Biden raps apex court at fundraiser in LA while Trump woos Michigan

President Joe Biden slammed the US Supreme Court as “out of kilter” at a glitzy fundraiser in Los Angeles on Saturday with former president Barack Obama and top Hollywood celebrities that has raised over $30mn.
Late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel began by showing a video montage contrasting Biden’s record with that of his predecessor and current Republican challenger Donald Trump.
He drew cheers from the audience at a packed Peacock Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, where Hollywood celebrities George Clooney, Julia Roberts and singing icon Barbra Streisand were among the guests.
Despite the Hollywood heavyweights, Biden turned serious when he spoke of his rival Trump, and how whoever wins the election will likely have at least two new Supreme Court nominations to make.
“The idea that if he’s re-elected he’s going to appoint two more flying flags upside down,” Biden said, referring to recent tumult over conservative sitting Justice Samuel Alito who was recently confirmed to have had the inverted American flag – a symbol of Trump’s false election fraud claims – raised outside his homes in Virginia and New Jersey.
Biden, a Democrat who has frequently denounced specific decisions but resisted a full attack on the court itself, said: “The fact of the matter is that there has never been a court that is this far out of step.”
He noted that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas had said that the court, which overturned the half-century-old federal right to abortion, should reconsider such things as in vitro fertilisation and contraception.
Trump nominated three of the six conservatives who control the nine-member court. He and Biden are in a tight rematch race for the November 5 election.
If Trump is elected again, Biden said, he “is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees”.
Democratic lawmakers, citing the flag displays, have said Alito should recuse himself from a case involving Trump’s claim of presidential immunity from prosecution on federal criminal charges relating to his efforts to overturn the 2020 results.
Since Biden took office, the court’s conservative majority has also restricted affirmative action, gender minority rights, gun control and environmental regulation.
It has blocked the president’s agenda on immigration, student loans, vaccine mandates and climate change.
Obama said that “the power of the Supreme Court is determined by elections. What we’re seeing now is a byproduct of 2016” when Trump was elected. “Hopefully we have learned our lesson. Because these elections matter.”
Obama also invoked Trump’s felony convictions to applause from the crowd.
Trump was convicted by a New York jury on May 30 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
The Biden campaign hoped the star-studded event would display strength and momentum despite Biden’s low approval ratings and concerns about the age of the president, who is 81.
“This will be one of the biggest fundraisers we’ve had,” said Ajay Jain Bhutoria, deputy finance chair at the Democratic National Committee.
A Biden campaign spokeswoman said that “$28mn heading into President Biden’s LA fundraiser – and counting. This is the largest Democratic fundraiser in history”.
Biden campaign’s fundraising in April lagged Trump’s for the first time, after the former president ramped up his joint operation with the Republican National Committee and headlined high-dollar fundraisers.
Democrats still maintained an overall cash advantage over Trump and the Biden campaign continues to have a considerably larger war chest.
Trump was also on the campaign trail, boasting in Detroit, Michigan that his own fundraising is “the highest in the history of politics”.
Michigan is a must-win state for Biden in November’s electoral mathematics.
Aiming to eat into Biden’s key electoral support from African Americans there, Trump visited a black church in Detroit and told hundreds of voters that “crooked Joe Biden has done nothing for you except talk”.
Trump then headed to a starkly different venue: a convention of high-profile hard-right Republicans and supporters of his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
At the Turning Point USA convention, Trump railed against Biden’s climate protection package, mocked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “salesman”, and renewed his incendiary rhetoric about what he branded the “Biden migrant invasion”, saying he will stop it with the biggest deportation operation in American history.
In a characteristically rambling 80-minute speech – frequently interrupted by loud cheering – Trump claimed that help for migrants leaves US war veterans “lying in the streets” and veered into everything from extended complaints about modern showers to repeating his lie that his 2020 election loss was “rigged and stolen”.
“We have a rigged country. We have rigged elections, we have open borders,” he said.
Biden and Trump are tied in national polls with less than five months to go before the election, while Trump has the edge in the battleground states that will decide the election, recent polls show.
On economic issues like inflation, Trump scores higher with voters overall than Biden.