Wake up with the Washington Examiner: What Trump can’t quit, Michigan madness, and Supreme Court history lesson

Never gonna give him up

Former President Donald Trump could be claiming victory. The debate between him and his former rival, President Joe Biden, was such a resounding win for the former president that Democrats booted their leader in favor of his No. 2. There hasn’t been a debate as consequential as the one on June 27 since we started seeing them on television. 

With Biden out and Vice President Kamala Harris tapping in, Trump has shifted his focus to trash the “dangerously liberal” Democratic replacement. He has plenty of fodder to stuff his speeches with, including Harris’s profession of changing nearly all of her positions she said she held when she was challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination four years ago. 

But there are some things Trump just can’t seem to quit. And attacking Biden appears to be muscle memory at this point, Congress and Campaigns Editor David Sivak wrote for us this morning. 

“Trump has joined Republicans in painting Harris as a ‘San Francisco radical’ who failed as Biden’s ‘border czar.’ His campaign’s first ad against Harris used the immigration crisis witnessed under Biden to call her ‘dangerously liberal,’” David wrote.

“He has simultaneously continued to incorporate material about Biden into his speeches. ‘He was choking like a dog,’ Trump said of their debate at a rally in Atlanta on Saturday, describing Biden’s exit from the race two weeks ago as an undemocratic takeover,” he wrote.

Reaching back and grabbing old material has happened so often since the race has changed, and the Harris campaign has flipped the script, poking at Trump’s age and asking if he can remember who he is running against. 

Republicans have spent years preparing to run against Biden in 2024 and saying he isn’t fit to run. Impeachment attempts have fizzled in the House as investigators found plenty of dirt on the president’s son while failing to tie Hunter Biden’s shady business practices and drug use to his father in any concrete way. And shifting focus to a new, relatively unknown commodity in Harris with fewer than 100 days until Election Day is a challenge. 

The Washington Examiner looked at the myriad ways Republicans and Democrats are trying to define Harris last week. 

Trump’s latest attack has fallen flat with elected officials. The former president tried to continue the thread of pointing to Harris’s inconsistency on policy to her alleged playing up different aspects of her biracial identity. He accused Harris of “becoming a black person” later in her career when it was advantageous for her after emphasizing her Indian heritage earlier. 

Harris is of Jamaican and Indian descent and, as David wrote, “has identified as black in both her formative years and throughout her career. She attended a black sorority at Howard University and was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus during her time in the Senate.”

The racial attack was spurned by most congressional Republicans, who said they preferred to attack Harris on her record. They weren’t picky about whether they preferred to slam the candidate on the policies she said she supported at one time and has decided are no longer important, or the programs she has been the face of as a member of the Biden-Harris administration. 

It’s those programs, primarily her role as Biden’s “border czar” and the face of his administration’s propping up of abortion rights, that are giving Trump ample opportunity to keep up his stream of attacks on Biden even while he fades into the background. 

Running against Harris isn’t the fight Trump picked when he waited and watched the GOP primary field fall apart with him barely lifting a finger. The plan was always to position himself as the alternative to an aged, low-energy Biden who was sapping the excitement from voters. Instead, he is locked in a fight with a significantly younger Harris, who has injected new life into the electorate, raising hundreds of millions of dollars and signing up hundreds of thousands of new volunteers. 

Trump wasn’t able to pick his opponent, but he’s capable of picking his battles. Each of those is likely to include Biden — and the ways Harris can’t escape being tied to her boss. 

Click here to read more about Trump’s campaign tactics. 

Michigan madness

Primary season is drawing to a close. There are a handful of contests that need to wrap up before voters know who their candidates are going to be in November. 

One of the most important contests is happening on Tuesday night in Michigan, where Democrats are all but assured to send Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) to face off against former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in one of a handful of pivotal Senate contests that will determine control of the chamber next year. 

Rogers and Slotkin still need to win their respective primaries, though the results appear to be a foregone conclusion, as Senate Reporter Ramsey Touchberry wrote this morning. 

“The Democratic front-runner, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), faces off against actor and small business owner Hill Harper,” Ramsey wrote. 

“The Republican front-runner, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, is up against physician Sherry O’Donnell and Republican-turned-libertarian former Rep. Justin Amash.” 

Rogers or another Republican faces an uphill fight, though one significantly easier with Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) not on the ticket. Michigan hasn’t sent a Republican to the Senate in two decades, and Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told Ramsey it wasn’t going to this year. 

“There’s no way we’re losing Michigan on my watch,” Peters said. 

Peters has some reason to be confident. Harris overtaking Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket has breathed new life into down-ballot feelings as voters are getting inspired to turn up on Election Day.

Biden frustrated the Arab- and Muslim-American communities in Dearborn, Michigan, with his vocal support for Israel in its war with Hamas. Their frustration meant a sizable “uncommitted” movement would send delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this month. A delegation that likely prefers Harris’s approach to Israel than Biden’s — and one that is not going to be a short-term factor as Harris locked up the roll call nomination last week. 

While Republicans were worried about having to face Stabenow, they are feeling bullish about their chances of defeating Slotkin. 

“You can probably get almost every Republican who is either in the field or ran in the field to admit that they wouldn’t have run against Debbie [Stabenow],” a source close to the Rogers campaign told Ramsey. “I think going against Slotkin, who we haven’t really seen run statewide, we don’t really know her vulnerabilities.”

Republicans have slowly been improving their standing in Michigan, running a candidate who lost to Peters by fewer than 2 points in 2020. 

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted the Senate race there from “lean Democrat” to “toss-up,” though that was when Biden was spooking Slotkin from appearing with him on the trail, and the rating hasn’t been revisited since the president dropped out of the contest. 

Click here to read more about what you need to know before Michigan’s primary tomorrow night.

Supreme Court story as old as time

Republicans are furious with Biden’s latest attempt to interfere with the Supreme Court. His move in the twilight hours of his presidency to push through term limits and an enforceable code of conduct on the justices smacks of executive overreach and partisan point-scoring — an attempt to run up the score with a Democratic base that has jolted to life with Harris taking over standard-bearer duties. 

Efforts to overhaul the court have primarily been from the Left, though Republicans were involved in some of the earliest moves to influence the court, Breaking News Reporter Jack Birle reminded us this morning in a short history lesson. 

“While the Supreme Court has largely stayed the same structurally until 1869, there have been several attempts to change the status quo in the more than 150 years since,” Jack wrote, about three failed attempts to overhaul the makeup and authority of the court.  

The most famous foiled plan was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to “pack” the court in 1937 after it struck down several New Deal programs. 

“Roosevelt claimed his proposal to add up to six more justices, or one for each justice that was over 70 years old, was to lighten the workload for the justices, but it was widely viewed as an attempt to tip the court in his favor,” Jack wrote. 

The Democratic field in 2020 nearly all ran on some promise to consider a plan to pump up the number of justices on the court after Trump appointed three justices, reshaping the ideological tilt for what will likely be a generation. 

Democratic attempts at meddling are well documented, but Republicans have gotten in on the action, too. 

Idaho Sen. William Borah tried to dilute the authority of the court in 1923 when he proposed a piece of legislation that would have required a 7-2 majority to kill a law passed by Congress. The bill went nowhere, and 5-4 decisions have riled up Democrats and Republicans for decades. 

Click here to read more about the failed attempts to overhaul the Supreme Court over the years.

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For your radar

Biden has no public events scheduled on Monday. He will speak with the king of Jordan at 11 a.m. before leaving Delaware to return to Washington, D.C. He will arrive at the White House at 2 p.m. before meeting with the National Security Council at 2:15. 

Harris is set to announce her running mate any time before she makes an appearance in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. She will join Biden in meeting with the National Security Council. She has no public events scheduled today.