Former President Joe Biden warned on Thursday that the country is facing “dark days” under President Donald Trump’s watch, saying the executive branch “seems to be doing its best to dismantle the Constitution.”
“They’re doing it all too often with the help of a Congress that’s just sitting in the sidelines and enabled by the highest court in the nation. The rulings they’ve made, my God,” Biden said as he spoke at the National Bar Association’s annual gala in Chicago.
“Folks, in our lives, the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before from everything that followed. Moments that forced us to confront hard truth about ourselves, our institutions and democracy itself,” he continued. “We are, in my view, at such a moment in American history, reflected in every cruel executive outreach, every rollback of basic freedoms, every erosion of long-standing established precedent.”
Biden never mentioned Trump by name, instead referring to him as “this guy,” and argued the American people are beginning to realize the need for judicial checks on the executive branch.
“Judges matter. Courts matter. The law matters and the Constitution matters. I think a lot of Americans are starting to realize that under the pressure we’re under now with this guy we have as president,” he said. “Oh, get ready, folks, this is just starting.”
Biden called out “law firms bowing to pressure, bending to bullies, instead of staying rooted in justice and the law,” along with some of the biggest news outlets in the country. He also scorned “the apparent glee some of our politicians express” at the administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement.
Biden said the current administration is intent on working to “ease all the gains we’ve made in my administration, to erase history, rather than make it, to erase fairness, equality, to erase justice itself.”
“Folks, we can’t sugarcoat this. These are dark days, but you’re all here for the same reason,” he said. “It’s because our future is literally on the line. We must, we must be unapologetic of fighting for the future.”
Biden’s latest speech comes the same week two senior aides appeared for interviews before the House Oversight Committee as part of the Republican-led panel’s intensifying investigation into the former president’s cognitive decline and possible efforts to conceal it from the public.
In his speech in Chicago, the former president joked about his age.
“I have the dubious distinction of being elected the youngest senator in American history and the oldest president in American history,” he said. “It’s hell turning 40 twice.”
The former president, who continues to undergo treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer, has kept a relatively low profile since leaving the White House, giving only a handful of speeches. He spends most of his time at his homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and is working on a forthcoming book.
As he closed out his speech, Biden encouraged Americans to “summon the courage” to stand up for what’s right.
“It means take the client who can’t write a big check, but needs protecting their basic fundamental rights. It means signing onto that brief that may draw the ire of people in power, but you know it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “It means standing firm against unconstitutional actions, designed to intimidate you. It means write the article, give the speech, lead the protest, defend the ideas your country is founded on, to protect your institutions, to fight for the soul of the nation.”
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