Is the First Democrat in Congress Calling For Biden to Drop Out a Gadfly—or the First Domino to Fall? (2024)

The first sitting Democratic member of Congress has officially called on President Joe Biden to drop out: The representative of Texas’ 37^th Congressional District, Lloyd Doggett, put out a statement Tuesday publicly requesting that the president withdraw from the 2024 election. Although Doggett joins a chorus of calls from just outside the Democratic Party—former members of Congress, current candidates—he is officially the first to break the seal in a quickly evolving situation regarding the president’s reelection.

“I represent the heart of the congressional district once represented by Lyndon Johnson. Under very different circ*mstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw. President Biden should do the same. While much of his work has been transformational, he pledged to be transitional,” wrote Doggett. Citing the recent Supreme Court decision bestowing criminal immunity on presidents, Doggett added, “President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020. He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024.”

The statement, laudatory but stern, is a groundshaking development for the embattled president. Despite the undeniable debacle of Thursday’s debate, elected Democrats have remained fearful of stepping out and calling on Biden to withdraw. No longer. Yet for many Americans, even for many Democrats, the first question that comes to mind is: Who is Lloyd Doggett?

Doggett represents Austin, Texas, a blue stronghold in the middle of the notoriously red state. He is no spring chicken himself; Doggett is 77 years old and has been in Congress since 1995.

Nor is he a household name. Doggett is a longtime progressive, a member of the Progressive Caucus and a co-sponsor of Medicare for All. He is renowned among congressional operatives and aides for his ability to get bills started. But he is not an attention grabber or a rabble-rouser; no one would confuse him for a power broker or a member of the Squad (or, despite his repping the politician’s former district, for LBJ).

The most recent time Doggett found himself in the national news, it was over a bitter internecine fight between Dems in 2019, over prescription drug pricing. That scrap found him on the losing end. Doggett introduced a number of amendments in the Ways and Means Committee to Nancy Pelosi’s signature H.R. 3, the prescription drug regulation package, changes that would have given the measure real teeth and moved it to the left. These were hardly radical additions, but rather simple and likely very popular tweaks, including expanding the number of drugs eligible for price negotiation by the federal government and lowering rates for the uninsured.

Doggett’s amendments were stomped out by Democratic leadership—some might say brutally. Committee Chairman Richie Neal, working in tandem with Pelosi, obliterated his efforts. Neal, who has long been a top recipient of donations from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, declined to comment publicly on the substance of the amendments, insisting that he merely wanted to stick with his own version, and he did. (H.R. 3 passed the House and died in the Republican-controlled Senate.) And Doggett has been scarcely heard from in the national press in the years since.

His decision to break rank and become the first Democratic congressman to call for Biden’s withdrawal is a watershed moment. It may be the beginning of the dam breaking against the obviously declining president’s beleaguered reelection campaign.

But Doggett is no Pelosi, no Hakeem Jeffries, no Jim Clyburn. He is very much not a member of leadership; he’s one of the more marginal members of the House Democratic Caucus despite his long tenure. And for that reason, his call may also end up meaning little.

“He is more of a gadfly,” said one Democratic operative, who has worked closely with Doggett’s office in the past. “If there is an effort to get Biden to step down, having Doggett calling first instead of someone from leadership could make it harder.”

Still, if recent history is any indication, progressives are almost always the first movers when it comes to consequential, sometimes risky decisions made by the Democratic Party (though they get little credit for it). Just Monday, it was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who made waves by becoming the first Democrat to announce that she would file articles of impeachment against at least one Supreme Court justice who has engaged in flagrantly unethical behavior that should well have disqualified them from their post. Ranking Democrats in the relevant committees in the House and Senate have sat on their hands for years as reports of justices’ misdeeds have poured in.

The most recent Trump impeachment is perhaps even more instructive. Immediately after the Jan. 6 insurrection in 2021, the very first elected Democrats to go public with their call for a Trump impeachment were members of the Squad and their affiliates. Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, who had just been sworn in for her first term, was the first to call for Trump’s impeachment over his role in the riot that left five people dead. Shortly after her came then-progressive Mondaire Jones (who has since had a conservative epiphany), Chicagoland’s Marie Newman, and original Squad member Ayanna Pressley. Ilhan Omar soon announced that she would be drawing up articles of impeachment.

Pelosi, then speaker of the House, was initially opposed to the move for impeachment. She eventually came around, and Trump was impeached a second time, but it’s possible that wouldn’t have happened had it not been for vocal and public progressive leadership on the issue.

So, Doggett’s statement may turn out to be a one-off call from the party’s backbench. Or he may be the first progressive to step out and lead on a historic turn of events, as Democrats scramble to save themselves from electoral catastrophe before it’s too late.

A number of recently published polls show Biden now trailing Trump badly, and a number of lesser-known Democratic possibilities, including the vice president, are polling better than Biden head-to-head against Trump, adding even more volume to calls for Biden to stand down.

At this point, it seems as though anything could still happen. But on the same afternoon as Doggett’s call, Clyburn—the man credited with saving Biden’s 2020 election campaign, and the only member of the old leadership team in the House who didn’t step down during this most recent Congress—made an eye-opening statement of support for the vice president. “I will support” Vice President Kamala Harris if Biden “were to step aside,” he told MSNBC.

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