybody.”
Privately, senior Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer were “lukewarm” on Ms Harris even though she was seen as a far better choice than Mr Biden.
“She wasn’t a great candidate. And she may not be as a political campaigner as good as Biden was in his prime,” a Democrat senator told The Hill. “We need to be very clear-eyed, and it’s going to be brutally tough.”
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TRUMP AGREES TO FBI INTERVIEW
Donald Trump has agreed to sit for an interview with the FBI over the attempt on his life by shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks.
A bureau official said the “standard victim interview” would “get his perspective on what he observed, just like any other witness to the crime”.
“The interview of the former president will be consistent with any other victim interview that we do,” Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office, told reporters on a conference call.
BIDEN ANNOUNCES SUPREME COURT REFORMS
US President Joe Biden unveiled plans to reform the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, in a longshot move as he seeks to make a mark in his last six months in power.
Mr Biden is calling for 18-year term limits for the top court’s justices and an enforceable ethics code, as well as a constitutional amendment to reverse the court’s recent ruling backing Republican nominee and former president Donald Trump’s claims of presidential immunity.
The plans have almost no hope of getting through a deeply divided US Congress but could motivate Democratic voters in the November 2024 election, from which Biden dropped out just over a week ago.
“What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms,” Biden said in an opinion piece in the Washington Post.
“We now stand in a breach.” Biden said the proposals also reflected the principle that “no one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one.”
HARRIS BACKS BIDEN SCOTUS MOVE
Harris said in a separate statement that “President Biden and I are calling on Congress to pass important reforms” to the court.
“These popular reforms will help to restore confidence in the Court, strengthen our democracy, and ensure no one is above the law,” she said.
Biden is set to further detail the plans in a speech in Austin, Texas. He had confirmed he would seek the reforms during an Oval Office address last week outlining his priorities after deciding to drop out of the 2024 election.
The Supreme Court partially ruled in favour of Trump’s immunity claims.
Trump is now using that ruling to challenge his recent criminal conviction in a porn star-hush money case and a series of other prosecutions.
VANCE HITS BACK AT ATTACKS
Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance has hit back at critics of his “childless cat ladies” comments, claiming the Democrats took his words out of context.
In a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson in 2021, Mr Vance said, “We’re effectively run in this country — via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs — by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.
“How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Footage of that interview, which resurfaced last week, went viral and sparked outrage among women including Taylor Swift’s loyal fan base.
On Sunday night (local time), Mr Vance told Fox News’ Trey Gowdy his 2021-dated comments were a “quip”, not a criticism of people without children.
“This is not a criticism and was never criticism, Trey, of everybody without children,” Mr Vance said.
He said he was trying to convey that it’s “important for us to be pro-family as a country.”
“Of course, for a whole host of reasons, it’s not going to work out for some people. We should pray for those people and of course have sympathy for them. I still think that means we should be pro-family, generally speaking, as a party,” he said.
TEXTS REVEAL SHOCKING TRUMP SHOOTING DETAIL
Shocking new details have emerged that suggest police officers spotted the gunman that tried to kill Donald Trump 90 minutes before he opened fire at a Pennsylvania rally earlier this month.
Text messages obtained exclusively by The New York Times show law enforcement officers were aware of Thomas Crooks earlier than previously known, in the latest revelation about security problems ahead of the assassination attempt.
The series of text messages were sent among a local police counter sniper team, including from one member who was leaving his shift and texted his colleagues at 4.19pm, “Guys I am out. Be safe”.
He then exited the second floor of a warehouse that overlooked the campaign rally site, leaving two other counter-snipers behind.
The member then noticed a young man with long stringy hair sitting on a picnic table near the warehouse.
At 4.26pm he texted his colleagues to warn them about the suspicious man, who was outside the fenced area of the Butler Fair Show grounds where Mr Trump was to appear.
He said that the person would have seen him come out with his rifle and “knows you guys are up there.”
Over an hour later, a different counter-sniper snapped a photo of Crooks and informed his team that the young male was observed aiming a rangefinder towards the rally.
The suggestion was made to notify the Secret Service about his whereabouts.
Half an hour after that, at 6.11pm, Crooks managed to fire shots from the roof of a warehouse connected to the same building where the counter-snipers who had been warned about him were positioned inside.
Despite being armed and just 121 meters from the former president, neither local police nor Secret Service agents had managed to locate him.
The latest revelation has added to the scrutiny around the security failures from that day.
Following the shooting, the Secret Service has faced criticism for lapses in security that allowed the incident to take place, while local police have attributed the lapse to insufficient manpower and “extremely poor planning.”
‘GREAT BRAVERY’: TRUMP DEFENDS FEMALE AGENT
Donald Trump has heaped praise on a female Secret Service agent who shielded him during his attempted assassination, after she was criticised as too small to protect him.
“There was great bravery displayed … Every one of them. There wasn’t one that was slow,” Mr Trump told supporters at a rally in Minnesota on the weekend, the New York Post reports.
“There was a woman to my right shielding me. A beautiful person. She was shielding me with everything she could.”
The former president continued: “She got criticised by the fake news because she wasn’t tall enough. She was criticised and she was so brave.
The crowd erupted in cheers after he said: “She was shielding me with everything. She wanted to take a bullet“.
The female agent came under fire because of her size, including from tech mogul Elon Musk.
“Having a small person as body cover for a large man is like an undersized Speedo at the beach – doesn’t cover the subject,” Musk wrote on social media.
“Could be a man or a woman, to be clear, just needs to be large enough to do the job.”
HARRIS LEADS IN ‘SHORTEST CAMPAIGN IN HISTORY’
America’s vice president has seen a spike in approval ratings according to a new poll.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll indicates the favourability rating of Kamala Harris among Americans has jumped from 35 per cent in last week’s poll to 43 per cent this week.
Following US President Joe Biden’s 20 July announcement that he would drop out of the presidential race, Ms Harris has seen a trickle of endorsements grow into a flood, especially among top Democrats such as former president Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The poll also showed a major jump in her favourability among independents, up to 44 per cent from only 28 per cent a week ago.
The poll found that a majority of Americans – 52 per cent – said Ms Harris should be the Democratic nominee.
Overall, 86 per cent of Democrats viewed her as the party’s preferred leader versus 20 per cent of Republicans.
In the past week the Harris election campaign said it had secured $US200 million ($A305 million) and signed up 170,000 new volunteers.
The 100-day countdown to the US election began on Sunday, a marker in a contest that has been up-ended by an assassination attempt on presidential contender Trump and the stunning exit of President Biden over his fitness to serve another term as president.
After weeks of infighting over the effectiveness of Mr Biden’s candidacy, Democrats have mostly rallied around Ms Harris, radically reshaping a race that was fast becoming dominated by Mr Trump.
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