Texas progressive Lloyd Doggett tears Democratic dam for Biden

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a little-known progressive Texan, on Tuesday became the first Democrat in Congress to call on President Biden to resign as the party’s nominee after a fraught debate that raised major questions about his health, age and mental acuity.

By making his concerns public, Mr. Doggett, who has represented his Austin district for nearly 30 years, spoke loudly what most other Democrats have dared to say only in private since Thursday’s debate.

Mr. Doggett is a run-of-the-mill congressman with little national profile. But his public statement reflected a growing sense of foreboding and concern among Democrats about whether Mr. Biden can remain the party’s nominee, and whether doing so could cost the party not only the White House but any chance of controlling Congress.

“President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020,” Mr. Doggett said in the statement. “He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024.”

In an interview on Tuesday afternoon, the congressman said he made the decision to break with his party and call on Mr Biden to withdraw from the race after feeling “alarmed” while watching the debate with his wife at their Washington home.

He was dismayed when Mr. Biden didn’t even attempt to debunk many of the falsehoods that former President Donald J. Trump presented in his answers. He was dismayed when the president seemed to lose his train of thought and wandered off into a discussion of health care, ending one answer with the words, “We defeated Medicare.” And “we were all concerned,” he said, about Mr. Biden’s lack of robust answers on abortion and reproductive freedom.

The next morning, Mr. Doggett said he had spoken to “everyone I could find” within the Democratic leadership and privately expressed his strong feelings that the president should step aside.

His discomfort grew after he returned to his Texas district last weekend, where he said the feedback was “10 to one in favor of the president withdrawing.” The Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday that “official” actions Trump took while in office were immune from prosecution was, in Doggett’s eyes, “the last straw.”

“It was clear that there would be no checks and balances on Trump if he were president,” Mr. Doggett said in the interview. He feared that a second Trump term would usher in “a much more authoritative administration” — a risk he said the country could ill afford.

“We have to choose our strongest candidate, and the public says that is not President Biden,” Mr. Doggett said. “I feel the same way.”

Doggett’s call for Biden to withdraw was in some ways reminiscent of his early days in Congress, when he was a prominent voice for the left wing of his party.

His 1994 victory was a bright spot for Democrats in an election year that saw Republicans regain control of the House for the first time in 40 years. Mr. Doggett also made a name for himself in the early 2000s as an outspoken opponent of Congress’s decision to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In 2015, he co-founded the House Affordable Drug Pricing Task Force.

Yet multiple redistricting and the recent influx of a younger, louder and more diverse group of progressives into Congress have relegated Mr. Doggett to relative obscurity. He is the only white male Democrat left in the Texas delegation.

Mr. Doggett’s position on the presidential nomination differs markedly from that of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat and a close ally of Mr. Doggett, whom he supported for speaker in 2002 over fellow Texas Republican Martin Frost.

Unlike Mr. Doggett, Ms. Pelosi spent the weekend on national television silencing doubters and insisting that the president’s debate performance was an anomaly. After saying Tuesday that there could be “legitimate” questions about whether last week “was an episode or whether this is a condition,” a spokesman later clarified that she had “full confidence” in the president and looked forward to his inauguration in January 2025.

Mr. Doggett does not believe that is a likely outcome. In his statement, he noted that his congressional district was once represented by Lyndon B. Johnson, who surprised Americans in 1968 by announcing that he would not seek re-election.

“Unlike Trump, Biden really wants to put country first,” Mr. Doggett said in the interview. “He can put country first by putting himself aside.”