A potentially long-shot legal fight to challenge President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election race is now quietly moving forward after his historic decision to bow out on Sunday.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project has been leading the threat of legal action, publicizing a June 21 memo on the matter immediately after last month’s presidential debate, the event that catalyzed the president’s decision to end his campaign. The memo warned of a “contentious path” to replacing Biden on the ballot, though questions linger as to whether they will bear fruit as Biden steers Democrats to coalesce around Vice President Kamala Harris.
In a brief post to X, formerly known as Twitter, the Oversight Project said to “Stay tuned” for more information about efforts to litigate the president and former presumptive nominee’s decision to bow out of the race.
“We have been preparing for this moment for months … Many in the media tried discrediting us … Who is laughing now? No more ‘making it up as you go’ elections,” the account added.
Now, plans and strategies about whether to move ahead with lawsuits to challenge Biden’s abrupt campaign suspension are underway. The Oversight Project intends to keep all information pertaining to potential challenges relegated to court briefs and via announcements through official social media accounts, a source told the Washington Examiner.
While it’s unclear at this time where lawsuits may be filed, the memo released last month suggested there could be litigation in Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin if anyone other than Biden is the nominee, though election law experts have countered that Biden was never officially named the nominee for the Democratic ticket and that his withdrawal comes well before the states’ ballot certification deadlines.
University of California professor Rick Hasen wrote in a recent blog post that the road to contesting the substitute candidate on state election ballots appears futile if not entirely pointless.
“In the unlikely event that a state law would make Biden be forced to be listed on the ballot (I’m not even sure how that could be), then I expect litigation would place the actual nominee of the party on the ballot,” Hasen said. “Voters should have the right to vote for the party’s candidate, and there are cases that affirm this principle that go back a while.”
Litigators who would aim to contest any legal effort to stop the swap of a new Democratic candidate include veteran Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias, who affirmed Sunday that the “Democratic nominee for president will be on all 50 state ballots.”
“There is no basis for any legal challenge. Period,” Elias added.
Though now it’s conservatives group such as the Heritage Foundation who are challenging a candidate’s validity, earlier this year Democrat groups saw failure to knock Trump off the ballot.
In a lawsuit stemming from Colorado and brought by the left-wing Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 to keep Trump on all state election ballots after a small cohort of voters cited his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 riot as the basis to bar him from office under the 14th Amendment.
Before Biden’s sudden withdrawal letter was issued Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) hinted at potential legal challenges to Biden’s removal earlier Sunday, though he did not specify a legal strategy.
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“I think they’ve got legal hurdles in some of these states,” he mentioned on CNN, noting that 14 million people cast their votes for Biden in the primary election. “And it’ll be litigated, I would expect, on the ground there.”
Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison seemed to indicate on Sunday that the choice to replace Biden would be made via an open convention, although Harris may ultimately be the top choice. The Democratic National Convention will be held August 19-22 in Chicago.
