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SC Democratic governor candidate says Biden shouldn't run in 2024 due to age

South Carolina gubernatorial candidate former Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.) on Thursday suggested that President Biden not run for another term in 2024, becoming the latest voice to express concern about the president’s age.

During an interview on CNN’s “New Day,” Cunningham was asked if he believed Biden, who is 79, was too old to run for reelection.

“Yeah, I think we need to have a new generation of leadership emerge. And this isn’t, you know, as the video said, judges in South Carolina have to retire at age 72. Democrats have a very deep bench, and it’s time to allow a new generation to emerge and new talent,” Cunningham replied, referring to a campaign ad released on Wednesday calling for age limits. 

“…I think we need to have a new vision, new leadership. And this isn’t about, personal about Biden, but he’d be 82 [by the] time of the next election. If he served out a second term, he would be 86 years old. I’m not sure if any of us know any 86-year-olds who should be running the entire country,” he added later.

Cunningham was also asked if House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), who is 81, should also retire.

“Look, this isn’t anything personal. I mean, we set out  – we draw a line, age 72, South Carolina state law is judges have to retire at age 72. So my question and the point that I’m making, if you’re too old to interpret the law, are you not too old to be making the law?” he asked.

“I appreciate all his service and what he’s done for our country, and It’s nothing personal. I get along fine with him. But as we look towards the future, we got to be looking to provide new vision,” he added later.

While the White House has repeatedly said Biden plans to run in 2024, some who spoke to The Hill earlier this week have acknowledged his age is a concern.

“Look, it’s a problem,” one Democratic strategist told The Hill, adding “He’s f—— old and everyone knows it, but no one wants to talk about it for fear of offending him or anyone around him.” 

The Hill has reached out to the White House and a spokesperson for Clyburn for comment. 

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FDA bans sale of Juul e-cigarettes

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said Thursday that it is banning the sale of Juul e-cigarettes, a major blow to the company and a major step in a broader effort to prevent youth vaping. 

FDA Commissioner Robert Califf indicated Juul “played a disproportionate role in the rise in youth vaping.”

“Today’s action is further progress on the FDA’s commitment to ensuring that all e-cigarette and electronic nicotine delivery system products currently being marketed to consumers meet our public health standards,” Califf said. 

The move is part of a broader FDA review of the vaping industry, as the agency decides which products to allow on the market.  

The FDA also appears to be moving forward with stronger regulations on traditional cigarettes, preparing to propose limits on the levels of nicotine.   

Juul has been at the center of efforts to fight back against the rise in vaping among teenagers, with critics pointing to its marketing. 

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) hailed the decision on Thursday, saying Juul had “used enticing flavors and slick marketing to get young people hooked on their products.” 

“I applaud FDA for following the science and taking this decisive stance to protect our nation’s public health by taking these dangerous products off the market,” he said.  

Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, said Wednesday before the news became official that “Juul, more than any other product and any other company, has been responsible for creating and fueling the youth e-cigarette epidemic.”  

The move would be “the most significant action the FDA has taken to date to end the youth e-cigarette epidemic and stop tobacco companies from using these nicotine-loaded products to addict another generation of kids,” he said.  

This story was updated at 11:05 a.m.

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Trailer drops for Trump documentary that had footage subpoenaed by Jan. 6 panel

Viewers are getting a first glimpse of an upcoming documentary on former President Trump that’s of interest to the Jan. 6 committee.

In the trailer for the Discovery+ documentary “Unprecedented,” released Wednesday, Trump and his adult children are seen each sitting down for interviews.

“I think I treat people well, unless they don’t treat me well, in which case you go to war,” Trump tells filmmakers.

Asked if he would be willing to talk about what happened at last year’s Capitol riot, Trump replies, “Yep.”

Earlier this week, British filmmaker Alex Holder said he had turned over extensive footage he had captured to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack after it issued a subpoena.

Holder said he was recording video for a project focused on Trump’s reelection campaign, and conducted interviews with the president and his family. He also captured footage as the riot was unfolding at the Capitol.

Holder is scheduled to be deposed by the Jan. 6 committee on Thursday.

In the teaser shared by Discovery+, Ivanka Trump says with a smile, “My father, he is very honest.”

“And he is who he is,” adds the 45^th president’s eldest daughter and former White House adviser.

“He believes everything he’s doing is right,” Donald Trump, Jr. says of his father in another clip.

Discovery+ has not yet announced an airdate for “Unprecedented.”

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Civil rights, education groups say 'an attack on transgender youth is an attack on civil rights’

In an open letter published Wednesday, 150 civil and human rights organizations denounced “mean-spirited” and “discriminatory” legislation targeting LGBTQ+ young people – particularly transgender youth – cropping up in state legislatures nationwide.

“These laws aim to shut transgender youth out of school activities such as sports, to ban them from school facilities such as restrooms, to prohibit discussion of their very existence in classrooms, and to punish educators and families who help young people access necessary gender-affirming care,” groups including the National LGBTQ Task Force, The Trevor Project and the American Psychological Association wrote Wednesday.

In just the first six months of the year, hundreds of bills that would limit the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans have been introduced in nearly every state, according to the Human Rights Campaign, which also signed Wednesday’s letter.

Several of those measures have already become law, including at least two bans on gender-affirming health care for transgender youth. One of them, in Alabama, makes it a felony, punishable by up to a decade in prison, for doctors to provide or recommend gender-affirming care to youth younger than 18 years old. (The enforcement of that law was partially blocked by a federal judge earlier this year).

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In Texas, whose legislature is not in session this year, officials including the governor and attorney general have said they believe some forms of gender-affirming care, like puberty blockers and hormone therapy, amount to “child abuse” under their interpretation of state law.

Other laws passed this year have targeted transgender athletes, particularly transgender women and girls. At least 10 states this year have enacted laws that bar transgender students from competing on sports teams that match their gender identity, citing ambitions to level the playing field and protect the integrity of women’s sports.

In Florida, the Parental Rights in Education law – known to its critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law – is set to take effect July 1. Under the measure, public school educators will be barred from engaging in classroom instruction related to sexual orientation or gender identity, which LGBTQ+ rights groups have challenged as unconstitutional. A similar law was passed in Alabama in April.

On Wednesday, civil rights groups called on state and national leadership to reject recent efforts to check LGBTQ+ rights and commit themselves to “meaningfully advancing” pro-equality policies.

“As organizations that care deeply about ending sex-based discrimination and ensuring equal educational opportunities, we support laws and policies that protect transgender people from discrimination, including participation in sports, access to gender-affirming care, access to school facilities, and access to inclusive curriculum,” they wrote in the letter, which was circulated by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a national civil and human rights coalition.

“We firmly believe that an attack on transgender youth is an attack on civil rights.”

Letter signers also argued that most recent legislation targeting LGBTQ+ people violates protections guaranteed under both the U.S. Constitution and Title IX, which could put states’ federal education funding in jeopardy.

They also discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the signatories said – both protected classes under the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County.

“We support the full inclusion, protection, and celebration of transgender youth, including access to school facilities and extracurricular activities such as athletics, gender-affirming care, and inclusive curriculum, because all young people deserve safe, healthy, and inclusive environments,” the groups wrote Wednesday. “Transgender and non-binary youth deserve the chance to succeed and thrive like any other child.”

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Abrams says she'll fund police if elected Georgia governor

Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (D) said that she will fund police departments in the state is she is elected governor in November. 

In an interview with Axios published Thursday, Abrams said she wants to establish a grant program that is focused on helping raise daily wages for local law enforcement and implementing changes involving training standards and accountability controls.

Abrams’ plan will also include new guidelines for police policies within the communities, end training standards on the use of force and implement local departments to adopt new guidelines with state funding, according to Axios.

Abrams, who ran for governor in 2018, noted that Democrats can support law enforcement while addressing accountability changes with its departments, Axios noted.

“When we make smart investments in our law enforcement, we get better officer recruitment, we get better retention, we get better interaction with the community and we get a safer Georgia,” Abrams said. 

Abrams also said that she isn’t worried about progressive voters’ response to her initiative, saying that people care about their lives and not about their party affiliation 

Abrams’ response comes as her opponent, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), just released a new campaign advertisement attacking Abrams for her support of the “defund the police” movement, Axios reported, which gained national attention amid the high-profile killings of Black Americans by law enforcement in 2020 and the social justice/police brutality protests that followed. 

Abrams told the media outlet that Kemp “cherry-picked” information in his latest campaign attack against her. 

Abrams added that her new incentive would cost the state around $116 million, noting that she is confident she can raise the money without any additional taxes, Axios reported. 

“Georgia has the money. What we have not had is the leadership willing to invest the money,” Abram told the media outlet.

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This loyalty to Trump: Were they all ‘detached from reality’?

A friend reached out to me the other day asking what I thought about the House hearings investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

I told him I thought the testimony was devastating, that it showed that Donald Trump lied over and over again about how the 2020 presidential election was allegedly “stolen,” despite the fact that there was no evidence to support such a contention.

I didn’t think that anything I said was the least bit controversial, but my friend apparently did. “It’s only a lie if he knows what he’s saying isn’t true,” he told me. “But if he really believes the election was stolen, then he’s not lying.”  

If he really believes the election was stolen, I said, then Donald Trump is just plain delusional.  To which my friend, who knows Trump, said that the man sincerely believes the election was fraudulent, “because that’s what he wants to believe. He’s not persuadable on the issue.”  

So, if facts won’t persuade Trump that he lost — if nothing can persuade him — then his attorney general, Bill Barr, was onto something when he told House investigators that Trump had “become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff.”

I have long thought that Donald Trump is detached from reality. Narcissists, which he appears to be, often are. But what about his supporters in the White House who evidently willingly went along with a scheme to overthrow the 2020 election and stop the peaceful transfer of power?  Were they also detached from reality?  

I’m thinking of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, who, according to testimony, tried to convince state officials to avoid certifying vote counts in order to give Trump a victory in the Electoral College. There’s Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, who supposedly was in on the scheme. As the New York Times reported this week, “The plan to enlist the help of state lawmakers to create fake slates of electors appears to have begun just days after the election when a pro-Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, sent an email suggesting the idea to John Eastman, another lawyer close to Mr. Trump.”

Were they all detached from reality? Or, more likely, did they put loyalty to Donald Trump over allegiance to the Constitution of the United States?

This loyalty to Trump brought to mind a piece I wrote last year, just two days before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol — a column about Trump’s Svengali-like hold on his supporters. 

I wrote: “In Robert Bolt’s 1960 play, ‘A Man For All Seasons,’ an overly ambitious little man named Richard Rich commits perjury against his friend, a great man of conscience, Sir Thomas More — perjury that he knows will send Thomas to his death.  

“And why does he do it? Because Richard Rich needs to be somebody bigger than he is. He needs recognition. He betrays his friend in exchange for a job he thinks will give him status — Attorney General of Wales.”

I wrote that, “After the trial, when Sir Thomas knows he is doomed, he confronts Richard Rich and utters a verse from the Bible — with a twist. ‘It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales?’ — making sure Richard, a status-seeking careerist, understands what he has just done: that he gave his soul not for the whole world but for a trivial job in a trivial place.”

“None of us is pure,” I wrote. “Few of us are as noble as Sir Thomas More. We make accommodations. Sometimes we convince ourselves that our motives are noble, when in fact they’re selfish. But if we’re going to sell out our principles,” I said, “we should be motivated by something of great significance. Each of us can decide what that might be, what would cause us to abandon our long held beliefs.”

I understand why so many of his supporters voted for Donald Trump, twice. The first time they thought he was better than Hillary Clinton and, four years later, they thought he was better than Joe Biden. I understand that many of them had had enough of liberal elites who thought they were uneducated hayseeds or, in Hillary’s famous words, “a basket of deplorables.”

What is harder to understand is why someone such as Rudy Giuliani, a man who once garnered great respect, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted the Mafia and on 9/11 wasn’t only the mayor of New York City, but was “America’s Mayor,” could throw it all away in order to serve a man for whom loyalty seems to be a one-way street. Just ask Mike Pence if you don’t believe me. And why would so many rank-and-file Republicans still support Donald Trump — and happily vote for him again — even though he played fast-and-loose with our democracy and was willing to shred the Constitution just to stay in power?  

I concluded my column one year ago with a question that I believe is as relevant today as it was just two days before Jan. 6, 2021: “It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world,” I wrote, “but for Donald Trump?” 

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him on Twitter @BernardGoldberg.

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Anti-abortion group launches $2 million ad buy in key swing states ahead of Supreme Court decision

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a conservative anti-abortion group, launched a $2 million digital ad buy in a number of key midterm states on Thursday ahead of the imminent Supreme Court decision on abortion rights.

The ad buy is set to run in Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for two weeks.

In the ads, the group zeroes in on what it says are “scientific advances that reveal the humanity of unborn children and the extremism of U.S. policy that allows unlimited late-term abortion up to birth.”

The high court is poised in the next several weeks to release a decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that could determine the fate of federal abortion protections. The Supreme Court scheduled an extra day this week this week to issue opinions, saying it will release rulings on Friday in addition to Thursday.

SBA List Pro-Life America says it plans to get heavily involved in battleground states ahead of November, seeking to make abortion a key campaign issue. The group and its affiliates plan to spend $78 million this cycle.

Abortion rights groups are also planning to get involved in key races ahead of the midterms. In April, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund announced a $16 million paid media campaign “to educate and increase urgency around the abortion access crisis facing the country.”

And on Wednesday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee held a briefing on abortion rights during the House Democratic Caucus meeting with Emily’s List, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL all in attendance. Earlier this week, the DCCC launched a billboard campaign targeting Republicans in on the issue in a number of swing districts in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, California, and Oregon.

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Biden to make 'Late Late Show' cameo

President Biden is getting ready to “Take a Break” with James Corden, appearing on the popular “Late Late Show” segment.

The commander in chief will take part in “Take a Break: White House” that will air next week, CBS announced Thursday. Starting Monday, Corden’s late-night TV program will broadcast from London for a “special week of shows.”

Corden “immerses himself in the heart of American politics in his most prestigious ‘Take a Break’ segment yet when he fills in as the assistant to the president,” CBS said in a news release touting Biden’s appearance.

It’s not the first time that Corden has tapped an executive mansion resident for a cameo on his show. In 2016, then-first lady Michelle Obama sang some tunes alongside the British comedian for his long-running “Carpool Karaoke” segment.

In April, Corden — who announced earlier this year that he was leaving the “Late Late Show” in 2023 — made an appearance in a similar-sounding skit that aired as part of the program at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. In the taped sketch, Corden headed to the White House in search of a new gig, and fielded questions from journalists in the briefing room.

Biden made his first in-studio, late-night TV appearance as president earlier this month, sitting down with Jimmy Kimmel on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”

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Live coverage: Jan. 6 panel explores Trump pressure campaign on DOJ

Justice Department officials’ unwavering resistance to then-President Trump’s attempts to use their agency to legitimize his bid to remain in office will be the focus of Thursday’s hearing from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

“In the remaining weeks of the transition, President Trump tried to pressure the Department of Justice and help him overturn the 2020 election,” a select committee aide told reporters Wednesday.

Follow The Hill’s live coverage below.

Catch up while you’re waiting for hearing to begin

9:00 a.m.

Thursday’s hearing starts at 3 p.m. Catch up on the latest headlines while you’re waiting for it to start.

Jan. 6 panel to hear from DOJ officials who battled Trump’s ‘misuse’ of agency

Who is Jeffrey Clark, a key figure in Trump’s DOJ pressure campaign

Jan. 6 committee delays hearing schedule until July

Hoyer: More Jan. 6 hearings possible due to influx of new tips

Thompson says Jan. 6 committee redoing Mo Brooks subpoena

Five takeaways from Tuesday’s hearing

Jan. 6 hearings coverage archive

The Hill staff

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