Politico

MADRID — The U.S. will send more destroyers, air defense systems and redeploy troops further east in the coming months, President Joe Biden announced Wednesday at NATO’s annual summit in Madrid.

“I said Putin’s looking for the Finlandization of Europe,” Biden said. “He’s going to get the NATOization of Europe. And that is exactly what he didn’t want, but exactly what needs to be done to guarantee security for Europe. And I think it’s necessary,”

The moves will add significant firepower to the continent and signal a deepened American commitment to NATO’s eastern front countries, which are worried Russia could continue its march westward if they’re successful in Ukraine.

“My position is that once Russia gets the whole Ukraine, they will proceed farther. Moldova, Baltic countries, Poland, Slovakia, Romania,” Jaroslav Nad, Slovakia’s defense minister, told POLITICO on the sidelines of the conference. “We have to stop them.”

Slovakia sent its Russian-made S-300 anti-aircraft system to Ukraine this spring, and has been backstopped by Patriot batteries from Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.S. Nad said he’s prepared to send T-72 tanks as well, if they can be replaced by the West.

While Biden’s new moves don’t include Slovakia, an American brigade combat team will head to Romania as the first of what will be a new rotational American presence in the country, a capability that Bucharest has long asked for. The U.S. Army will also further entrench itself in Poland, setting up a permanent V Corps headquarters, an Army garrison headquarters, and a field support battalion there.

The U.S. had already deployed an armored brigade and aviation brigade to Poland in 2017, and the new commands will help with logistics and the planning of exercises across the east.

The Pentagon said it will also “enhance its rotational deployments — which include armored, aviation, air defense, and special operations forces” to the Baltic region, stage new air defense units in both Germany and Italy, and send two new F-35 squadrons to the U.K.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the U.S. has deployed 20,000 additional forces to Europe, bringing the total to over 100,000.

Probably the biggest and most visible part of the new deployments will be two more Arleigh Burke-class destroyers that will be homeported in Rota, Spain, making a total of six U.S. warships capable of performing air defense missions and launching cruise missiles well inland. The destroyers will help patrol the Mediterranean where Russian cruisers and submarines have been more active over the last year, and provide missile defense for southern European allies.

In the weeks before the invasion, the U.S. sent four destroyers to Europe, marking the largest naval presence in Europe since 2018. Those ships eventually went home to the U.S.

After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the Navy began pushing its Rota-based destroyers into the Black Sea, a practice that ended once Russia again invaded Ukraine in February. But with Turkey closing the entrance to the Black Sea to military shipping once the war started, the deployments ended.

The invasion also led Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to extend the Mediterranean deployment of the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group through the summer.

President Joe Biden further criticized the “shocking” Supreme Court ruling on abortion as he signed the most significant gun control bill in decades Saturday.

“I think the Supreme Court has made some terrible decisions,” Biden said after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, revoking the constitutional right to an abortion.

“The decision is administered by states. My administration is going to focus on how they administer it and whether or not they abide by their own law,” Biden said.

In a speech Friday, the president decried the “extreme and dangerous path the court is now taking us on.”

Biden’s Saturday remarks came as he signed the landmark gun control measure before departing for the G-7 Summit in Germany.

“Today, we say more than enough,” he said. “Nothing is going to fill that void in their hearts, but they have led the way, so others won’t have to endure the same thing,” Biden said.

On Friday, the House cleared the bipartisan gun safety package, following Senate passage on Thursday.

The law includes narrow restrictions on firearm ownership that are intended to keep guns out of the hands of people experiencing mental health crises.

It also includes roughly $13 billion in new spending for policy programs like mental health and school safety, and emerged as the result of deadly shootings last month that killed 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 people in Buffalo, N.Y.

“Their message to us was to do something. How many times have you heard that? Just do something? For God’s sake, just do something. Well, today, we did,” Biden said. “While this bill doesn’t do everything I called for … God willing, this will help save a lot of lives.”

Joe Biden has long resisted attacking the Supreme Court, preferring instead to channel his ire toward cases he believes were wrongly decided.

But on Friday, after the majority of justices dealt a fatal blow to Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that guaranteed the right to elective abortion, the president assailed the court as being captured by rightward extremism. In doing so, he raised the question: just how much of a blowtorch would he take to the judiciary heading into a crucial stretch of the midterm campaign?

“With this decision,” Biden said in his speech that followed the court’s ruling overturning Roe, “a conservative majority of the Supreme Court shows how extreme it is, how far removed they are from the majority of this country. It made the United States an outlier among developed nations in the world.”

For good measure, the president decried the “extreme and dangerous path the court is now taking us on.”

Biden has long prided himself as an institutionalist loath to challenge the validity of the court. He resisted signing onto a slate of proposed reforms that include expanding its membership, imposing mandatory age limits on justices or instituting a code of ethics. Friday’s remarks made no mention of such changes.

But they were notable, as far as Biden prepared speeches go, for their intense bite. The president singled out Justice Clarence Thomas by name for laying the groundwork to reconsider the right of gay marriage and for couples to make their own decisions on contraception. He also framed the court’s three newest members as being beholden to Donald Trump, the president who nominated them to the bench. The midterms, he added for good measure, would be defined by their ruling.

“This fall, Roe is on the ballot,” he said.

Despite the sharp rhetoric, Biden advisers don’t anticipate that he’ll use the court itself as a battering ram in the coming midterms. John Anzalone, a longtime Biden pollster, said while just a quarter of Americans have confidence in the Supreme Court, he does not envision Democrats running against the conservative Justices so much as the GOP candidates who would use their ruling to ban all abortions—many of them in “extreme cases.”

Friday’s ruling took the issue from the hypothetical to a reality, Anzalone said, and in all but 10-plus states abortion will be illegal — “and there will be a reckoning against the GOP because of this.”

“The key to a lot of close midterm races will be the outrageous quotes by GOP candidates on their position on abortion even in the case of rape and incest,” Anzalone said, recalling past Senate hopefuls in tight races who were felled by their own positions and words. “They are Todd Akins and Richard Moudick on steroids.”

A Biden adviser echoed his remarks, pointing to the president’s emphasis on women being forced to carry the children of a rapist, and moves by congressional Republicans to impose a federal abortion ban. “Our messaging to the public is primarily going to be about how this is affecting people,” the adviser said.

How hard, if at all, Biden chooses to attack the Supreme Court could shape the contours of an election cycle in which Democrats are bracing for potentially widespread losses. Most midterms are a referendum on the party in control of the White House, which in turn tries to turn them into a choice between the two parties. To date, Biden has attempted to do just that, deeming Republicans as enthralled with Trump’s “ultra MAGA” brand. He has picked fights with Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fl.) over threats to entitlement programs and blasted Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) for putting Obamacare in the crosshairs.

But calls are growing from outside the White House to turn the midterms into a referendum on the court itself and to do so by attacking the institution and its conservative justices as political players whose power needs to be curtailed by growing Democratic majorities in Congress.

Mark Mellman, the Democratic pollster, said that “there will be a lot more impetus” behind some of the court reform proposals that Biden has resisted.

And Brian Fallon, executive director of court reform group Demand Justice, said Biden should subordinate his institutionalist streak and unrelenting belief that he could help bring back an era of bipartisan comity. He urged the president to not squander the political opportunity before him to make “a villain out of these Trump appointed Supreme Court justices issuing hugely unpopular decisions that are extremely relevant politically.”

“The White House is on the defensive over inflation and gas prices. … and here is a contrast waiting to be drawn and the only thing stopping them is their allergy to picking fights on partisan lines,” Fallon said.

As evidence of the opportunity he believes is at hand, Fallon pointed to yet-to-be-released polling commissioned by his group and performed by Hart Research, showing that Democrats are more focused on the court than Republicans (69 percent to 60 percent), and that liberals are engaged much more than conservatives (71 percent to. 47 percent). Traditionally, those numbers have been flipped, and exit polls of recent presidential elections found more Republicans than Democrats factored court appointments as their highest priority.

Fallon’s internal survey also found more than six in 10 voters across key battleground states say they are paying attention to the Supreme Court and its decisions, up from 51 percent in April 2021.

Biden’s remarks on Friday came during a week of pitched decisions on everything from Miranda rights to the legal limits of gun ownership. With decisions going routinely in conservative directions, Democrats up and down the ballot cast the court’s majority as ideologues who put their personal views ahead of constitutional duties.

Earlier Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped the justices that ruled to overturn Roe as “right-wing politicians that Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell packed the court with.” And on Thursday, following the court striking down a law that required New York residents to have “proper cause” to carry a handgun, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del), a close Biden ally known for choosing his words carefully, blistered the court as being “led by conservative judicial activists who twist constitutional analysis to substitute their own policy preferences.”

Biden, for his part, laid out steps he’d take to try and dull the impact of the court’s decision. He spoke about the Justice Department intervening if states tried to block people from accessing contraception or traveling for an abortion. He also spoke about the threat of “extremist” governors and state legislators looking to block the mail in states with medicated abortion and again vowed that he would be taking more steps in the future.

“What we want to see fundamentally is him rising to this moment with executive actions that do everything possible to protect access to abortion, and there were some tangible steps in there,” said Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of the progressive group Indivisible.

But Greenberg went further than Biden would. She said the slate of rulings points to a need for reform and expansion because “we have seen what this court will do if it continues to go unchecked.”

“We have seen the court demonstrate that it intends to simply make the laws that it wishes to make in accordance with its extremist, right-wing philosophy,” she said. “And it is a moment for everyone who has previously placed their faith in an institutionalist reading of the court to recognize that this is not the court they have previously understood to be exercising power, and to update their views accordingly.”

Sam Stein contributed to this report.

President Joe Biden on Friday called the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade a “sad day for the court and for the country” and called on Congress to restore abortion rights protections.

“Now with Roe gone, let’s be very clear: The health and life of women of this nation are now at risk,” he stated, speaking from the White House. He called it, “a tragic error by the Supreme Court in my view.”

The White House had been quietly preparing for this moment for months. It began when the Supreme Court took the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case and accelerated dramatically with the early May leak of a draft opinion that signaled the court was ready to overturn Roe. Aides prepared for a variety of outcomes, including the possibility that Chief Justice John Roberts would be able to broker some sort of compromise that would at least partially leave Roe intact.

But a decision to gut the ruling was always viewed as the most likely, and West Wing staff began having multiple meetings a week to try to game plan a response, recognizing that such a decision would set off a political firestorm, one filled with both peril and opportunity for Biden.

The news broke a day before Biden was set to travel to the G-7 summit in Germany, thousands of miles away from Washington. And it created the specter of a president heading overseas to deal with foreign entanglements while massive political tectonic shifts were happening back home. The president said no executive actions could fill the abortion rights void left by the Court’s decision.

“The court has done what it has never done before: expressly take away a constitutional right that is so fundamental to so many Americans that had already been recognized,” said Biden.

For weeks, an exasperated Gavin Newsom warned Democrats they need to more aggressively confront Republicans in the national culture wars he’s convinced his party is losing.

In recent days, the California governor signaled to his team that, for now at least, what they’ve referred to internally as his “Paul Revere” phase has gone far enough. But the warnings turned a whisper campaign into something audible: Is the governor positioning himself for a White House run in 2024?

Newsom has stressed that he isn’t challenging President Joe Biden — either on his stewardship of their party or as a candidate in two years. He’s reminded people that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris separately trekked across the country to stump for him in his recall election. But taken together, the moves have been widely interpreted as a relatively young executive using the specter of a future presidential bid to shine a bright spotlight on himself. And they’ve been enough to elicit early brushbacks from allies of Biden and Harris.

“Everybody is trying to be relevant for the next race. He came through the recall election and he’s doing a pretty good job as governor. However, I think ambition makes people do different things,” said Cedric Richmond, a former senior Biden White House official who recently transitioned to a top role in the Democratic National Committee.

Richmond bristled at suggestions — advanced by Newsom and others — that Democrats aren’t taking the fight to Republicans on abortion and guns, and praised Biden for uniting the West against Ukraine, delivering baby formula and continuing to lead the response to Covid. Assessing the West Wing’s reaction to Newsom, Richmond added, “I am not sure they are reading the Gavin Newsom opinion pages about his desire to be politically relevant.”

Newsom has long centered Republican leaders as foils, using his State of the State speech in March to argue that America is plagued by agents of a “national anger machine” that’s fueling division and weaponizing grievance. Often focusing on Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, Republican governors who revel in making California an example of progressivism run amuck, Newsom argues, the GOP is counting on complacency to erode voting rights, scapegoat minorities, conjure conspiracies and undermine democracy.

But after POLITICO revealed the leaked Supreme Court draft overturning Roe v. Wade, Newsom unloaded on Democrats, asking outside a Planned Parenthood office last month, “Where the hell is my party? Where’s the Democratic Party? … Why aren’t we calling this out? This is a concerted, coordinated effort. And, yes, they’re winning.”

He made similar comments in later interviews.

The governor’s pointed critiques arrived at a particularly vulnerable time for Biden, who is facing renewed questions about his age and confronting a long list of challenges as Democrats prepare for the likelihood of a tough midterms, all while suffering from historically weak polling.

“They don’t know if Biden is going to run or not,” John Morgan, a prominent Biden bundler and attorney from Orlando, Fla., said of Newsom and other potential presidential candidates. “They are thinking, ‘I don’t know if I am going to be at the swim meet or not, but I am going to put my bathing suit on anyway.’”

“He looks like a million dollars,” Morgan added of Newsom. “And he looks at the Democratic bench and he doesn’t see anyone sitting there, so he says, ‘I am going to sit there.’”

Newsom’s remarks outside the Planned Parenthood office surprised even some on his own team. More recently, he’s tried to steer attention away from inside his own ranks and toward Republicans themselves. In a sit-down with The Atlantic, he keyed in on Republican efforts to curb reproductive and voting rights, ban books and limit how teachers instruct about race and their targeting of LGBTQ rights, including Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Fellow California Democrats say he’s not trying to create a youthful contrast with Biden so much as make the affirmative case for Democratic governance.

“Our state is coming roaring back and we’re looking at the rest of the country and saying, ‘What the heck are you people thinking?’” California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis said. “We have all the tools as a nation and we have to get it together. And California is the best model to combat climate change, protect a woman’s right to choose, sensible gun control and investing in education.”

***

Facing no serious threat in his fall reelection, Newsom is now planning to do what he demanded of fellow Democrats: directly engage with Republicans in those culture wars. His most attention-grabbing idea so far is one he pitched staff on his own. He joined Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, where he’s since gone after the GOP on red state murder rates. The governor’s team also has discussed going on Fox News, with one adviser arguing that for Newsom, “it’s about the feeling we’re getting our asses kicked; that the Trumpers are owning the libs and we have to get into the fighting mode and make this a choice.”

Added another person close to Newsom: “He resents that shit [and] wants to push back on that narrative because he has the facts on his side.”

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who helped give Newsom his start in politics in the mid-90s, said he was merely “telling it like it is.”

“He is literally echoing what lots of us think: Our party doesn’t have a message that’s registering with voters,” Brown said.

While Newsom tends to eschew the Sunday shows, believing that statewide officials are often put in the uncomfortable position of punditizing on national events, he recognizes that doing them has the benefit of boosting his reputation in the state, a person familiar said. His spokesperson Anthony York said he’s trying to help people “connect some of those dots” around GOP efforts in the states and before the Supreme Court. But, York added of the critiques of Democrats, “you can only do that so many times.”

The subtext of Newsom’s latest moves, however, is that he is the rare Democrat in an enviable position. After soundly beating back the recall, Newsom is sitting on a record state budget surplus and had more than $25 million in his campaign accounts. His U.S. Senate and state attorney general appointees will keep their seats; the state is bouncing back from the pandemic; he’s preparing to sign a raft of gun control bills — including one modeled after Texas’ new abortion law allowing people to sue healthcare providers — and he’s helping lead the fight around abortion rights to a state constitutional amendment on the fall ballot.

With no real fall campaign, his team has talked about turning him into a one-man tourism bureau, traveling to landmarks and far-flung corners and urging Americans to spend their travel dollars there. The side effect of such freedom is that it sparks a lot of chatter about larger political ambition. And though the governor’s allies downplay such talk, a longtime Newsom friend described him as appearing “unshackled from any expectations.”

“He’s on the mountaintop,” the friend said. “Now, there’s of course a question of what the next mountain will be. But he’s going to be governor for another four years. He’s in the job he always wanted. He has no reason to be timid at his age or at this stage in his life.”

***

Few in Newsom’s orbit at the moment think he would challenge Biden in 2024 — though some are now operating on the assumption the president won’t run. If Biden does, indeed, bow out, Newsom would be unlikely to take on Harris. But if her candidacy appeared weak, it would not be unthinkable.

The vice president bombed in the last presidential campaign, and many Democrats, nervous about her prospects as a nominee, are already pining for potential alternatives. Harris’ standing — and Biden’s — may only deteriorate after a midterm election in which Democrats are bracing for widespread losses.

Already, Harris’ orbit has taken notice. Bakari Sellers, a Democrat close to the vice president who served as a top surrogate for her in 2020, said that Newsom is “no threat to the VP for anything she decides or wants to do. But you have to tread lightly because Joe Biden is still president of the United States and Joe Biden is running again in 2024.”

“An older guy once told me you don’t want to fly too close to the sun,” Sellers added. “I like what Newsom is doing, but I don’t want him to be Icarus and sometimes he gets too close to the sun.”

And Brown, an early mentor to both Newsom and Harris, told POLITICO he would advise Newsom not to join a presidential field that included Harris. He suspected that would be Newsom’s “natural instinct” as well. “He’s a very careful, precise, candidate,” Brown said.

Members of Newsom’s team, which includes advisers who previously consulted for Harris, largely agree with Brown. Still, a Democratic operative who has spent years batting down suggestions that Newsom and Harris were on an eventual collision course said they aren’t so sure anymore that Newsom would stand down.

One lane that may be available to Newsom would be as a late entrant into a Democratic primary, either in 2024 if Biden does not run again, or in 2028 — waiting in either scenario to see first if Harris somehow opts out or stumbles. By waiting, he would avoid a direct confrontation with Harris while presenting himself as an alternative.

“If it’s a wide-open race, I think he can come in late and be competitive,” said Danielle Cendejas, a California-based Democratic strategist.

Still, like most California Democrats, she is skeptical of Newsom’s prospects. For as many Democrats as live in California, the state is a perennial punching bag for much of the rest of the country. Harris, the last viable presidential candidate from the state, imploded so quickly she dropped out before the Iowa caucuses. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, after traveling the country for months mulling a presidential campaign, elected not to run.

“I don’t see it,” Cendejas said. “It is hard to see that the timing is right for someone like Newsom.”

If he does run, Newsom would immediately join the ranks of credible, upper-tier contenders — a proven vote-getter with a large donor list and connections to Democratic Party heavyweights in organized labor, Silicon Valley and in Hollywood. At 54, he is young in presidential terms. And in November he will almost certainly cruise to a second term, pulling more votes — if last year’s failed recall election is any indication — than the whole populations of many states.

“He’s got a huge constituency because he’s the governor of the most populous state,” said James Carville, the former Bill Clinton strategist. “He’s got an enormous fundraising base and a lot of delegates there.”

However, Carville said, “One thing we do know, and pretty conclusively, is that the most important voting bloc in picking a Democratic nominee are southern Blacks. And the question for Gov. Newsom is, is that going to travel?”

Given California’s relatively small Black population — standing at less than 7 percent — Carville said, “I’ll take a wait and see attitude.”

Newsom has a history of rankling his own party dating back to his days as San Francisco mayor. In 2004, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein suggested Newsom’s issuance of gay marriage licenses gave conservatives an issue to rally around in that year’s presidential campaign.

But while Newsom may be a risk-taker, he’s not politically suicidal. Nor does he lack an antenna. In 2009, he abandoned his campaign for California governor months before the primary, after it became clear that former Gov. Jerry Brown would win. Instead, he sought the office of lieutenant governor and was elected governor in 2018 when Brown left after serving four nonconsecutive terms.

“There are worse things than being governor of the largest state in America,” said Garry South, a Democratic strategist who advised Newsom in the run-up to 2010. “It’s not like he’s the governor of Wyoming or Rhode Island.”

He said, “I have no idea what’s going on in Newsom’s head, but I know the guy pretty well. … Frankly, I’ve never got the feeling from him that he was just dying to run for president.”

President Joe Biden on Wednesday again blamed Russia’s war in Ukraine for recent hikes in fuel prices, as he pushed for Congress to suspend the federal gas tax.

“We could have turned a blind eye to Putin’s murderous ways,” Biden said in a short speech at the White House, referring to President Vladimir Putin of Russia. “The price of gas wouldn’t have spiked the way it has. I believe that would have been wrong.”

The president contrasted the bipartisan support for Ukraine with criticism of his administration on rising gas prices. His administration has faced mounting disapproval for near-record levels of inflation.

“Are you saying that we would rather have lower gas prices in America and Putin’s iron fist in Europe?” Biden said. “I don’t believe that.”

Biden asked oil companies to increase refining capacity and pass “every penny” of their savings from the proposed gas tax holiday on to consumers. Earlier Wednesday he called for a three-month suspension of the 18-cent-per-gallon federal gas tax, but it seems unlikely to pass in Congress.

In his speech, the president said states should also find other solutions to lower consumer gas prices, such as eliminating their own gas taxes or offering rebates to households.

A combination of all Biden’s asks — a federal gas tax holiday, state gas tax holidays, increased refinery capacity and oil companies and gas stations passing on savings to consumers — could lower gas prices by about a dollar a gallon, he said.

The federal gas tax is used to fund highways, but Biden said highways would continue to be maintained through higher tax revenues and a lower deficit this year.

“We can do both at the same time,” Biden said. “We can bring down the price of gas and give families just a little bit of relief.”

In the long term, Biden said, the experience of rising gas prices demonstrates a need for electric vehicles, expanded public transportation systems and alternative energy resources such as wind, solar and nuclear.