Joe biden

It’s going to be an awkward Fourth of July cookout chez Biden, as Hunter’s legal team is reportedly planning to invoke a Supreme Court ruling dad Joe said “contradicts both common sense and the Constitution.” But hey, Hunter seems to be thinking, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right? Especially when doing so could keep you out of prison. The SCTOUS opinion that new Second Amendment rights poster-boy Hunter Biden is embracing was handed down in June 2022. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen challenged a New York law requiring residents applying for concealed carry weapons permits to show “proper cause” for carrying a gun.

The House will vote on Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden’s debt-ceiling deal this evening and, by all accounts, the speaker has stuck the landing. Having reached an agreement with the White House, McCarthy got his way in a crucial Rules Committee meeting yesterday, fought off a Freedom Caucus rebellion and looks set to win support for his deal from a majority of his conference.  To the great disappointment of those banking on a bruising Republican civil war, McCarthy evidently feels secure in his position. Asked about the possibility of disgruntled hardliners filing a motion to vacate today, McCarthy replied: “Look, everybody has the ability to do what they want. But if you think I’m going to wake up in the morning and ever be worried about that, no. Doesn’t bother me.

Welcome to a later-than-usual debt-ceiling brinkmanship special edition of the DC Diary. The mood music was encouraging as Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden sat down for talks in the Oval Office this evening. “We still have some disagreements, but I think we may be able to get where we have to go,” said Biden to pool reporters. “We both know we have a significant responsibility.” McCarthy was similarly positive. Hours earlier, treasury secretary Janet Yellen wrote to lawmakers telling everyone what they already knew: that the US is “highly likely” to run out of money to pay all its bills if “Congress has not acted to raise or suspend the debt” as early as June 1. Not news, exactly, but an effort to focus minds.

"Negative partisanship” is a notorious feature of American politics. In presidential elections especially, voters don’t vote for the party and candidate they like; they vote against the party and candidate they fear. This is one reason third-party politics is a waste of time. If voters want to prevent the worst outcome, they will always choose the most viable alternative over the best alternative. For Joe Biden in 2020, it was enough that he wasn’t Donald Trump. For Trump in 2016, it was enough that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Next year, we’ll find out whether the voting public now views Biden as more like Clinton or still considers him better than Trump.

The pandemic-era immigration policy known as Title 42 came to end alongside the nation's public health emergency Friday. Its expiry is expected to throw the southern border into further chaos. Title 42 refers to a portion of US code that gives the federal government the authority to curb migration during public health crises. The Trump administration implemented the policy to quickly eject illegal border crossers, including those who claimed asylum, amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Administration officials at the time warned that border crossers could both spread the virus to American citizens, as well as to each other if held in close quarters in detention facilities, at a time when the US was mostly prohibiting travel from other countries.

Tick. Tick. Tick. That’s the sound of the clock as the United States approaches the limit of its borrowing power. Tick. Tick. Tick. It’s also the sound of the US debt clock. Actually it's more of a whoosh as it tries to keep pace with the sheer clip of the national debt, which totals some $31.7 trillion or over $240,000 per taxpayer. For fiscal hawks, these two measurements have set the tempo for a seemingly endless set of battles over the nation's debt ceiling and financial footing. To be clear, the government already hit its debt limit. That was back on January 19, a mere twelve days after Kevin McCarthy survived his bid to claim the speaker’s gavel.

We've come a long way in the two and a half years since the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop were unleashed on the world. In addition to the splashy, X-rated photos and videos of Hunter surrounded by drugs and prostitutes, the New York Post's reporting honed in on a set of emails that suggested Hunter's foreign business dealings involved his father, President Joe Biden. In one email, an official for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma thanks Hunter for the "opportunity" to meet then-Vice President Biden. In another, Hunter's business partner alludes to setting aside 10 percent of a deal with a Chinese firm for "the Big Guy." These bombshells served as the flashpoint for a series of investigations that are finally nearing their conclusion.

Those in the White House masochistic enough to have read the results of the ABC/Washington Post poll published yesterday will surely have had an uneasy start to the week.  The poll reveals plenty of problems for Biden and those whose job it is to persuade the American people to give him another four years: the fact that it shows him losing by six points to Donald Trump, widely panned as a busted flush with no appeal beyond the MAGA hardcore; the solid majority of voters who do not think the Biden has the mental sharpness (63 percent) or the physical health (62 percent) to serve as president; and the new record low approval rating in the survey (36 percent).

Joe Biden has long sought to depict himself as a champion for women — from sponsoring the Violence Against Women Act as a senator to fronting the It’s On Us anti-campus sexual assault campaign as vice president. But frankly, he's not having a very feminist week. Cockburn was shocked to read a report in Politico that TJ Ducklo is “on the cusp of officially reentering Biden world in a senior communications role on his reelection campaign.” Ducklo, you may recall, resigned as White House deputy press secretary in 2021 after yelling at Tara Palmeri, a female reporter then at Politico,  threatening to “destroy” her. Palmeri had contacted the White House to ask about Ducklo’s relationship with Axios political reporter Alexi McCammond, who covered the Biden campaign.

The shaky foundations of Biden 2024 Joe Biden promised to “finish the job” in a video announcing his 2024 run released Monday. A year and a half out, the president’s reelection pitch has serious flaws and yet, with Ron DeSantis failing to make any headway against an indicted Donald Trump, you can understand why Biden and his team might be feeling confident about their chances. Before we unpack that paradox, a quick reminder of the weaknesses of Biden as a candidate next year. There’s his age, of course, and all the embarrassments it brings and stage-managing it demands. (Note that he will not have the cover of a pandemic this time around.) There’s the unimpressive economic record. (His launch video was notably light on claims about the health of the US economy.

Joe Biden’s campaign officially launched with a video released in the early morning hours featuring a message bizarrely limited in its focus to a single threat: the return of Donald Trump. https://youtu.be/ChjibtX0UzU Of course Trump is the odds-on favorite to be the next Republican nominee, but Biden’s announcement ad had none of the optimism you typically see from incumbent campaigns proud of what they've achieved. If the economy is doing as well as the White House regularly claims, you'd think that would be at the center of his launch and appeal for re-election. Instead, the mood of this ad was dark and foreboding — fear the Donnie from over the sea and his dark and terrible return! Biden’s team is doubling down on their 2022 strategy with this approach.