The dirty laundry is being aired with Joe Biden no longer running for re-election. What we could have guessed turned out to be accurate, which is that congressional Democrats were in full panic mode. Only a handful of Democratic senators wanted Biden to remain the 2024 nominee after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump in June. It’s a stunning and damning indictment of a presidency marked by incompetence and overt weakness. There’s no other way to frame it: Biden’s presidency got suffocated with a pillow.
The president’s colleagues may have said nice things about him, but this article in The New York Times had ‘meeting with Kevorkian’ vibes all over it. For starters, it drove quiet, though good rank-and-file Democrats, like Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), to speak up, essentially drawing a line in the sand for the president. For his part, Reed felt Biden had to submit himself to mental evaluation by two independent specialists and then hold a press conference on the results if he wanted to get past the age and mental fitness questions that dominated the news cycle after he flopped against Trump. Also, the lack of support among congressional Democrats, especially those in the Senate, reportedly left Biden aghast:
Senator Jack Reed, the West Point graduate, Army veteran and Rhode Island Democrat who leads the Armed Services Committee, is hardly known as a troublemaker prone to rash statements.
So when Senate Democrats gathered privately with President Biden’s top political advisers last month to assess Mr. Biden’s capacity to remain the Democratic presidential nominee, the decision by the normally taciturn Mr. Reed to be among the first to speak was notable. What was even more remarkable was what he said, according to two attendees: If Mr. Biden wanted to stay in the race after a disastrous debate performance that underscored concerns about his condition and mental acuity, he should submit to examination by two independent neurologists who were willing to report their findings at a news conference.
It was a striking position for a Democratic loyalist to take, and one that underscored the near unanimity among Senate Democrats in the room that day that Mr. Biden should not continue as the party’s nominee. It was just one of a series of extraordinary moments during a closed-door session on July 11 that would lead Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, to schedule a face-to-face meeting with the president days later in which he urged Mr. Biden to withdraw.
The effort by Mr. Schumer and Senate Democrats to persuade Mr. Biden to step aside was a more pivotal factor than previously known in bringing about the president’s exit from the race, as he found himself with scant support in the chamber that had been his political home for 36 years.
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The article also details how Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) tried to keep everyone in line regarding leaks. The Biden White House had already run aground, with aides offering damning observations to the press days after the June debate.
At a party lunch, the publication added that only three senators wanted Biden to remain the 2024 Democratic nominee. They saw the president’s campaign crumbling, and they could no longer vouch for his health and mental fitness. If he tripped up again, their credibility would be shot forever, and everyone knew another stumble was only a matter of time, especially as the campaign schedule became unrelenting in the final months. With the convention approaching, Schumer tried to meet with top White House officials who were reluctant for obvious reasons. Only after he threatened to make his meeting request public, along with threats that he would permit his caucus to voice their concerns about Mr. Biden, did the White House agree to a discussion. The meeting did not go well, with a platitudinous presentation that everyone had heard before.
The White House tried to convey that everything was fine, but the party knew otherwise. What frustrated Schumer even more was how his concerns and those of other Democrats at the meeting were not relayed to the president. That’s when Chuck went to Biden personally in Delaware to deliver the grim news that virtually no Democrat in the Senate wanted him to carry on as party leader. Biden said he needed a week, leading to his quitting the race.
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