AUSTIN (KXAN) — President Joe Biden’s visit to Austin to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came at another historic moment that’s not without precedent.
Sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Biden told the nation in a televised address that the “best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.” Five days later, the president visited the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, where the landmark Civil Rights Act is currently on display. It’s Biden’s first major trip since the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump and Biden’s bout with COVID-19.
It also echoes another Oval Office exit.
On March 31, 1968, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, from the Texas Hill Country, gave a nationwide address from the Oval Office announcing he wouldn’t seek a second term.
“I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president,” Johnson said in a surprise decision that came amid anger over the Vietnam War.
Political expert Joshua Blank watched Biden’s speech last week. He and other historians see parallels between the two former senators-turned VP-then president. Both Johnson and Biden faced doubts over their electability and pressure from their own party to step aside. Both were also praised for their decision to not seek reelection.
“I thought, in and of itself, it was historical,” said Blank, when asked about Biden’s speech. “It was a moment of living history.”
‘We don’t see ourselves as a lame duck president’
Blank, a research director at the nonpartisan Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, polled Texans last month and found: 32% say the economy and inflation — issues also facing LBJ — are top of mind.
Other issues Texans want to hear the candidates talk about, according to the Texas Politics Project:
- Immigration/border security: 22%
- Abortion/women’s rights: 6%
- Democracy: 4%
- Healthcare: 3%
- Corruption: 3%
- Climate change/environment: 3%
“Without a doubt, the price of goods is still the issue most on voters’ mind because they feel it every day,” said Blank. “They feel it at the gas pump. They feel it when they buy their groceries.”
President Biden has a wish list of proposals, including major ones announced in Austin on Monday, that he would like to accomplish before the end of his term. Experts say a divided Congress, and lame duck status, will make that difficult to accomplish. On the president’s plate now is an unfinished and ambitious agenda that includes the economy, gun violence and immigration.
“We’re also securing our border,” Biden said in his speech last week. “Border crossings are lower today than when the previous administration left office.”
Illegal crossings from Mexico into the U.S. are at a three-year low, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. In June, CBP processed 83,536 migrants who illegally crossed the southwest border into the U.S., marking four months of declines. Last month, Biden signed a proclamation to “temporarily suspend the entry of certain noncitizens across the southern border,” CBP said.
In his Oval Office address last week, Biden said “over the next six months” he will be “focused on doing my job as president.” The president specifically mentioned the following wish list of priorities: lowering costs, growing the economy, defending civil rights “from the right to vote to the right to choose,” gun violence, climate change, Supreme Court reform and ending cancer as well as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Biden said he will also work to free the hostages and all Americans unjustly detained around the world.
‘Very unlikely’
On Monday, before arriving in Austin, the president again called for Supreme Court reform to include term limits and an ethics code. Biden reiterated that call while speaking at the LBJ Library. He also told the Austin crowd he wants Congress to reverse a recent Supreme Court ruling giving former presidents broad immunity from prosecution.
There are “no kings in America,” Biden said.
“He wants to finish the job that he started and deliver more historic results for the American people,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a briefing last week, adding Biden is “going to run through the finish line” of his term as he winds down a political career that started more than 50 years ago.
“We don’t see ourselves as a lame duck president at all in this period of time,” she added.
While the president is pushing ahead, Blank said he believes the White House will mostly get pushback from a divided Congress. That began happening on Monday when Republican Speaker Mike Johnson said Biden’s Supreme Court reform plan would be “dead on arrival” in the House.
Speaking at the LBJ Library, Biden countered by saying Johnson’s “thinking is dead on arrival” to applause.
“It’s very unlikely that the Republican House would deliver the president any victories during this time, in an election year, so late in his term,” said Blank.
“Once an executive office holder at any level of government, whether it be a governor or president, says they’re not running for reelection, they lose power,” he added. “And it’s not because members of the other party all of a sudden say, ‘I don’t want to work with you.’ It’s because the power they hold over their own party wanes dramatically as people are looking to see who’s next.”
For Democrats, that attention is turning to presumptive nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris was born three months after LBJ signed the landmark Civil Rights Act — the reason for Biden’s Austin visit.