Biden to speak on civil rights, Supreme Court proposals at LBJ Presidential Library

(WASHINGTON) — Following New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s primary defeat at the hands of George Latimer, another member of “The Squad” is at risk of being ousted: Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, who is facing a strong challenge from St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.

The race catapulted to national attention in part due to the tremendous amount of outside group spending. The United Democracy Project PAC, the fundraising arm affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has spent more than $7 million to challenge Bush, who currently represents a district composed of the St. Louis area, and boost Bell’s profile.

This dynamic is reminiscent of Bowman’s race, where he and his supporters point to AIPAC’s enormous cash flow behind his challenger as a key reason he lost his primary in June. United Democracy Project’s spending in Bowman’s race helped make it the most expensive House primary in U.S. history.

Asked for comment for this story, Bush’s campaign pointed to data showing that it is the second-most expensive House race.

AIPAC’s involvement in this primary was precipitated by Bush’s critical stance of Israel in how it carried out its war with Hamas, a posture held by many other progressive lawmakers, including Bowman.

Bush has said that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza following Hamas’ attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 — and was supported in calling for a cease-fire by over two dozen local faith and social justice groups, including Jewish organizations, last November.

Bush was condemned by a group of local Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Federation of St. Louis, the St. Louis Jewish Community Center and the St. Louis Rabbinical and Cantorial Association, for her “communication about the recent events in Israel and Gaza,” which they described as “insensitive, incorrect, and fanning the flames of antisemitism.”

Another group of Jewish clergy endorsed Bell in the month leading up to the primary.

Meanwhile, Bell has aggressively campaigned with the St. Louis Jewish community. According to Jewish Insider, Bell has made Jewish outreach a priority in his campaign.

Sam Crystal, the chief of staff of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which has endorsed Bell, said he believes that this tactic has been successful.

“That he is not just expressing support for the issues that Jewish voters are prioritizing, but taking the time to actually reach out to Jewish voters in the district and to create relationships with the Jewish leaders, has been a big impact on why he’s gained so much support in the district,” he said.

Crystal said he believes that this outreach will help Bell defeat Bush. He estimated that Jews make up 2.8% of the district and said that “in close races, those kinds of margins can make the difference, and the Jewish vote will be a part of the winning coalition that delivers victory for Wesley Bell.”

Professor Dan Butler, director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at the Washington University in St. Louis, stressed to ABC News that Bowman and Bush’s races have a great deal of differences, especially when it comes to the impact of the Israel-Hamas war.

“Clearly the war in Gaza is what is behind the donor class here. That’s the reason Bush is being challenged,” said Butler. “But you don’t really see it discussed, in part because I just don’t think either candidate has much to gain from it.”

Butler said he finds that the conflict here is not between centrism and progressivism, as in New York’s primary race, but rather a clash between two progressives “trying to signal who’s the right member of the Democratic team to send to Washington.”

Even still, Bell’s campaign is not without problems of its own.

Bell’s decision to run for this seat, and his approach to doing so, have garnered some controversy. In October of last year, he ended a bid for Senate to challenge Bush. In a statement at the time, Devon Moody, Bush’s campaign manager, said it was “disheartening that Prosecuting Attorney Bell has decided to abandon his U.S. Senate campaign to become Missouri’s first Black senator after less than five months, and has instead decided to target Missouri’s first Black congresswoman.”

And according to Drop Site News, four months before Bell challenged Bush, he privately assured her that he would not drop his Senate bid to face her. “I’m telling you on my word: I am not running against you. That is not happening,” he said on the leaked audio.

Moreover, Bell’s progressive bona fides have been challenged. Prosecutor Organizing Table, a watchdog organization formed by several racial justice organizations, accused Bell of not matching his promises of being a progressive prosecutor.

Bell has also received criticism for managing Mark Byrne’s campaign for the same seat in 2006. Byrne, who Bell’s campaign described as a “longtime friend” despite “differences in political affiliations and positions on many issues,” ran as a conservative Republican. Byrne’s website said that he intended to “protect the rights of the unborn” and that there is “no greater job for elected representatives than to protect those who cannot protect themselves.”

Bell campaign spokesman, Anjan Mukherjee told ABC News that Bell has the “momentum and enthusiasm to win this election, and looks forward to taking his progressive track record to Congress.”

Sarah Arkebaur, co-chair of the St. Louis Democratic Socialists of America electoral working group, said that with “who is donating to his campaign, as well as his past work for Republican candidates,” Bell “does not live up to [the] moniker” of a progressive.

Arkebaur touted Bush’s work in Congress.

“She is non-stop fighting for policies that are crucial for working people,” she said. “And we know, from what we’ve talked to — people at the doors, doing door-to-door canvassing, on the phones doing phone banks — that these policies are popular with voters.”

Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, offered a similar message.

“This race is about reelecting a champion for abortion rights, democracy and everyday people — that has the broad support of local electeds, unions and every reproductive rights group against the same Republican megadonors banning abortion in Missouri and trying to elect Donald Trump in November,” he said.

If Bush is unable to defend her seat, Butler, the professor, says her loss will send a clear message.

“If Bush loses, it will send a message to the other Democratic incumbents to be much more careful about criticizing Israel,” said Butler.

ABC News’ Oren Oppenheim contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — In a notable moment from Sen. JD Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention last week, former President Donald Trump’s newly picked running mate took aim at President Joe Biden’s support of the Iraq War.

“When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico,” Vance told the Milwaukee crowd, adding, “When I was a senior in high school, that same Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq.”

But in 2010, Vance himself expressed support for the war.

“I supported the Iraq invasion on the merits,” Vance wrote in a 2010 article for “FrumForum,” a conservative website run by David Frum, now the senior editor for The Atlantic, according to a post reviewed by ABC News.

Vance, who served as a combat correspondent with the U.S. Marines in Iraq in late 2005, is the first veteran on a presidential ticket since 2008.

In the FrumForum article, dated April 12, 2010, Vance discussed the complexity of the war in the wake of Wikileaks releasing a video of an Apache helicopter gunning down a group of Iraqi civilians.

“We can legislate laws of war and refine rules of engagement, but war will always be a grisly business,” said Vance, writing under his previous name, J.D. Hamel, which he also used during his military service. “I’m not a peacenik, and I supported the Iraq invasion on the merits, but it’s folly to send troops to do the toughest job and then be shocked by the attitude that some show while doing it.” 

Vance previously went by Hamel, his mother’s husband’s name, before later taking the name Vance, the name of his maternal grandmother.

In the piece, Vance also criticized then-President George W. Bush for failing to “emotionally prepare the American people for war.”

“Of all of President Bush’s mistakes, his failure to emotionally prepare the American people for war is perhaps the most severe. We ought to demand the best of our troops, and do whatever necessary to rectify mistakes, but the American people are too often confused or shocked when things like this happen,” Vance wrote. “Maybe we wouldn’t be if we understood the monumental difficulty of our task.”

Vance’s time writing for “FrumForum” — whose editor, David Frum, is a vocal Trump critic — has garnered scrutiny since the Ohio senator accepted the nomination as the Republican vice presidential nominee.

Vance’s stance on the Iraq War appeared to turn more critical in the years following his 2010 article. In a 2016 op-ed in The New York Times, he lamented that Republicans, in 2008 and 2012, “ran candidates who refused to rethink the Bush foreign policy that led to Iraq.”

“With the Islamic State on the rampage, Americans today look to a Middle East that is humiliatingly worse off than the way we found it,” Vance wrote.

Speaking at the Heritage Foundations 50th Anniversary Leadership Summit in April 2023, Vance said that when he was a high school student, just prior to enrolling in United States Marine Corps in April 2003, he believed “what we would do in Iraq was transform it from a horrible dictatorship into a flowering democracy.”

“I also hate to say not just that it didn’t happen, not just that some of us were wrong, myself very much at the top of the list, even though I was only a high school student,” Vance said last year, “but the people who were most wrong suffered no consequences.”

Last year, Vance called the Iraq war an “unforced disaster” in a social media post.

“Twenty years ago we invaded Iraq. The war killed many innocent Iraqis and Americans. It destroyed the oldest Christian populations in the world. It cost over $1 trillion, and turned Iraq into a satellite of Iran. It was an unforced disaster, and I pray that we learn its lessons,” Vance wrote.

In a statement to ABC News, Vance spokesperson William Martin said, “Like thousands of young men at the time, Sen. Vance enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps near the start of the Iraq War. He ultimately came to the same conclusion as millions of other Americans: that the war he served in was a massive mistake.”

“Too few leaders in Washington learned that lesson, but President Trump knew it from the very start,” the statement continued. “Together, they will implement an America First agenda that actually serves our national security interests and avoids the foreign policy disasters that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have overseen for the past four years.”

Throughout his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly claimed he did not support the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011, despite previous public statements to the contrary. In an Howard Stern interview that briefly touched on the subject, Stern asked Trump, “Are you for invading Iraq?” to which Trump replied, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly,” referring to the 1990 Gulf War.

Trump, however, told NBC News in 2016, “I heard Hillary Clinton say I was not against the war in Iraq. I was totally against the war in Iraq.”

“You can look at Esquire magazine from 2004 … I was against the war in Iraq. I said it’s going to totally destabilize the Middle East, which it has. It’s been a disastrous war,” Trump said, pointing to a comment he made over a year after the war began.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden on Monday visited the LBJ Presidential Library to mark the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and gave remarks on his new proposals to reform the U.S. Supreme Court.

The remarks were Biden’s first major speech since his Oval Office address last week on his decision to exit the 2024 race.

In Austin, Texas, he discussed his administration’s work to protect civil rights and his calls for reforms to the nation’s highest court, including term limits and an enforceable code of conduct for justices as well as a constitutional amendment against presidential immunity, all of which face long-shot odds of congressional approval with a Republican-controlled House and closely divided Senate.

“In recent years, extreme opinions that the Supreme Court has handed down have undermined long established civil rights principles and protections,” Biden said.

“I have respect for institutions and the separation of powers laid out in the Constitution, but what’s happening now is not consistent with that doctrine of separation of powers. Extremism is undermining the public confidence in the court’s decisions,” he continued, checking off recent decisions that he said led him to the reform proposals, saying those decisions have “undermined long established civil rights principles and protections.”

“And most recently and most shockingly, the Supreme Court established in Trump vs. the United States a dangerous precedent,” Biden said. “They ruled, as you know, that the president of the United States has immunity for potential crimes he may have committed while in office, immunity. This nation is founded on the principle that there are no kings in America. Each of us is equal before the law. No one is above the law!”

The setting for Monday’s remarks was also significant, as Biden is the first sitting president since Lyndon B. Johnson to not seek reelection.

In stepping away from the campaign trail, Biden’s focus is now shifted to how to “finish the job” in the final few months of his presidency and cement the legacy of his decades-long political career.

“The president is focused like a laser beam on making sure that the next six months matter to the American people,” Stephen Benjamin, the director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, told reporters on Monday. “He is soliciting the ideas and thoughts of the best and brightest people in this administration, but also from across the country, asking people, ‘What is left undone, what else do we need to work to secure?'”

Benjamin said he expects the president to continue to work on accountability for the Supreme Court, fortifying the economy, lowering prices for American families and more.

On his 18-year term limit proposal, Biden said this will help ensure that the court changes with some regularity and would remove “an extreme court attacking the confirmation process.”

“That would make timing for the court’s nomination more predictable and less arbitrary. And reduce the chance that any single presidency imposes undue influence on generations to come,” he said.

Republicans in Congress signaled they are ready to challenge Biden’s agenda.

House Speaker Mike Johnson slammed the proposed Supreme Court reforms, which Biden is floating after several court controversies this term, as “dangerous” and said they are “dead on arrival in the House.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also argued in floor remarks that the administration is pushing for reform because they don’t agree politically with the court’s recent decisions.

“Why is the Biden Harris administration so willing to put the crown jewel of our system of government, the independent judiciary, to the torch? Because it stands in their way,” McConnell said.

In closing, Biden spoke about Vice President Kamala Harris who supports his court reforms and who has now taken the torch from Biden as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“I’ve made clear how I feel about Kamala,” Biden said. “She has been a champion of rights throughout her career. She will continue to be an inspiring leader and project the very ideal of America.”

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.