• Biden on Thursday said he supports a change to the Senate filibuster rule to codify Roe v. Wade into law.
  • Democrats are unsatisfied with Biden's leadership as they urge him to challenge the Supreme Court's rulings.
  • White House officials insist that Biden's measured approach is the best way to beat Trump in 2024.

Democrats seem to be collectively unimpressed with President Joe Biden's efforts to challenge the Supreme Court amid the historic rulings it has released in the last few weeks, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade, reversing the constitutional right to obtain an abortion.

Despite the president publicly condemning the abortion decision, The Atlantic's Ronald Brownstein reported that Biden has avoided further criticism of the Court and the legitimacy of its recent decisions.

Biden completely changed his position on endorsing a change to the Senate's filibuster rule in order to restore a national floor to discuss abortion rights giving the Senate the opportunity to codify Roe into law, which he originally refused to stand by.

 

The Atlantic reported that Democrats' frustrations also surround the pattern of Biden and his administration following rather than leading. Even though Biden came out in support of changing the filibuster rule, it took him a while to do so.

"It followed days of Democrats calling on him to say something along these lines," Jeff Shesol, former White House speechwriter for Bill Clinton, told the Atlantic. "When he finally said it, there was a sense of a yielding rather than a president who is leading."

Biden still seems to have his mind set on beating former president Donald Trump if both of them decide to run for re-election. The Atlantic reported that White House officials insist that the president's more level approach, rather than confronting the GOP with more force gives him a better chance at beating Trump like he did in 2020.

"I go back in my mind to 2020 and ask: Could anyone else have beaten Trump? I don't think so," Tresa Undem, a pollster mostly for progressive causes, told The Atlantic. "But from the perspective of some Democratic voters [now], he just doesn't get it. Biden will be presiding over this critical period when so many people are losing rights. Can you imagine being the president when women lost the right to abortion, and election subversion [is advancing], and the whole country is worried about democracy, and you are like, 'The Supreme Court is just fine'?"

Executive Director of the Take Back the Court Action Fund, Sarah Lipton-Lubet, told the Atlantic that Biden should "stop treating the Supreme Court like it's some untouchable panel of demigods. This Court is brazenly political, and we have to stop pretending otherwise." Lipton-Lubet and other progressives are pushing Biden to expand the high court as a way to dilute the conservative super-majority.

As Democrats struggle to find the sense of leadership they desire, Shesol told The Atlantic he thinks that Biden is missing the point and he must ask himself, "what institution is he trying to protect?"

Brownstein wrote, "Biden's embrace of the filibuster carve-out for abortion shows his incremental adaptation, however reluctant, to the feral modern combat between the parties. But will that be enough for Democrats desperately looking for leadership against a resurgent right that threatens to demolish everything they value?"

Read the original article on Insider