Joe Biden hails Jimmy Carter’s character in eulogy at memorial service celebrating former president’s long life – latest updates | US politics

Joe Biden has canceled a trip to Italy and the Vatican City he was scheduled to embark on today in response to the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles county.

“After returning this evening from Los Angeles, where earlier today he had met with police, fire and emergency personnel fighting the historic fires raging in the area and approved a Major Disaster declaration for California, President Biden made the decision to cancel his upcoming trip to Italy to remain focused on directing the full federal response in the days ahead,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced yesterday.

The White House just announced Biden will convene a meeting of senior officials at 4.30pm to discuss his administration’s response to the fires. For the latest on the blazes, follow our live blog:

The House has voted 243-140 to pass a bill that sanctions the international criminal court over its arrest warrant for Israeli leaders including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, NBCLA’s Jacob Wheeler reports.

According to Wheeler, 45 Democrats sided with Republicans in voting “yes” to the bill.

The vote comes amid American lawmakers’ attempts to defend Israel and its leaders over its war waged across the Gaza strip which has killed over 46,000 Palestinians since 7 October 2023 when Hamas attacked Israel and killed over 1,200 Israelis.

Last June, 93 member states said that the ICC must be allowed to carry out its work “without intimidation” following revelations of Israeli interference.

Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator John Fetterman said on Thursday that he has expected an invitation to meet with Donald Trump, CBS reports.

According to the outlet, Fetterman, who will be the first sitting Democratic senator to meet with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort, said:

“That is the plan. Yes, we are going to have a conversation.”

He went on to add:

“I think that one, he’s the president, or he will be officially… And I think it’s pretty reasonable that if the president would like to have a conversation — or invite someone to have a conversation — to have it. And no one is my gatekeeper.”

As Donald Trump attended Jimmy Carter’s funeral service at the National Cathedral in Washington DC on Thursday, New York’s court of appeals declined to block his sentencing in his hush-money case.

The Guardian’s Joan Greve and agencies report:

One judge on the New York court of appeals issued a brief order declining to grant a hearing to Trump’s legal team.

“Your proposed order to show cause was reviewed by Judge Rivera, who declined to sign the order,” the court’s chief clerk wrote to Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s lawyers. “As a result of the Judge’s determination, no motion is pending in the above title at the Court of Appeals.”

The news comes less than a week after the judge who presided over Trump’s trial, Juan Merchan, denied the president-elect’s motion to dismiss the case. Trump’s legal team had argued that the presidential transition process should be allowed to continue without the disruption of a criminal sentencing hearing, but Merchan disputed that logic.

For the full story, click here:

Joe Biden and the four living ex-presidents, Donald Trump among them, met at the National Cathedral in Washington DC for Jimmy Carter’s memorial service, the first time such a gathering had occurred since George HW Bush’s funeral in 2018. The president delivered a eulogy for Carter, in which he hailed Carter’s character, which he called his “enduring tribute”. So, too, did Carter family members, and the sons of his vice-president Walter Mondale and Gerald Ford, the Republican president Carter defeated in 1976. Carter’s casket is now on its way to his hometown Plains, Georgia, where he will be buried at his home after a private funeral for family later today.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

Politico reports that Michelle Obama is in Hawaii, and missed Jimmy Carter’s memorial service because she had a scheduling conflict.

She was the lone former first lady not to attend, leaving Barack Obama to sit next to Donald Trump. The two former presidents – the latter of whom will be back in power soon – shared what looked to be some amiable conversation before the memorial started.

Jimmy Carter’s memorial service was attended by a host of foreign officials, including Canada’s outgoing prime minister Justin Trudeau, United Nations secretary general António Guterres and Britain’s Prince Edward.

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown was also in attendance:

Military pallbearers have picked up Jimmy Carter’s casket and taken it out of the National Cathedral. Joe Biden and the former presidents stood with their hands over their hearts as they passed.

Carter’s casket is now scheduled to be driven to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and then flown to an army airfield in Georgia. There, it will be Secret Service employees who protected the former president.

This afternoon, Carter’s family will hold a private funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown Plains, where he taught Sunday school. Carter will then be buried at his home.

Joe Biden reached out and touched Jimmy Carter’s casket as he walked back to his seat after finishing his eulogy.

The homily was just delivered by Andrew Young, a former congressman and mayor of Atlanta who Jimmy Carter appointed as ambassador to the United Nations.

“Time and time again, I saw in him the ability to achieve greatness by the diversity of his personality and his upbringing. Dr King used to say that greatness is characterized by antitheses, strongly marked. You’ve got to have a tough mind and a tender heart, and that was Jimmy Carter,” Young said.

“And he grew up in the tremendous diversity of the South, and he embraced both sides. He was a minority in Sumter county – just about 20% 25% of the population was white, but growing up as a minority, he became the friend of the majority.”

Young concluded:

I never cease to be surprised, I never cease to be enlightened, I never cease to be inspired by the little deeds of love and mercy that he shared with us every day of his life.

It was President James Earl Carter that for me symbolized the greatness of the United States of America, and I am truly grateful for him, because in spite of the harshness of the depression and the explosions of inflation, he never wavered from his commitment to God Almighty and his love of all of God’s children.

Jimmy Carter was a blessing that helped to create a great United States of America, and for all of us and many who are not able to be here, I want to say thank you.

After finishing his speech, Biden returned to his seat next to Jill Biden.

The former presidents and vice-presidents in attendance are not scheduled to speak.

Biden closed by reflecting on his visit to the Carters’s home in Plains, Georgia shortly after taking office, and saying he missed the former president.

“To young people, to anyone in search of meaning and purpose: study the power of Jimmy Carter’s example. I miss him, but I take solace in knowing that his beloved Rosalynn are reunited again,” the president said. Former first lady Rosalynn Carter died in 2023.

“To the entire Carter family, thank you, and I mean this sincerely, for sharing them both with America and the world. We love you all. Jill and I will cherish our visits with them, including that last one in their home. We saw Jimmy as he always was, at peace with a life fully lived, a good life, a purpose and meaning of character, driven by destiny and filled with the power of faith, hope and love.”

Echoing the remarks of others who eulogized him, Biden described Jimmy Carter as a president who saw today’s challenges coming long before they arrived.

“Many think he was from a bygone era, but in reality, he saw a well into the future,” the president said.

“A white southern Baptist who led on civil rights, a decorated navy veteran who brokered peace, a brilliant nuclear engineer who led on nuclear nonproliferation, a hard-working farmer who championed conservation and clean energy, the president who redefined the relationship with the vice-president.”

“As we all know, Jimmy Carter also established a model post-presidency by making a powerful difference as a private citizen in America, and, I might add, as you all know, around the world. Through it all, he showed us how character and faith start with ourselves and then flows to others.”

Joe Biden began by noting that he may have been the first senator to endorse Jimmy Carter’s candidacy for president in 1976, “based on what I believe is Jimmy Carter’s enduring attribute: character, character, character”.

“Character, I believe, is destiny. Destiny in our lives, and, quite frankly, destiny in the life of the nation. It’s an accumulation of a million things built on character that leads to a good life in a decent country,” Biden said.

“Jimmy Carter’s friendship taught me, and through his life, taught me, that strength of character is more than title or the power we hold. It’s the strength to understand that everyone should be treated with dignity, respect, that everyone, and I mean everyone, deserves an even shot.”

Joe Biden has stepped up to the podium to deliver a eulogy for Jimmy Carter at the National Cathedral.

He began by remarking on how he visited Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter shortly after taking office.

After leaving the presidency at the age of 56, Jimmy Carter dedicated himself to several causes, chief among them eradicating guinea worm.

The debilitating disease once affected millions of people each year in Asian and African countries, but thanks to efforts by Carter and other health organizations, has been almost entirely eradicated.

The former president’s grandson Jason Carter remarked on that in his just-concluded eulogy:

We’ve all heard a lot lately about guinea worm disease. It’s an ancient and debilitating disease of poverty, and that disease will have existed from the dawn of humanity until Jimmy Carter.

When he started working on this disease, there were three-and-a-half million cases in humans every year. Last year, there were 14. And the thing that’s remarkable is that this disease is not eliminated with medicine. It’s eliminated essentially by neighbors talking to neighbors about how to collect water in the poorest and most marginalized villages in the world, and those neighbors truly were my grandfather’s partners for the last 40 years.

And as this disease has been eliminated in every village in Nigeria, every village in Sudan or Uganda, what’s left behind in those tiny 600 person villages is an army of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s, who have demonstrated their own power to change their world.

Here’s more about the philanthropic work Carter undertook after leaving the White House:

In his eulogy, Jimmy Carter’s former White House domestic affairs adviser Stuart Eizenstat mounted a defense of his record as president.

Carter struggled to maintain his public support while in the White House, and overwhelmingly lost his bid for a second term in 1980 to Republican Ronald Reagan.

“As we lay our 39th president to rest, it’s time to redeem his presidency and also lay to rest the myth that his greatest achievements came only as a former president,” Eizenstat said.

He recounted how Carter, a southerner whose home state Georgia once practiced segregation, appointed people of color as judges and top administration officials. Eizenstat noted that the former president created the education department and Federal Emergency Management Agency, which remains “crucially important today, and we see it in Los Angeles”.

While crediting Carter with fighting climate change, Eizenstat added that “his energy bills were critical to move our country from dependence on foreign oil to energy security. We are now, as a result, the largest oil and gas producer in the world”.

“He may not be a candidate for Mount Rushmore, but he belongs in the foothills of making the US stronger and the world safer,” Eizenstat said in conclusion.

Here’s more about the political headwinds Carter faced during his presidency:

In a eulogy for Jimmy Carter delivered by his son, former vice-president Walter Mondale credited his boss with attempting to tackle climate change long before it became a global crisis.

“Carter was far-sighted. He put aside his short term political interests to tackle challenges that demanded sacrifice to protect our kids and grandkids from future harm. Very few people in the 1970s had heard the term climate change, yet Carter put his presidency on the line to pass laws to conserve energy, deregulate new oil and gas prices and invest in clean renewable alternatives to fossil fuels,” Mondale, who died in 2021, wrote in the eulogy being read by Ted Mondale, a former Minnesota state senator.

“It wasn’t a perfect program, but thanks to President Carter, US energy consumption declined by 10% between 1979 and 1983. In many ways, he laid the foundation for future presidents to come to grips with climate change. Some thought he was crazy to fight so hard to pass these laws, but he was dead right, and we know that now.”

At that last line, Ted Mondale appeared to look directly at the former presidents that are seated right in front of him. Among that group is Donald Trump and George W Bush, whose administrations did little to tackle the climate crisis.

Jimmy Carter beat Republican President Gerald Ford in the 1976 election, but the two political rivals later became friends, and agreed to deliver eulogies at each other’s funerals.

Carter followed through on that promise after Ford died in 2006, and today, the Republican’s duty has fallen to his son, Steven Ford. “I can just see my dad getting his yellow legal pad out with his pen and writing this for his beloved friend,” Ford said as he began.

Here’s part of it:

By fate of a brief season, Jimmy Carter and I were rivals, but for the many wonderful years that followed, friendship bonded us as no two presidents since John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It is said that president Adams’s last words were “Thomas Jefferson still survives”.

Now, since Jimmy has a good decade on me, I’m hedging my bets by entrusting my remembrances of Jimmy to my son, Steve. According to a map, it’s a long way between Grand Rapids, Michigan and Plains, Georgia, but distances have a way of vanishing when measured in values rather than miles. And it was because of our shared values that Jimmy and I respected each other as adversaries even before we cherished one another as dear friends.

Now, this is not to say that Jimmy never got under my skin, but has there ever been a group of politicians that didn’t do that to one another? During our 1976 contest, Jimmy knew my political vulnerabilities and he successfully pointed them out. Now, I didn’t like it, but little could I know that the outcome of that 1976 election would bring about one of my deepest and most enduring friendships.