Washington (CNN)The Biden administration is extending the pause on federal student loan payments one last time until January 31.
The pandemic relief benefit was set to expire on September 30 after an unprecedented 19-month suspension. The freeze was initially put in place by Congress and then extended by both the Trump and Biden administrations.
“As our nation’s economy continues to recover from a deep hole, this final extension will give students and borrowers the time they need to plan for restart and ensure a smooth pathway back to repayment,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in a statement.
Borrower balances have effectively been frozen for more than a year, with no payments required on federal loans since March 2020. During this time, interest has stopped adding up — saving the average borrower about $2,000 over the first year — and collections on defaulted debt have been on hold.
Former Reagan DOJ Chief of Staff Mark Levin called on otherwise silent Republicans to rally behind and craft impeachment articles against President Joe Biden, saying he is intentionally disregarding federal law and the fact his administration continues to issue dictates to his own people while allowing thousands of unvetted and COVID-infected illegal immigrants into the U.S. largely unencumbered by such restrictions.
Levin, host of “Life, Liberty & Levin“, told “Hannity” that Biden’s culpability in several critical American crises remains so whether or not his actions are “by design… or the fact he’s dim-witted.”
“Joe Biden is the most disastrous president in modern American history,” he said, adding that Biden’s and the federal health bureaucracies’ unending and ever-changing mandates or recommendations imposed on the American people while the southern border remains open to all is akin to a 20th Century president instructing Americans to get a polio vaccine while “inviting people into the country that he knows have polio.”
Levin said Biden is actively ushering in thousands of illegal immigrants because they represent innumerable prospective Democratic voters – voters that he said will “turn Texas and Arizona blue” and thereby give Democrats a guaranteed congressional majority for at least a generation.
On the Texas border, thousands of illegal migrants have overwhelmed cities like McAllen, while exclusive Fox drone footage has shown large groups of migrants being housed under the Anzalduas Bridge that runs between Texas and the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
“No president has ever done this to his own people. He is a coward and he buckles to the radical left. He’s no fool. The idea that people who are vaccinated are the ones who are going to be punished, it’s like gun owners who are law-abiding are the ones are going to be punished,” said Levin, adding that Biden and his party hold the same disdain for the unvaccinated as they do for successful working-class Americans – “they’re the ones they tend to punish with the tax code.”
A coalition of 11 housing industry groups said in a statement Wednesday evening that they opposed the new ban.
Trade groups representing property owners late Wednesday sued to block a new federal eviction moratorium that President Joe Biden himself warned this week was on shaky legal ground.
The Alabama and Georgia chapters of the National Association of Realtors filed a motion in federal court to vacate the ban that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered Tuesday. The same groups led a legal challenge against the prior federal eviction moratorium that expired Saturday — a lawsuit that prompted the Supreme Court to cast doubt on the CDC’s authority.
President Biden knows that the CDC’s eviction moratorium is illegal, having, per Gene Sperling, “not only kicked the tires,” but “double, triple, quadruple checked.” He also knows that the Supreme Court has ruled that it is illegal, and that the majority of the legal scholars he has consulted think that the Court is correct.
And yet, because a bunch of progressives have spent the day complaining, Biden announced just now that he intends to violate his oath and reissue the order anyway. “The bulk of the constitutional scholars,” Biden admitted at his press conference just now, “say it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.” Then he said that he was prepared to try his luck anyway.
After intense pressure from progressives, the CDC has announced a more limited eviction moratorium days after an earlier freeze on evictions expired.
Days after a national eviction moratorium expired, the Biden administration on Tuesday issued a new, more limited freeze that remains in effect through Oct. 3.
Like the previous order, the two-month moratorium issued Tuesday comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The new ban on evictions covers parts of the United States that are experiencing what the CDC calls “substantial” and “high” spread of the coronavirus.
The order, which cites the rise of the delta variant, says: “Without this Order, evictions in these [higher transmission] areas would likely exacerbate the increase in cases.”
“Where we are right now with such high disease rates, we felt a new, tailored order [was needed] to make sure that … working Americans who were at risk of eviction could be stably housed during this really tenuous, challenging period of time,” the CDC’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, told NPR’s All Things Considered.
President Biden called a reporter a ‘pain in the neck’ Monday in the Oval Office for asking him a question that was off his preferred topic of Iraq.
Sitting in the Oval Office with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, Biden smiled as NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell asked him to comment on Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough’s announcement that front-line VA workers would be required to get a coronavirus vaccine.
“You are such a pain in the neck, but I’m going to answer your question because we’ve known each other for so long,” he said. “It has nothing to do with Iraq … I’ll answer your question. Yes, Veteran Affairs is going to, in fact, require that all doctors working in their facilities are going to have to be vaccinated.”
Biden was genial with O’Donnell, but he has lashed out in the past at reporters over questions he finds unfair or unfounded. Last month, he snapped at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for a question about Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling her she was in the “wrong business” at one point, and he also had sharp replies on the subject of his son Hunter Biden throughout 2020.
Biden has at times been criticized since he took office for being too scripted and expecting questions to be on his topic of choice. He’s lately been more loose with his words, such as when he had to walk back remarks to reporters that Facebook was “killing people” because it allowed the publication of misleading information about coronavirus vaccines.
One White House reporter anonymously told journalist Julia Ioffe earlier this month that Democrats generally expect the media to take their side and are more “thin-skinned” than Republicans as a result.
(CNN)Arizona’s Senate held a Thursday briefing on the ongoing Republican-initiated “audit” of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, where Joe Biden outperformed Donald Trump by enough of a margin to win the state.
The review is being conducted by Cyber Ninjas, a cybersecurity firm that has no experience in election auditing. And the company’s chief executive officer, Doug Logan, made some Thursday claims that were immediately called into question by the county and independent experts.
Representative Madison Cawthorn claims President Joe Biden is “mentally unstable” and said first lady Jill Biden should be called out for being “cruel” to her husband.
Cawthorn, a Republican who represents North Carolina’s 11th congressional district, spoke to Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo about his views on the president’s mental state and Jill Biden’s treatment of her husband.
Salcedo said that Biden “has lost control of the pandemic” and cited border crossings by unvaccinated individuals. He asked Cawthorn if Republicans should “hold Biden accountable” for “putting America in reverse” in terms of COVID.
Cawthorn said. “You know, I would love to have a congressional inquiry to understand exactly what Joe Biden’s reasoning is, but unfortunately I don’t think he could find his way to Congress.”
“I’m talking from a very objective standpoint here. I think we should indict Jill Biden – I’m not saying indict in terms of criminal – but I’m saying that we should call her out for being so cruel to her husband,” Cawthorn went on.
Former White House physician explains why the president needs a cognitive test on ‘Hannity’
Dr. Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician, called on President Biden to immediately undergo a cognitive test so the commander-in-chief can prove to the American public sound mental capabilities.
“We can’t sit on this any longer,” Jackson told “Hannity” Thursday night, citing Biden’s “embarrassing” performance overseas this week with world leaders.
“He’s not physically or cognitively fit to be our president right now,” Jackson added.
The freshman Texas congressman and 13 of his GOP colleagues sent a letter to Biden Thursday expressing “concern” with his cognitive state and cited several examples of potential memory lapses, including apparently forgetting the name of his Defense Secretary, telling an Amtrak story with a timeline that didn’t add up and seemingly blanking on the often-quoted first line of the Declaration of Independence.
Environmentalists emboldened by this week’s defeat of Keystone XL are pressuring President Joe Biden to revoke permits for other oil and gas pipelines, warning their votes depend on the administration blocking fossil fuel infrastructure.
“If you need and want us — as I know the Biden team does — to come out in stronger numbers for 2022, then you have to do right by our community,” Jane Kleeb, the president of Bold Alliance, who spent more than a decade battling TC Energy Corp.’s Keystone XL, said in a call with reporters Friday. “You have to stand up to these big oil and fracked-gas pipelines and say ‘no more.’”
Pipelines have been a focal point in the fight against climate change, putting leaders such as Biden and Canada’s Justin Trudeau in a tough spot as they pledge to help cut global carbon dioxide emissions at a Group of Seven summit in the U.K. The U.S. is the world’s biggest producer and consumer of oil, and it’s still unclear how plans to wean Americans off gasoline will pan out. Canada holds the world’s third-largest crude reserves and its economy benefits enormously from their development.
The Department of Justice said it will not seek information identifying the readers of a USA TODAY story from earlier this year, according to a Friday court filing, but only after the FBI captured the alleged criminal it was seeking through other means.
Gannett, which publishes USA TODAY, filed a motion to quash the subpoena, initially issued in April, last week. It was resisting an effort by the FBI to obtain the IP addresses of people who read a story about a shooting of two FBI agents on Feb. 2. The subpoena sought only information on who read the story during a 30-minute time period later that night.
“A government demand for records that would identify specific individuals who read specific expressive materials … invades the First Amendment rights of both publisher and reader, and must be quashed accordingly,” Gannett’s lawyers wrote in a May 28 filing.
USA TODAY Publisher Maribel Perez Wadsworth also slammed the FBI for the effort.
(CNN)President Joe Biden on Friday proposed a $6 trillion budget for fiscal year 2022, laying out details of a proposed dramatic increase in federal spending that serves as the underpinning of an economic agenda that seeks to transform the American economy as the country emerges from dual public health and economic crises.
The budget proposal, which is an opening bid in negotiations with Congress and is expected to change before being signed into law, calls for the most sustained period of spending in more than half a century. The White House budget serves more as a marker of administration priorities than a policy blueprint destined to be signed into law. It would invest heavily in Biden’s top priority areas including infrastructure, education, research, public health, paid family leave and childcare.
They share Roman Catholicism as a faith and California as their home base. Yet there’s a deep gulf between Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco and Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego in the high-stakes debate over whether politicians who support abortion rights should be denied Communion.
Cordileone, who has long established himself as a forceful anti-abortion campaigner, recently has made clear his view that such political figures — whose ranks include President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — should not receive Communion because of their stance on the issue. The archbishop issued a pastoral letter on the topic May 1 and reinforced the message in an hourlong interview Friday with the Catholic television network EWTN.
“To those who are advocating for abortion, I would say, ‘This is killing. Please stop the killing. You’re in position to do something about it,’” he told the interviewer.
The polarized viewpoints of the two prelates illustrate how divisive this issue could be if, as expected, it comes before the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at its national assembly starting June 16. There are plans for the bishops to vote on whether the USCCB’s Committee on Doctrine should draft a document saying Biden and other Catholic public figures with similar views on abortion should refrain from Communion.
President Joe Biden said April’s lower than expected job growth shows that his massive infrastructure and family support bills are needed now more than ever.
The president rejected the idea that federal unemployment benefits are removing incentives for people to return to the labor force.
Hiring slowed dramatically in April, with nonfarm payrolls increasing by a much less than expected 266,000 and the unemployment rate rising to 6.1%.
When U.S. Catholic bishops hold their next national meeting in June, they’ll be deciding whether to send a tougher-than-ever message to President Joe Biden and other Catholic politicians: Don’t receive Communion if you persist in public advocacy of abortion rights.
At issue is a document that will be prepared for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops by its Committee on Doctrine, with the aim of clarifying the church’s stance on an issue that has repeatedly vexed the bishops in recent decades. It’s taken on new urgency now, in the eyes of many bishops, because Biden — only the second Catholic president — is the first to hold that office while espousing clear-cut support for abortion rights.
Such a stance, by a public figure, is “a grave moral evil,” according to Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, who chairs the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities and believes it’s necessary to publicly rebuke Biden on the issue.
If you go to a gun show and buy a firearm from a federally licensed seller, you will have to pass a background check, just as if you went to a bricks-and-mortar gun store. You would only escape a background check at a gun show if you bought from a seller who isn’t federally licensed.
While the data is incomplete, federally licensed sellers have been found to make up a substantial share, and perhaps a majority, of gun show vendors.
In a Rose Garden event, President Joe Biden announced several actions his administration will take to address what he called an “epidemic” of gun violence.
Biden repeated his call for Congress to pass legislation to expand background checks. The House voted largely along party lines to pass a pair of background check bills this year, but they haven’t moved forward in the Senate.
“These bills, one, require background checks for anyone purchasing a gun at a gun show or an online sale,” Biden said at the April 8 event. “Most people don’t know it, you walk into a store and you buy a gun, you have a background check. But you go to a gun show, you can buy whatever you want, and no background check.”
When it comes to background checks for gun purchases, what matters is who sells the guns, not where the guns are sold — and when a federally licensed seller is a vendor at a gun show, they have to run a background check just as they would if they were back at a bricks-and-mortar gun store.
The White House told PolitiFact that Biden wasn’t suggesting that every gun transaction at a gun show would take place without a background check. Instead, he meant that sales without background checks could occur in some cases.
However, that’s not what he said.
What the laws say about sales at gun shows
Advocates for stricter gun control measures often talk about the “gun show loophole,” though some observers say the term is a misnomer. The phrase itself doesn’t explain who is and isn’t required to run background checks at gun shows.
Federal law requires that people in the business of dealing in firearms be licensed by the federal government.
Specifically, the law says that a license is required if “a person who devotes time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms.”
The law specifically rules out a required license if a person “makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms.”
This can sometimes be a fuzzy distinction, but it means many sellers of guns do need to have a license.
“Every federally licensed retailer, whether they are selling a gun at a brick and mortar store, a gun show or the sale starts online,” must complete a signed background check form from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and get approval from the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check system, said Mark Oliva, a spokesperson for the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
President Joe Biden arrived in Pittsburgh this afternoon to tout a massive, $2 trillion plan — called the American Jobs Plan — that will focus on infrastructure and the climate and rely heavily on corporate tax reform to pay for it.
The president land after 3 p.m. at Pittsburgh International Airport. From there, Mr. Biden headed to Collier and the carpenters training facility. which is used to train apprentices in a trade that could benefit mightily from investments in rebuilding America’s structural foundation.
President Biden will hold his first news conference as commander-in-chief Thursday at 1:15 p.m. EDT in the East Room.
The conference will be streamed on Fox News Channel and Fox News Digital.
Biden’s first press conference comes over two months into the new administration, a delay that raised eyebrows in the media world.
Donald Trump waited 27 days into his presidency to hold a press conference, Barack Obama waited just 20 days before holding one, and George W. Bush waited 33 days before taking questions from the press in a formal setting.
The White House defended Biden, noting he has taken brief questions in informal settings.
PITTSBURGH — President Joe Biden will be in Pittsburgh next week.
During the visit, Biden will talk about “his economic vision for the future and the Biden-Harris Administration’s plan to Build Back Better for the American people.”
Further information has not yet been made available.
Stay with Channel 11 News and WPXI.com for updates on Biden’s visit.
Washington (CNN)Both of the President and first lady’s dogs, Major and Champ, have returned to the White House after spending some time in Delaware following a biting incident involving Major, according to Jill Biden’s press secretary Michael LaRosa.
The two German Shepherds returned to Washington after Major worked with a trainer at the Bidens’ home in Delaware following the incident at the White House.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the dogs were still getting acclimated to their new surroundings at the White House when Major “was surprised by an unfamiliar person and reacted in a way that resulted in a minor injury to the individual.”
President Joe Biden told ABC that Major wasn’t sent to Delaware because of the incident and that the move was previously planned because he and First Lady were going to be traveling.
Five White House staffers have been fired because of their past use of drugs, including marijuana, press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday.
Marijuana has become a delicate issue for President Joe Biden’s administration because 15 states and Washington, D.C., allow for recreational usage, despite a federal prohibition. The administration has tried not to automatically penalize potential staffers for legal behavior in their communities by developing a more flexible policy, Psaki said in a statement to The Associated Press.
The 78-year-old commander-in-chief had his hand on the railing when he tripped twice before falling over the third time as he flew up the stairs of the idling aircraft at Joint Base Andrews.
After recovering, Biden appeared to take a moment to dust off his knee before finally making his way to the top. He then gave a salute before ducking into the cabin to take off for Georgia.
The dogs joined the Bidens at the White House shortly after the Bidens relocated to Washington. Since then, they have been allowed to roam unleashed on the White House grounds.
President Joe Biden’s two dogs have been moved away from the White House after one of the dogs showed aggressive behavior to White House staff, according to a report first published by CNN.
The Bidens have two German shepherds — a 13-year-old named Champ and 3-year-old named Major. Reports indicate that it was Major who was involved in a “biting incident” with a “member of White House security.”
The condition of the biting victim is unclear, but the dogs were moved back to Biden’s home in Delaware shortly after the incident and have not returned.
The Bidens adopted Major in 2018 from a dog shelter in Delaware. According to a Facebook post from the Delaware Humane Society at the time, Major was born to a litter of pups “that were surrendered and not doing well at all.”
MERIDEN, Conn. — Having told educators that they would soon be vaccinated, the Biden administration began an aggressive push on Wednesday to drum up support for reopening schools, putting on a show of unity with the leaders of teachers unions and highlighting measures to keep students and staff safe from the coronavirus.
A day after President Biden announced a new federal program to give teachers nationwide access to at least a first dose of the vaccine by the end of March, the administration sought to position itself as intent on opening schools as soon as possible while also addressing the concerns of teachers that their fears were being ignored.
To carry the message, the White House dispatched the first lady, Jill Biden, and the newly confirmed education secretary, Miguel Cardona, on a trip to Connecticut and Pennsylvania to emphasize that teachers should no longer fear returning unprotected to the classroom. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that teachers do not have to be vaccinated for schools to reopen safely.
Getting shots into the arms of educators and school staff would be his “top priority” as education secretary, Dr. Cardona said in Connecticut, where he and the first lady were joined by Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress are jamming their agenda forward with a sense of urgency, an unapologetically partisan approach based on the calculation that it’s better to advance the giant COVID-19 rescue package and other priorities than waste time courting Republicans who may never compromise.
The coronavirus pandemic is driving the crush of legislative action, but so are the still-raw emotions from the U.S. Capitol siege and the hard lessons of the last time Democrats had the sweep of party control of Washington. Republicans are mounting blockades of Biden’s agenda just as they did during the devastating 2009 financial crisis with Barack Obama.
Democrats, in turn, are showing little patience for the GOP objections and entertaining few overtures toward compromise, claiming the majority of the country supports their agenda. With fragile majorities in the House and the Senate, and a liberal base of voters demanding action, Democrats are operating as if they are on borrowed time.For many lawmakers, it’s personal.Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., led the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to House passage Wednesday on the 30th anniversary of the Rodney King beating by police in Los Angeles that she thought at the time would spur policing reforms. Instead, more Black Americans and others have died in police violence, even after Floyd’s death at the hands of law enforcement last summer.“It’s examples like that that lead to the urgency,”
Bass said Wednesday.The start of the first congressional session of the Biden administration was supposed to be a new era of bipartisan deal-making. The Senate evenly split, 50-50, and the House resting on a slim majority for Democrats set prime conditions for Biden to swoop in and forge across-the-aisle compromises.
But the rush through Biden’s first 100 days is shaping up as an urgent era of hardball politics, with Democrats prepared to go it alone, even if that means that changes to the Senate filibuster rules are needed to work around Republican roadblocks to legislation that many Americans support.
While daily new cases of Covid-19 are significantly down from the peak in early January, the decline has plateaued in recent days at a worryingly high level.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, both Republicans, announced Tuesday they would allow businesses to reopen at 100% capacity and lift mask mandates.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday called the decisions a “big mistake.”
“The last thing, the last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking, that, ‘In the meantime, everything’s fine. Take off your mask. Forget it.’ It still matters,” Biden said.
President Joe Biden will sign an executive order on Wednesday to review the global supply chains used by four key industries in an effort to avoid the shortages in medical equipment, semiconductors and other goods seen as critical during the pandemic.
China reliance targeted: Biden’s order will institute 100-day reviews of the global producers and shippers for: computer chips used in consumer products; large-capacity batteries for electric vehicles; pharmaceuticals and their active ingredients; and critical minerals used in electronics.
The reviews will seek to determine whether U.S. firms in these sectors are relying too much on foreign suppliers, particularly those in China, a senior administration official told reporters. They will also consider other vulnerabilities, like extreme weather and environmental factors.“
Clearly we are looking at the risks posed by dependence on competitor nations, but that is only one of a range of risks we are looking at,” the administration official said.
The order will also direct yearlong reviews for six sectors: defense, public health, information technology, transportation, energy and food production.
WASHINGTON — President Biden took a snow day Thursday as DC received a half-inch dusting — but Vice President Kamala Harris carried on with scheduled in-person events.
Biden postponed a trip to Michigan, where he planned to tour a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing facility, and the White House declared an 8 a.m. “lid” for reporters — meaning there would be no in-person events.
The president’s trip to Portage, Michigan, was preemptively canceled Wednesday evening before any precipitation fell in Washington.
The early White House “lid” meant a 12:30 p.m. briefing with White House press secretary Jen Psaki was conducted by phone.
Although the destination in Michigan was a frigid 16 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday morning, it wasn’t snowing there.
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