Third-party threat neutralized
Day One of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was eventful , stuffed with a smaller-than-expected crowd of protesters breaking through barricades, an increasingly rare public appearance by President Joe Biden , and a surprise speech from Vice President Kamala Harris .
There are few things that could dampen the jubilation in the Democratic Party. Harris has climbed past former President Donald Trump in the Real Clear Politics polling average despite lagging behind him on individual issues.
Even the threat of third-party challengers, never in serious contention for usurping a bloc of Electoral College votes, has nearly vanished from Democrats’ radar. The Washington Examiner’s team of reporters and editors at the DNC caught up with key Democratic figures who told them the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , Jill Stein , and Cornel West aren’t figures who strike fear into the hearts of the party, even if Harris and Co. can’t completely ignore them.
“I don't fear them. There's that saying you either run unopposed or you run scared,” Daniele Monroe-Moreno , chairwoman of the Nevada Democratic Party, told our team. “And it's our job as a party and our volunteers and my team just get the vote out and tell our story about the work that we have been doing, both at the national level and the state level, to make sure that people understand how they're voting and what that vote means.”
Not long ago, Democrats were particularly worried about Kennedy, and they put in a strong push to try to keep him off the ballot in several states. The one-time Democrat with the famous last name tried to challenge Biden for the party’s nomination before opting to launch an independent bid. He had spikes of interest, though his history of embracing conspiracy theories and a series of negative stories have blunted the edge he might have had to cut into the vote share in some significant way.
That hasn’t stopped Republicans from trying to protect the outsiders, though.
Similar to when Biden was leading the ticket, the third-party options are primarily lingering as an outlet for voters who are frustrated that Harris isn’t listening to them.
“What I can say is that there are ways for my vote to have an impact, and one of them is for me to vote for Jill Stein instead of being pressured by the apparatus of the Democratic Party that I have to vote for her or I'm voting for fascism,” Sarah Bechdel , a 35-year-old Chicago resident, told our team.
And there is a growing movement at the DNC to try to push people away from Harris. What was once the “Abandon Biden” movement evolved seamlessly into a push to “Abandon Harris.”
“Today, we launch Abandon Harris, Abandon Harris. In the protests on the streets of Chicago, reminiscent of 1968, we now declare that the only option for people of conscience is to abandon Harris, to punish her and the party so that they know that they can never put genocide on the ballot,” Hassan Abdel Salam, founder of Abandon Biden, said during a press conference outside the DNC on Monday.
Click here to read more about Democratic confidence they can focus on Trump.
Supreme Court complicates another Biden plan
Biden is the third consecutive president to overhaul Title IX — the legal framework that prevents sex-based discrimination in schools and education programs that receive federal funding, primarily institutions of higher education.
Then-President Barack Obama shook up campus culture with a “dear colleague” letter that significantly altered the way cases of rape and sexual assault were handled. Critics of the changes said the new rules stripped students accused of crimes of their rights — such as facing their accuser, being presented with evidence against them, and having the bar for finding them guilty lowered.
Under Trump, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos went through the rulemaking process to reverse the Obama-era changes.
When Biden returned to the White House as the president, he started fiddling with the rules again, this time to tackle the matter of whether transgender students would be allowed to participate in sports according to the gender with which they identify. That change sparked a challenge in several Republican-led states.
Last week, the Supreme Court allowed injunctions preventing the new rules from going into effect in 26 states, creating an uneven patchwork of regulations across the country just as students are preparing to return to campus, Supreme Court Reporter Kaelan Deese wrote this morning.
“The impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday is already being felt in schools nationwide. In the 26 states where the new rules are blocked, schools are operating under the old Title IX guidelines, meaning 24 Democratic-led states, including Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York, are operating under the new rules,” he wrote.
Critics of the court are frustrated with the justices who upheld the injunctions, complaining that the rules affect more than transgender athletes.
“Friday’s ruling provides yet another object lesson in how poorly the justices have fared when grappling with complicated legal questions in the truncated context of emergency litigation,” law professor Steve Vladeck wrote on his blog, One First.
The court, in a 5-4 decision that featured Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the three Democratic-appointed justices in dissent, said Biden’s Department of Education had overstepped its authority in changing the definition of “sex” and hadn’t provided enough evidence to overrule lower courts’ support for the challengers.
“The justices in the minority explained they would have merely halted portions of the rules pertaining to the alleged ‘injuries,’ such as the gender identity and sexual orientation provisions, and said that the rest of the new rules should resume,” Kaelan wrote.
Allowing the injunctions to remain in place could mean the question will return to the justices down the line.
“Whether the legal fights continue largely depends on the outcome of the presidential election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris,” Kaelan pointed out. “If the latter wins, the next administration is sure to keep fighting to implement the updated gender and sex rules under Title IX in court, while a Trump administration would likely seek to undo the changes to the 1972 law under Biden.”
Click here to read more about the Title IX fight that continues to simmer.
Premium problem
Democrats, on the whole, have pivoted away from demands for a complete rethink of how health insurance works. Gone are the calls for single-payer systems, a policy position Harris has been criticized for walking back without explaining her reasons for changing her mind.
However, moving away from the most extreme version of overhaul doesn’t mean she plans to keep the status quo. She has promised to keep moving down the road of caps on medication Biden began to pave. But marginal savings on prescriptions could come back to bite patients, Healthcare Reporter Gabrielle Etzel wrote this morning.
“Last week, Harris released a series of economic proposals aimed at lowering prices for food, housing, and healthcare in an attempt to distance herself from the economic legacy of President Joe Biden ,” Gabrielle wrote.
“Among those proposals is a plan to set caps on the amount paid for households for drugs. The policy would expand provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats passed in 2022, meant to lower prescription drug costs for beneficiaries of Medicare , the government healthcare program for people who are over 65 or who have certain disabilities,” she added.
The Inflation Reduction Act capped the cost of insulin at $35 for Medicare beneficiaries. Harris is promising to expand that cap to everyone who buys insulin.
Next year, another Inflation Reduction Act provision is set to kick in that will cap the out-of-pocket costs for all Medicare beneficiaries on prescriptions at $2,000. That’s another price cap Harris is promising to institute across the board.
While the up-front savings sounds like a windfall for consumers, healthcare experts are sounding the alarm that shifting the burden to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and private insurers will mean everyone will pay more for their health insurance.
“What they’re doing already, it’s increasing premiums,” healthcare policy adviser at the Heritage Foundation Ed Haislmaier told Gabrielle. "That's not an expectation. That's a fact. It has increased premiums already, and it's expected to increase premiums more, even substantially more, as early as this fall.”
Experts aren’t ready to put a figure on how much such a policy would push yearly premiums up, but the policy appears to be chasing a problem that few patients even have.
“According to a KFF analysis with 2018 data, nearly 13% of people with employer-provided health insurance coverage pay somewhere between $200 and $1,000 annually. That year, fewer than 1% of patients had out-of-pocket costs more than $2,000,” Gabrielle wrote.
Click here to read more about the big changes to health insurance hanging in the balance.
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Biden is in California and has nothing on his public schedule.
Harris is traveling to Milwaukee this evening for a rally at 9 p.m. Eastern before flying back to Chicago to attend evening events at the DNC.
Trump will hold a rally in Detroit, Michigan, at 3 p.m.
DNC speakers include second gentleman Doug Emhoff, former first lady Michelle Obama, and former President Barack Obama.
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