Prominent Democrats from across Texas converged on the University of Texas Monday, July 29, to hear remarks from President Joe Biden. Several local officials – including Mayor Kirk Watson, Travis County Judge Andy Brown, and U.S. Reps. Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett – welcomed Biden as he landed in Austin on Air Force One.
The president was in town to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the landmark legislation championed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The visit was originally planned for July 15, back when Biden was still a presidential candidate, but was postponed following the attempted assassination of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on July 13.
Before Biden spoke Monday, the LBJ Library hosted a program that featured Bryan Cranston reading excerpts from the speech LBJ delivered in 1964 to celebrate passage of the Civil Rights Act (Cranston portrayed LBJ on Broadway in the play All the Way, as well as in its television adaptation). U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young, who organized along Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, introduced the president.
“There are no kings in America.” – President Joe Biden
Biden described the Civil Rights Act as “a defining moment” in American history. Taken together with passage of the Voting Rights Act (1965) and the Fair Housing Act (1968), Biden said “these three acts have made this nation fundamentally more fair, fundamentally more just, and, most importantly, fundamentally more consistent with our founding principles.”
But most of the president’s speech focused on dangers to our democracy: “There are no kings in America,” Biden said.
To address these threats, Biden laid out a suite of reforms to the Supreme Court of the United States which he had announced earlier Monday: a set of binding ethics rules for the court, term limits for justices, and an amendment to the U.S. Constitution meant to address the recent SCOTUS ruling that holds U.S. presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for “official acts” committed while in office.
“In recent years, extreme opinions that the Supreme Court has handed down have undermined long-established civil rights principles and protections,” Biden said – making an implicit connection between reining in the high court and advancing the cause of civil rights. “They’re planning another onslaught, attacking civil rights in America,” the president continued, making direct reference to Project 2025, the sweeping plan created by the Heritage Foundation that Trump has recently attempted to distance himself from. Some say it would usher in a new era of far right Christian Nationalism in American politics.
Enacting any of the Supreme Court reforms will involve a harrowing uphill battle. The U.S. Constitution has not been amended in three decades and Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told reporters on July 29 that the SCOTUS reforms were “dead on arrival.” (Rep. Lloyd Doggett and other lawmakers have repeatedly presented a similar set of reforms since 2013.)
Despite the long odds, Biden concluded his remarks on an optimistic note. “We … have to remind ourselves who we are. We’re the United States of America, and there is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity – nothing – when we do it together.”
This article appears in August 2 • 2024.