Politics

Dems maintain they’re ‘looking forward’ as questions about Biden loom

Published

1 year ago

May 14, 2025

Democrats thought they were done with Joe Biden. Now, new revelations about his mental and physical decline while in office are putting a harsh spotlight back on him — and Democrats’ failings last year — at a critical moment in the party’s attempts to move on.

On Blue Light News, Democrats rallying against the GOP megabill that could slash Medicaid benefits and enact sweeping tax cuts instead ran into blaring headlines this week about Biden’s deteriorating condition and doomed campaign.

“It’s a discussion that was overdue. I don’t know if it’s helpful, but it’s unavoidable,” said Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), the 78-year-old who called for Biden to step aside from the ticket last year.

In interviews with more than two dozen other Democrats on Capitol Hill, lawmakers met questions about Biden’s campaign failings and mental lapses with heavy sighs and topical pivots. Many talked about “looking forward” — to combating President Donald Trump, to retaking control of Congress — in a sign of how awkward and potentially damaging the recriminations about Biden have become.

Many in the party had treated Biden with kid gloves in the aftermath of Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump, with lawmakers publicly and privately lauding Harris’ effort and eliding Biden’s drag on the ticket.

Now, most in the party are desperate to talk about anything else.

“Our energy needs to be in our priorities to be looking forward, not backwards,” said Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.). “This relitigation is backwards looking, and that’s not very helpful to us.”

Top Democratic congressional leaders also shrugged off Biden when confronted this week with the latest divulgences about his mental and physical acuity — and whether they helped cover them up.

“We’re not looking backward, we’re looking forward at this moment in time,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a Tuesday press conference. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer echoed him hours later: “We’re just looking forward.”

A Biden spokesperson declined to comment.

But the party’s problems aren’t going away with Biden. All week, while contending with news coverage and a forthcoming book about the past president, the party was also confronting turmoil at the Democratic National Committee over a DNC official’s effort to challenge “asleep at the wheel” Democrats. House Democrats raced to shut down a rogue Trump impeachment effort by Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.). And there was a spate of negative press about one of the party’s own senators, John Fetterman.

Some Democrats welcomed the renewed conversations about Biden, worried their party has yet to fully reckon with last year’s electoral shellacking. It has been a point of tension in the party since last year, flaring up for some House members at the White House Christmas party. One Democratic lawmaker approached Harris in the photo line to tell her “we love you,” according to a person familiar with the interaction and granted anonymity to speak freely. When the lawmaker got to Biden, the then-president asked, “Well, do you love me, too?”

Even today, there are Democrats who think the party should be doing more to learn from their mistakes in 2024.

“Joe Biden clearly just was not capable of delivering the message we needed to deliver in 2024,” said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) “Why did it take so long? Why was it so hard to recognize that and make the change? So I guess to some degree it is helpful to have that conversation.”

“It’s OK for us to come to grips with our failures so that we can make the changes necessary to win. And while I am very much focused on the future, I’m concerned that there’s still a lot of denial in our party about how badly we’ve lost,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who was one of the first Democrats to call for Biden to step aside last summer.

He added: “Some of the same people who just want to move on are the same people who are basically in denial that we lost.”

Others like Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) acknowledged that the former president clearly lost a step, but didn’t believe it was a death knell to the party’s prospects of winning future elections.

“Look, most Democrats … had no idea that Biden had lost some of it — not all of it — but he lost some of it. It’s one of those things that happens in all aspects of life. You don’t want it to happen at that level, but it does,” Cleaver said. “I think some people in the White House who were trying to be helpful, didn’t talk to the right people who … could have addressed it a little better. But it’s not like that’s going to destroy the Democratic Party.”

But their views are far from the prevailing ones. Instead, on Capitol Hill, Democrats were rushing to shift the public’s focus to the House GOP’s megabill — and a moment of unity for Democrats as they lined up in opposition to Trump’s domestic agenda. Ideological disagreements on taxes, immigration and entitlements have largely been paved over with the legislation giving Democrats plenty to oppose.

“We have more important things to talk about,” said Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) when asked questions about revelations about Biden’s mental acuity this week — a far cry from where she was some 10 months ago, when she joined an ever-growing caucus of Democrats calling for the then-president to leave the Democratic ticket.

Others saw this moment as another chance to take a dig at the GOP.

“There’s nothing more unifying than watching Republicans try to rip [health care] away and absolutely destroy our economy,” said Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-Mich.).

“So I think important conversations are being had about the values that unite us.”

Andrew Howard contributed to this report.

Politics

The accidental American

Published

22 minutes ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

In 2001, airline employees stopped a seven-months pregnant Florence Balogun from traveling home to London, deeming her too pregnant to fly. She stayed in New York, where she was visiting, eventually giving birth to a son, Folarin, before returning to London.

Twenty-five years later, Folarin Balogun has attracted global notice as a rising soccer star. Despite training in Arsenal’s youth academy and spending much of his career playing for England’s youth teams, Balogun — legally an American citizen, thanks to his Brooklyn birth — has emerged as a key contributor to the U.S. team’s attack at this year’s World Cup. The striker scored two goals in America’s opener against Paraguay last Friday, hoisting his team to a record-breaking 4-1 victory, the most goals the U.S. men’s team has ever scored in a World Cup game.

While Balogun’s performance has fueled fresh hopes about America’s World Cup prospects, he’s also found himself in the middle of America’s ongoing birthright citizenship debate.

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order overturning the country’s long-standing birthright citizenship practice. The American Civil Liberties Union then sued to block the move, taking their legal battle to the Supreme Court. The court is expected to issue a final ruling soon — though it seems“broadly skeptical” of Trump’s effort.

“The executive order itself doesn’t claim to strip away [Balogun’s] citizenship or or the citizenship of other people born before [Feb. 19, 2025],” Cody Wofsy, the lead lawyer in the ACLU’s case, told Blue Light News. “But the constitutional theory that the government is asking the Supreme Court to adopt casts a shadow over the citizenship of millions and millions of people who were born in this country and have lived their entire lives as citizens.”

Examples of high-profile birthright citizens — like Balogun, but also politicians such as Kamala Harris and Marco Rubio — help illustrate the reality of banning birthright citizenship, Wofsy said.

“We don’t know what the justices are thinking,” he said, “but I would hope that they understand just how grave an action the government’s asking them for.”

Politics

The Americans who want to see Australia do well

Published

52 minutes ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SEATTLE — Some American fans walking toward Lumen Field on Friday morning were playfully jeering their Australian peers whenever they spotted a telltale yellow jersey. But a major driver of the local economy offered a kinder greeting to the visiting team.

Cranes in view of the stadium gates have been outfitted with the Australian flag and a WELCOME message from the Northwest Seaport Alliance, which manages the ports of Seattle and Tacoma, along with dockworkers’ union ILWU Local 19.

The seaport alliance and the labor union representing its workforce are mounting a similar display throughout the World Cup, rotating flags out to reflect the pair of teams that will face off next in Seattle. But keeping the Australians happy is a more urgent cause for Seattle harbor interests than, say, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Qatar.

Australia is one of the ports’ top trading partners, with the 14th largest source of container volume at the Port of Seattle, but ranks much higher when it comes to the dollar value of goods that come from there. (New Zealand, for example, sends more volume to Seattle than Australia but it’s worth only half as much.)

Meat, including beef and lamb, and minerals comprise the biggest categories of goods that Australia ships to the United States, although some of the most valuable exports — gold and pharmaceuticals — are more likely to land at Sea-Tac airport than via the harbor.

The U.S. and Australia have had a free-trade pact since 2005, although President Donald Trump’s tariff regime threatens to disrupt some trade flows. Australia is currently pushing back on its inclusion on an American list of countries alleged to use forced labor in its supply chains, which the U.S. Trade Representative is using as the basis to impose a 12.5 percent tariff.