Biden foregrounds abortion as he announces bid for second term as US president – as it happened

Washington digested Joe Biden’s announcement that he is running for a second term, with Democrats sounding very much ready for him to remain in office for another four years, and Republicans giving Americans all sorts of reasons not to vote for him. We’re 560 days away from the 2024 election; prepare for lots more of this.

Here’s what else happened today:

• Biden said he would veto the Republican debt ceiling bill if it ever gets to his desk, which it probably won’t, at least not in its current form.

• Senator Ed Markey has called on supreme court justice Clarence Thomas to resign over his recently revealed links to a Republican megadonor. The Democrat is the first senator to make such a demand.

• Neil Gorsuch, a conservative supreme court justice, sold a property to the head of a law firm who argues cases before the tribunal shortly after his confirmation, according to a new report.

• Donald Trump’s civil trial over a rape allegation is under way in New York City.

• Please don’t talk about Biden or Trump’s age, a UK-based charity that focuses on ageing, asked.

The White House congratulated Washington state for enacting tighter restrictions on guns today, including a ban on the sale of certain assault weapons.

“Today, Washington State has become the tenth state in the nation alongside Washington DC to ban assault weapons and get weapons of war off America’s streets. President Biden commends the leadership of Washington Governor Jay Inslee, and legislative leaders, as well as the advocates, survivors and elected officials who fought for years to make today a reality. In so doing, they have made every community in the state – from Seattle to Spokane and everywhere in between – safer and more secure,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.

According to the Associated Press, Democratic governor Jay Inslee signed three bills today that impose a 10-day waiting period on gun purchases, bans dozens of semi-automatic firearms and allow family members of people who die from gun violence to sue a seller or manufacturer if it “is irresponsible in how they handle, store or sell those weapons”.

Joe Biden was the oldest president ever elected when he won in 2020, and the 80-year-old will continue that record-breaking streak if he wins a second term.

Many of Biden’s potential GOP candidates are in their 40s or 50s, but the current frontrunner Donald Trump is 76. Age seems certain to be one of the considerations voters will weigh, should the 2024 election come down to the two men. But the UK-based Centre for Ageing Better has a message for Trump, Biden and the 2024 primary field as a whole: leave age out of it.

Here’s what their chief executive Carole Easton had to say:

Whatever happens over the next 18 months in the US Presidential elections, at the Centre for Ageing Better we have one simple request. No one mentions the age of any of the candidates.

The date of birth of Joe Biden or Donald Trump or any other candidate is a completely irrelevant factor in the race. Their competency, their policies, their personal integrity, even their personal finances and health, are all relevant factors in deciding who should be the next occupant of the White House. Their age is not. Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of the candidates, that is a matter of their individual character, not their age.

Ageism is so prevalent within society, we are still only now getting to grips with its impact and its seriousness. Ageism assumes that all experiences of getting older are homogenous when we know that is not the case. We must end the continual use of harmful stereotypes about ageing and older age and avoid fuelling intergenerational conflict.

The race to become the next US President should be about the competency of individuals. Our concern at Ageing Better is that the campaign provides the background for an outpouring of outdated and offensive stereotypes which will only serve to demonstrate how far we still need to travel to eradicate the scourge of ageism from society.”

Joe Biden will veto a Republican proposal to raise the debt ceiling while slashing spending and implementing a number of conservative policies, the White House announced today.

GOP leaders in the House of Representatives are expected to this week call a vote on the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023. Biden has refused to negotiate with Republicans over the debt limit, saying it should be increased without conditions ahead of an estimated June deadline where the US government will run out of money and potentially default on its obligations.

“The Congress has a solemn obligation to prevent default and ensure that the United States meets its obligations. The Administration strongly opposes the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023, which is a reckless attempt to extract extreme concessions as a condition for the United States simply paying the bills it has already incurred,” the White House office of management and budget (OMB) said in a statement.

The office takes specific issue with the bill’s mandatory spending reductions, which would “force severe cuts to education (including for students with disabilities), food safety inspections, rail safety, healthy meals for seniors, research on cancer and other diseases, border security, public safety and veterans’ medical care”. The OMB also objected to the bill’s provisions blocking Biden from relieving some student loan debt, and repealing tax credits included the Inflation Reduction Act, among other issues.

“The bill stands in stark contrast to the President’s vision for the economy. The President’s budget invests in America, lowers costs for families, grows the economy, and reduces the deficit by nearly $3tn by asking the wealthy and large corporations to pay their fair share. Therefore, if the president were presented with the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023, he would veto it,” the OMB said.

Republicans hold a slim majority in the House, and it’s unclear if they have the votes yet to pass the bill, since some rightwing lawmakers have refused to increase the debt ceiling for any reason. It’s also unlike the measure would attract enough Democratic support to pass the Senate, which they control.

Nate Silver is reportedly being forced out of his data-driven political journalism outlet FiveThirtyEight amid the latest round of job cuts at ABC News’s corporate owner, Disney.

Silver sent an internal message to employees at FiveThirtyEight – which is hosted by ABC News – that he expects to leave Disney when his contract expires “soon”, according to an article published by the Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday.

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The Hollywood Reporter said ABC News plans to retain the FiveThirtyEight brand but aims to generally streamline the site ahead of the 2024 presidential election. A statement that ABC issued to the Hollywood Reporter added: “​We are grateful for the invaluable contributions of the team members who will be departing the organization and know they will continue to make an important impact on the future of journalism.”

Silver founded FiveThirtyEight in 2008 before taking it with him to the New York Times and selling it to the Disney-owned sports network ESPN. Disney later moved FiveThirtyEight to ABC News.

According to the internal message from Silver, whose expected departure would mark the first time he hasn’t been involved with the site he started, FiveThirtyEight’s staff was in for “a hard day” sooner rather than later because of upcoming layoffs.

“Unfortunately the day we’ve been worried about has arrived,” Silver’s message read, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Suggested he was among those who would be leaving the site soon, Silver’s missive added: “We don’t yet know the scope of these layoffs, exactly who is [affected], or the terms under which they are departing, but it is going to be a hard day for all of us.”

Silver later went on Twitter and said he “had been worried about an outcome like this” and had already been engaging in conversations about “opportunities elsewhere”.

“I am so proud of the work of FiveThirtyEight staff,” Silver said. “It has never been easy. I’m sorry to the people [affected] by this.”

The cuts which have ensnared Silver are part of a larger cost-reduction campaign at Disney, which seeks to eliminate 7,000 jobs to save $5.5bn in expenses, according to Reuters. It is the second wave of layoffs associated with the cost-cutting plan, Reuters added.

Washington is digesting Joe Biden’s announcement that he’s running for a second term, with Democrats sounding very much ready for him to stay in office for another four years, and Republicans giving Americans all sorts of reasons not to vote for him. We’re 560 days away from the 2024 election; prepare for lots more of this.

Here’s what else has happened today:

• Senator Ed Markey has called on supreme court justice Clarence Thomas to resign over his recently revealed links to a Republican megadonor. The Democrat is the first senator to make such a demand.

• Neil Gorsuch, a conservative supreme court justice, sold a property to the head of a law firm who argues cases before the tribunal shortly after his confirmation, according to a new report.

• Donald Trump’s civil trial over a rape allegation is under way in New York City.

Joe Biden wrapped up his speech, with an exhortation that he’s been using for months: “Finish the job!”

“Manufacturing has come alive again. People can afford decent healthcare. Towns that have been forgotten and left behind for dead are coming alive again because of you all and what we’re doing now. Now we’ve just got to keep going. Finish the job!” the president said as he concluded his remarks.

He used the same line in his re-election announcement today, but the speech otherwise avoided mentioning the campaign. That may be because of rules governing the separation between his activities as president – such as today’s speech – and as a candidate.

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Thus far, this address has proven to be a standard Joe Biden stump speech, with no mention of his campaign for re-election.

The president is talking about infrastructure, the importance of unions and his promotion of policies that encourage more consumption of American-produced goods. Biden has left the big news of the day – that he’s running for a second term – unmentioned, at least so far.

The crowd, however, has clearly heard the news. “Four more years! Four more years!” they began chanting a few minutes ago. Biden, taking a breather in speech, hung his head and smiled.

Joe Biden has kicked off his speech focusing on manufacturing and his legislative accomplishments.

It’s before a friendly crowd of union workers, many of whom chanted “Joe, Joe” as he walked onstage. Watch it as it happens at the live stream embedded at the top of the page.

Joe Biden will in a few minutes make his first public appearance since announcing his re-election campaign, with an address to a North America’s Building Trades Unions conference in Washington DC.

According to excerpts released by the White House, the president will cover familiar ground, such as the 2021 infrastructure measure he succeeded in getting Congress to enact. “Under my predecessor, Infrastructure Week was a punchline. On my watch, we’re making Infrastructure Decade a headline,” Biden will say.

This blog will be keeping an eye out for any comments the president makes about his campaign for a second term.

On Fox News, Republican congressman John James sought to place blame on Joe Biden for not getting Americans out of harm’s way in conflict-torn Sudan:

Democratic candidates have counted on Black voters for decades, and Biden is no exception. Their support was viewed as key to turning around his flagging presidential campaign in 2020, and to his defeat of Donald Trump later that year.

Massachusetts’s Democratic senator Ed Markey has called on supreme court justice Clarence Thomas to resign:

Thomas has faced mounting questions over his ethics after investigative news outlet ProPublica revealed his ties to a Republican megadonor.

Last week, the Senate judiciary committee, led by its Democratic chair Richard Durbin, asked supreme court chief justice John Roberts to testify about the court’s ethics code.

Days after he was confirmed to the supreme court, Neil Gorsuch sold a property he co-owned to the head of a law firm that has argued cases before the justices, Politico reports.

The story reveals another entanglement between the high court and parties outside it, after ProPublica reported on ties between Clarence Thomas, one of the court’s best-known conservative jurors, and a Republican mega-donor. Gorsuch, a conservative, was appointed by Donald Trump to the court in 2017, filling a vacancy created by the death of fellow conservative Antonin Scalia the year before – which Mitch McConnell, then the Republican Senate majority leader, prevented Barack Obama from filling.

Here’s more from Politico’s story:

For nearly two years beginning in 2015, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sought a buyer for a 40-acre tract of property he co-owned in rural Granby, Colorado.

Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the then-circuit court judge got one: The chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court. Gorsuch owned the property with two other individuals.

On April 16 of 2017, Greenberg’s Brian Duffy put under contract the 3,000-square foot log home on the Colorado River and nestled in the mountains northwest of Denver, according to real estate records.

He and his wife closed on the house a month later, paying $1.825 million, according to a deed in the county’s record system. Gorsuch, who held a 20 percent stake, reported making between $250,001 and $500,000 from the sale on his federal disclosure forms.

Gorsuch did not disclose the identity of the purchaser. That box was left blank.

Since then, Greenberg Traurig has been involved in at least 22 cases before or presented to the court, according to a POLITICO review of the court’s docket.

They include cases in which Greenberg either filed amicus briefs or represented parties. In the 12 cases where Gorsuch’s opinion is recorded, he sided with Greenberg Traurig clients eight times and against them four times.

On Capitol Hill, Republican speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy continues to push Joe Biden to negotiate with him over raising the debt ceiling:

Biden has refused to consider anything but a simple increase to America’s borrowing limit, but McCarthy wants the White House and Democrats to agree to big spending cuts and other conservative priorities, and has proposed legislation to implement those. The US government has already reached the limit on how much it can borrow, and could default on its debt around early June if it isn’t able to borrow more cash.

In the Senate, Republican lawmaker Tom Cotton, who has ruled out a presidential run next year, also hit Biden for not negotiating with McCarthy: