Biden calls again for US assault rifles ban: ‘We are living in a country awash in weapons of war’ – as it happened

We’re closing the US politics live blog for today, but we’ll be back tomorrow and will bring you all the most important news as it happens, including covering the next public hearing of the House committee investigating the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.

For those wishing to follow the news relating to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, our blog on the war can be found here.

Here’s where things stand:

• A federal judge has declined to delay the upcoming trial of Steve Bannon, an adviser to Donald Trump who faces contempt charges after refusing to cooperate with the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.
• Joe Biden is once again appealing to Congress to go further with gun safety legislation and ban assault weapons for the general public in the US. At an event at the White House he said: “We are living in a country awash in weapons of war.”
• The US president hailed the long-awaited gun safety legislation recently passed with bipartisan support but also said that the act was a call to action to do more, saying the slowness of the government to act had left “too much of a trail of bloodshed and carnage”.
• A strong majority of Democratic voters – 64% – want the party to nominate someone other than Joe Biden to stand for president in the 2024 election, according to a new opinion poll by the New York Times and Siena College. The survey added, however, that as a result of questioning a sample of people across the US they found that in another match-up between Biden and Donald Trump, Biden would once again triumph.

Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the president of NextGen America, traveled from Texas to participate in the group’s abortion rights protest outside the supreme court today.

Ramirez noted that her mother once obtained an abortion because her doctor warned of severe health risks if she carried her pregnancy to term.

“I am so grateful that she was able to have that because I would have likely grown up without a mother,” Ramirez said.

Gesturing toward the flowers representing the lives that will be lost because of the Roe reversal, Ramirez added, “Today my mom might be one of these flowers and one of these lives that will be lost in the coming years.”

Ramirez said NextGen members are now organizing in battleground states like Arizona and Michigan to ensure that abortion rights supporters are elected to office in November.

“Young people are pissed off, and they have every right to be, and we’re channeling their anger into power, into action,” Ramirez said.

“We need to take every single step necessary, and everything should be on the table to look at how we protect access to abortion and also make sure that the supreme court doesn’t take away the right to gay marriage, that it doesn’t take away our right to contraception. Because this wasn’t the end; this was the opening salvo.”

Members of the youth voter group NextGen America gathered outside the US supreme court today to protest against the decision to overturn Roe v Wade, which ended nearly 50 years of federal protections for abortion access in the US.

The group laid flowers in front of the court and wore black to mourn those who are expected to lose their lives because of the end of Roe.

Health experts have said they expect maternal mortality to rise in the wake of the Roe reversal, as abortion will probably soon be outlawed in 26 states.

The NextGen protesters carried signs criticizing the supreme court’s decision. One of them read, “Pro-life is a lie. They don’t care if people die.”

After laying the flowers, one of the protesters cried as a trumpet player played solemn music outside the court.

A federal judge has declined to delay the upcoming trial of Steve Bannon, an ex-adviser to Donald Trump who faces contempt charges after refusing for months to cooperate with the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, the Associated Press writes.

Bannon is still scheduled to go on trial next week despite telling the House committee late Saturday that he is now prepared to testify. It’s unclear whether Bannon will again refuse to appear before the committee with the trial pending.

US District Judge Carl Nichols also ruled against several requests by Bannon’s attorneys to seek the testimony of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or the committee chairman, Democratic representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi.

And Nichols barred Bannon’s attorneys from arguing before a jury that the committee violated House rules in demanding Bannon’s appearance, or that Bannon had defied the subpoena on the advice of his defense counsel or at Trump’s order.

Nichols also said he could address during jury selection any concerns about pretrial publicity due to the committee’s ongoing hearings. If it proved impossible to pick an unbiased jury, the judge said, he would reconsider a delay.

The rulings led one of Bannon’s attorneys, David Schoen, to speak out in frustration as he sought clarification from the judge, the Associated Press reported.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} What’s the point of going to trial here if there are no defenses?” Schoen asked.

“Agreed,” Nichols responded.

Speaking to reporters outside court, Schoen said he questioned whether Bannon could effectively defend himself given Nichols’ rulings and hinted he would appeal.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} He’s the judge. That’s why they have a court of appeals,” Schoen said of Nichols.

The judge said earlier in the hearing that Bannon could argue he thought the deadline to respond to the subpoena may not have been “operative”.

Bannon had been one of the highest-profile Trump-allied holdouts in refusing to testify before the committee, leading to two criminal counts of contempt of Congress last year for resisting the committee’s subpoena.

The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol by extremist supporters of Donald Trump has, it appears, decided to reschedule what had been expected to be a primetime hearing on Thursday evening.

There had been an earlier expectation that a hearing this Thursday would be the “grand finale” of the committee’s public sessions. But first it became clear that the session wasn’t necessarily going to be the last and now it’s reportedly been canceled/postponed to a date to be determined – without it ever being officially publicly announced, NBC and MSNBC report.

Speculation suggests new evidence is expected, not least from the potential cooperation of former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who’s been stonewalling.

Tomorrow’s hearing was originally going to be at 10am ET, but is now due to begin at 1pm ET.

From the Associated Press:

President Joe Biden will confront a kaleidoscope of challenges when he travels to the Middle East this week, his first trip there since taking office. With the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the rearview mirror, the United States is reassessing its role in the region at a time when its focus has shifted to Europe and Asia.

A look at some of the major issues that will be at play during Biden’s travels:

ISRAELI-ARAB COOPERATION

Biden will become the first US president to travel directly from Israel, his first destination, to Saudi Arabia, his last stop before returning to Washington. The itinerary is a reflection of friendlier relationships between Israel and its Arab neighbors, a tectonic shift that is reshaping the region’s politics.

Under Donald Trump, Israel normalized relations with countries such as the United Arab Emirates through the Abraham Accords. Although no one expects Israel and Saudi Arabia to announce formal diplomatic ties during Biden’s trip, more incremental steps could be taken, such as allowing Israeli commercial flights to cross over the kingdom en route to other countries nearby.

In addition, there’s already a surge in security cooperation being presided over by the US military’s central command, which oversees operations in the region. John Kirby, a national security spokesman for the White House, said the nascent military partnership is intended to foster a regional air defense system that could protect against Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.

IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL

The threat of Iran is one of the primary incentives for Israel and Arab countries to work more closely together, and the issue will likely be a top focus for Biden’s meetings. Israel views Iran as its greatest threat, and Sunni Arab countries consider Shiite Iran as a dangerous competitor for regional power.

A key question is finding the best way to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, which it’s believed to be closer than ever to achieving. Biden wants to rejuvenate the nuclear deal that was reached by Barack Obama in 2015 and abandoned by Trump in 2018, but negotiations appear to have stalled. Israel, which is widely believed to be the only nuclear-armed state in the region but does not acknowledge having such weapons, was opposed to the deal. It didn’t like that the agreement limited Iran’s nuclear enrichment for only a set period of time, nor did it address Iran’s ballistic missile program or other military activities in the region. Now Israel is calling for increasing sanctions to pressure Tehran into agreeing to a more sweeping accord.

Biden is expected to visit one of Israel’s missile defense installations as he tries to reassure Israelis that the US is committed to the country’s protection.

ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT

Even though Israel is building closer ties to Arab countries, there’s been no progress toward resolving its decades-long conflict with the Palestinians.

In fact, some Palestinians feel abandoned by Arab leaders who have reached their own deals with Israel through the Abraham Accords. That came without securing progress toward the Palestinians’ goal of an independent state in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, lands Israel seized in the 1967 Middle East war.

And there are increasing doubts that a two-state solution is even possible at this point because Israel has spent decades expanding settlements that are now home to hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers. Israel blames the continuing conflict on Palestinian violence and the refusal of Palestinian leaders to accept past proposals that it says would have given them a state.

Biden plans to visit with Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, in Bethlehem during his trip. But it’s unlikely that there will be an opportunity to prod either him or the Israeli prime minister, Yair Lapid, to reopen talks. The Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the occupied West Bank, has grown increasingly unpopular and autocratic in recent years. Lapid is a caretaker prime minister serving while Israel braces for another round of elections later this year.

HUMAN RIGHTS

Biden will probably be confronted with more fallout over the death of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed two months ago. An analysis overseen by the United States suggested that she was shot by Israeli soldiers who were conducting a raid nearby, but it stopped short of drawing a definitive conclusion. The murky outcome led to more anger than clarity.

The treatment of journalists will also be a focal point when Biden visits Saudi Arabia. US intelligence believes that the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, likely approved the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a US-based writer for the Washington Post who was critical of the regime. The murder was carried out by agents who worked for the crown prince, and it took place inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

Dozens of activists, writers, moderate clerics and economists remain imprisoned for their criticism of Mohammed bin Salman. The few who’ve been released, like blogger Raif Badawi and women’s rights advocate Loujain al-Hathloul, face years-long travel bans and cannot speak freely. Some senior members of the royal family have been arrested or had their assets seized, and others were forced into exile.

Despite the crackdown, the crown prince has also been credited with reforms. Saudi Arabia looks and feels starkly different than just five years ago, when religious police still roamed the streets chastising women for wearing bright nail polish in malls, enforcing gender segregation in public places and ordering restaurants to turn off background music. Women can now drive, travel abroad without the permission of a male relative and attend sporting events in stadiums once reserved solely for men. Movie theaters and concerts, including one with pop star Justin Bieber, have government backing, a major change after decades of ultraconservative Wahhabi influence.

OIL PRODUCTION

Biden will likely face pressure to temper his criticism of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record to persuade the kingdom and its neighbors to pump more oil and alleviate months of sky-high prices at the gas pump.

Energy analysts say drivers shouldn’t get their hopes up. “If the public is looking for lower gasoline prices after this trip, I think they’re bound to be disappointed,” said Samantha Gross, director of the energy security and climate initiative at the Brookings Institution.

Saudi Arabia, among the biggest energy producers in the world, are already producing near their full capacity of 11 million barrels of oil per day. And members of Opec+ nations, including Saudi Arabia, are likely to be cautious when it comes to demands from the US.

In 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic severely scaled back travel, Trump urged Opec+ to scale back production as the US oil industry wobbled. Now, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has driven up prices, Biden wants Opec+ to produce more even though there are fears of a global recession around the corner.

Elevated oil prices are simply good business for Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of OPEC+. The kingdom reported that the value of its crude exports were about a $1bn per day in March and April, a 123% increase compared with the same period in 2021.

The US-Mexico relationship, a straightforward tradeoff during the Trump administration, with Mexico tamping down on migration and the US not pressing on other issues, has become a wide range of disagreements over trade, foreign policy, energy and climate change, the Associated Press writes.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is to visit Washington tomorrow to meet with Joe Biden, a month after López Obrador snubbed Biden’s invitation to the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.

Mexico’s leader had demanded that Biden invite to the summit the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, all countries with anti-democratic regimes, and he has also called US support for Ukraine “a crass error.”

On that and other issues, it’s clear López Obrador is getting along much worse with Biden than with Donald Trump, who threatened Mexico but wanted only one thing from his southern neighbor: stop migrants from reaching the border.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} I think it is more that the Biden administration has tried hard to re-institutionalize the relationship and restore the relationship that’s not centered solely on immigration and trade. And I think as a result that leads to issues coming up that AMLO is less comfortable talking about,” Andrew Rudman, director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center, said, using the Spanish acronym by which Mexicans refer to the president.

US officials want López Obrador to retreat on his reliance on fossil fuels and his campaign to favor Mexico’s state-owned electricity utility at the expense of foreign-built plants powered by gas and renewable energy. Washington has filed several complaints under the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement pushing Mexico to enforce environmental laws and rules guaranteeing trade union rights.

López Obrador also has angrily rejected any US criticism of the killings of journalists in Mexico or his own efforts to weaken checks and balances in Mexico’s government. He is also angered by US funding of civic and non-governmental groups in Mexico that he claims are part of the opposition.

It all adds up to a witches’ brew in bilateral relations.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}At the end of the day, the problem is that you have the complete mismatch in this relationship,” said Arturo Sarukhan, who served as Mexico’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2006 to 2013.

The United States “needs Mexico as a key partner on everything from ‘near shoring’ (manufacturing for the U.S. market) . in terms of competitiveness, in terms of North American energy security, energy independence, energy efficiency,” Sarukhan said. “The problem is you have a Mexican president who doesn’t care about any of these things.”

Garnell Whitfield spoke at the White House as he was introducing Joe Biden at the gun safety event moments ago. He and relatives and community are mourning the killing of his mother, 86-year-old Ruth Whitfield, who was the oldest victim of the mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, upstate New York, on May 14, just days before the school shooting in Uvalde, south Texas.

An 18-year-old white man was apprehended after 10 Black people died in a racist attack on a store, as Garnell Whitfield said: “the only supermarket in their community” where his mother and others went to pick up some groceries “believing they were safe, but they were not”.

Whitfield decried the “weapon of war” the alleged gunman in the attack carried as he “walked in, camera rolling”.

The perpetrator has been charged with state and federal crimes, including murder, federal hate crimes and firearms offenses.

An affidavit submitted with a criminal complaint last month said his “motive for the mass shooting was to prevent Black people from replacing white people and eliminating the white race, and to inspire others to commit similar attacks”.

The gunman wore a “tactical-style helmet, camouflage clothing, body armor and a GoPro video camera”, was armed with a Bushmaster XM-15 caliber rifle and carried “multiple loaded magazines”, the court documents said. The rifle is an AR-15 assault-style rifle, a type used in numerous mass shootings.

The gunman exited his car, killed three people in the parking lot and continued his spree inside the store. He said “sorry” to a white Tops employee who he shot in the leg, authorities said.

On the south lawn of the White House a little earlier today, Garnell Whitfield said that in the United States “we must address white supremacy” and domestic terrorism.

“They are a leading threat to our homeland and way of life,” he said.

Following Kamala Harris to the podium, Whitfield thanked the vice president for attending his mother’s memorial service in Buffalo, adding she was a big fan and was “dancing in heaven” knowing Harris was in attendance.

Joe Biden is once again appealing to Congress to go further with gun safety legislation and ban assault weapons in the US.

In remarks at the White House moments ago he included a vivid indictment of the proliferation of military-style assault weapons among the general public in recent years and how they repeatedly feature in mass shootings.

“We are living in a country awash in weapons of war,” the US president said. “Weapons that are designed to hunt are not being used [in massacres], weapons they are purchasing are designed as weapons of war, to take out an enemy. What is the rationale for these weapons outside war zones? Some people claim it’s for sport or to hunt,” he continued in front of an estimated audience of about 300 people on the South Lawn of the White House.

“But let’s look at the facts,” he said. Biden spoke of bullets fired from an assault rifle moving twice as fast as bullets fired from handguns and “maximize the damage done” to people.

“Human flesh and bone is just torn apart and as difficult as it is to say, that’s why so many people and so many in this audience – and I apologize for having to say it – need to provide DNA samples to identify the remains of their children, think of that,” he said.

“Yet we continue to let these weapons be sold to people with no training or expertise,” he said.

He notes that such lethal weapons provided to soldiers require them to have extensive training and background checks and mental health assessments, and required responsible storage.

“We don’t require the same common sense measures for a stranger walking into a gun store to purchase an AR15 or some weapon like that. It makes no sense.”

“Assault weapons need to be banned,” he said. “They were banned, I led the fight in 1994,” he said, noting that the successful but temporary federal ban on assault rifles being on sale to the general public in the US ended in 2004.

“In that 10 years, it was long, mass shootings went down, and when the law expired in 2004 and those weapons were allowed to be sold again, mass shootings tripled, they’re the facts.

“I’m determined to ban these weapons again,” he said, to applause from the audience at the White House.

He said he also wanted to get high capacity magazines banned “and I’m not going to stop until we do it”.

Biden noted that “guns are the number one killer of children in the United States, more than car accidents, more than cancer”.

He said that in the last 20 years, “more US high school children have died from gunshots than on-duty police officers and active-duty military combined, think of that. We can’t just stand by. With rights come responsibilities. Yes there is a right to bear arms but we also have a right to live freely, without fear for our lives in a grocery store, in a playground…”

Joe Biden said he hopes that the legislation just passed to improve gun safety in the US is a call to achieve more on this issue, as he decried the “every day places” such as supermarkets, schools, nightclubs, places of worship, workplaces “turned into killing fields” by mass shootings, and also neighborhoods blighted by gun violence, much of which is now so common the tragedies often barely make news headlines.

He called the new legislation “an important start”. The legislation will toughen background checks for the youngest gun buyers, keep firearms from more domestic violence offenders and help states put in place red flag laws that make it easier for authorities to take weapons from people adjudged to be dangerous, as well as cracking down on gun trafficking.

Most of its $13bn cost will help bolster mental health programs and aid schools, which have been targeted in Newtown, Connecticut, and Parkland, Florida, and elsewhere in mass shootings.

“How many more mass shootings do we have to see where shooters 17, 18 years old is able to get his hands on a weapon and go on a killing spree?” Biden asked in his address.

And he noted that the legislation promised some progress so that “if we can keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers we can save the lives of their partners and we can also stop mass shootings”.

Biden said the legislation “is not enough and we all know that”.

Joe Biden has hailed the long-awaited gun safety legislation recently passed with bipartisan support but also said that the act was a call to action to do more.

“Nothing can bring back your loved ones,” Biden told survivors and bereaved families gathered at the White House for an event to mark the passing last month of the Safer Community Act that, among various measures, strengthens background checks before guns can be purchased.

“This has taken too long,” Biden said moments ago, and has left “too much of a trail of bloodshed and carnage” as a result of gun violence across the US.

He hailed lawmakers, families and activists present who had been instrumental in passing the first federal gun control legislation in 30 years last month, shortly after two mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, in May.

“Because of your work, your advocacy, your courage, lives will be saved today and tomorrow because of this … despite the naysayers, we can make meaningful progress on dealing with gun violence,” the president said.

At this point he was briefly interrupted by what appeared to be some heckling, details unclear so far.

Kamala Harris is hailing the recent bipartisan gun reform legislation, even though it only enacts a fraction of what gun control advocates want in the US, with the vice president noting that “for 30 years our nation failed to pass meaningful legislation” addressing what she noted have been repeated calls for “common sense action to protect our communities”.

The legislation will toughen background checks for the youngest gun buyers, keep firearms from more domestic violence offenders and help states put in place red flag laws that make it easier for authorities to take weapons from people adjudged to be dangerous.

Most of its $13bn cost will help bolster mental health programs and aid schools, which have been targeted in Newtown, Connecticut, and Parkland, Florida, and elsewhere in mass shootings.

At the time of the bill’s signing last month, Joe Biden said the compromise hammered out by a bipartisan group of senators “doesn’t do everything I want” but “it does include actions I’ve long called for that are going to save lives”.

“I know there’s much more work to do, and I’m never going to give up, but this is a monumental day,” said the president, who was joined by his wife, Jill, a teacher, for the signing.

US president Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris are now approaching the podium in the garden of the White House at an event to mark the bipartisan gun reform legislation passed last month, called the Safer Community Act.

The first speaker is Uvalde pediatrician Roy Guerrero, who speaks of “a hollow feeling in our gut” in the south Texas community where a teenage shooter gunned down 19 children and two teachers in the tiny city in May.

Guerrero said he hopes that the legislation just passed is just “the start of the movement to ban assault weapons” in the US.

Guerrero said: “I spend half my days convincing kids that no one is coming for them and that they are safe—but how do I say that knowing that the very weapons used in the attack are still freely available?”

Harris is speaking now.

House January 6 panel member and senior Democrat Zoe Lofgren has explained that the committee intends to present evidence “connecting the dots” about how different extremist groups rallied to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to form a violent mob that perpetrated the deadly insurrection as they sought in vain to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat by Democrat Joe Biden.

The panel is holding its next hearing tomorrow afternoon and the subsequent one is expected on Thursday evening.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}We are going to be connecting the dots during these hearings between these groups and those who were trying – in government circles – to overturn the [2020]election. So, we do think that this story is unfolding in a way that is very serious and quite credible,” Lofgren of California told CNN yesterday.

Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the right-wing group the Oath Keepers will reportedly testify tomorrow, KDVR of Colorado and CNN have said.

Panel member and Florida Democrat Stephanie Murphy told NBC yesterday about a vital tweet by Donald Trump in late 2020 and far-right groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers that:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Without spoiling anything that comes this week and encouraging folks to tune in to the specifics, what I will say is that we will lay out the body of evidence that we have that talks about how the president’s tweet on the wee hours of December 19th of ‘Be there, be wild,’ was a siren call to these folks. And we’ll talk in detail about what that caused them to do, how that caused them to organize, as well as who else was amplifying that message.

The House January 6 select committee is expected to make the case at its seventh hearing Tuesday that Donald Trump gave the signal to the extremist groups that stormed the Capitol to target and obstruct the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s electoral college win.

The panel will zero in on a pivotal tweet sent by the former president in the early hours of the morning on 19 December 2020, according to sources close to the inquiry who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the forthcoming hearing.

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump said in the tweet. “Be there, will be wild!”

The select committee will say at the hearing – led by congressmen Jamie Raskin and Stephanie Murphy – that Trump’s tweet was the catalyst that triggered the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups, as well as Stop the Steal activists, to target the certification.

And Trump sent the tweet knowing that for those groups, it amounted to a confirmation that they should put into motion their plans for January 6, the select committee will say, and encouraged thousands of other supporters to also march on the Capitol for a protest.

The tweet was the pivotal moment in the timeline leading up to the Capitol attack, the select committee will say, since it was from that point that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers seriously started preparations, and Stop the Steal started applying for permits.

The select committee also currently plans to play video clips from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s recent testimony to House investigators at Tuesday’s hearing.

Raskin is expected to first touch on the immediate events before the tweet: a contentious White House meeting on 18 December 2020 where Trump weighed seizing voting machines and appointing conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell as special counsel to investigate election fraud.

The meeting involved Trump and four informal advisers, the Guardian has reported, including Trump’s ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn, ex-Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and ex-Trump aide Emily Newman.

Once in the Oval Office, they implored Trump to invoke executive order 13848, which granted him emergency powers in the event of foreign interference in the election – though that had not happened – to seize voting machines and install Powell as special counsel.

The former president ultimately demurred on both of the proposals. But after the Flynn-Powell-Byrne-Newman plan for him to overturn the election fell apart, the select committee will say, he turned his attention to January 6 as his final chance and sent his tweet.

Read the full report here.

In the quirky world of opinion polls, there is a “glimmer of good news” for Joe Biden, the New York Times notes, in its survey conducted in conjunction with Siena College.

Even though almost two thirds of US Democratic voters don’t want him to be the nominee in 2024, if Biden does fight the election and his Republican opponent is Donald Trump again, the Democrat will win, according to this morning’s newly-published poll.

Biden would beat Trump in that hypothetical match-up by 44% to 41% if those questioned in the survey had their way.

The Times notes that “the result is a reminder of one of Mr. Biden’s favorite aphorisms: ‘Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.’ The poll showed that Democratic misgivings about Mr. Biden seemed to mostly melt away when presented with a choice between him and Mr. Trump: 92 percent of Democrats said they would stick with Mr. Biden.”

Its report details the discontent with Biden’s presidency and outlook, however, adding:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Jobs and the economy were the most important problem facing the country according to 20 percent of voters, with inflation and the cost of living (15 percent) close behind as prices are rising at the fastest rate in a generation. One in 10 voters named the state of American democracy and political division as the most pressing issue, about the same share who named gun policies, after several high-profile mass shootings.

More than 75 percent of voters in the poll said the economy was “extremely important” to them. And yet only 1 percent rated economic conditions as excellent. Among those who are typically working age — voters 18 to 64 years old — only 6 percent said the economy was good or excellent, while 93 percent rated it poor or only fair.

The White House has tried to trumpet strong job growth, including on Friday when Mr. Biden declared that he had overseen “the fastest and strongest jobs recovery in American history.” But the Times/Siena poll showed a vast disconnect between those boasts, and the strength of some economic indicators, and the financial reality that most Americans feel they are confronting….

On the whole, voters appeared to like Mr. Biden more than they like his performance as president, with 39 percent saying they have a favorable impression of him — six percentage points higher than his job approval.

In saying they wanted a different nominee in 2024, Democrats cited a variety of reasons, with the most in an open-ended question citing his age (33 percent), followed closely by unhappiness with how he is doing the job. About one in eight Democrats just said that they wanted someone new, and one in 10 said he was not progressive enough. Smaller fractions expressed doubts about his ability to win and his mental acuity.

Joe Biden’s approval rating has been struggling mightily for a year and the US president’s popularity is now shockingly low even among his own supporters across America, with 64% of Democratic voters saying they want someone else to be the party’s presidential nominee in the 2024 election, according to a new opinion poll carried out by the New York Times and Siena College and published by the newspaper this morning.

It describes Biden “hemorrhaging support” amid a bleak national outlook on life and politics, and only 26% of Democratic US voters telling pollsters that they want the party to renominate the current president to run for a second term.

The results make shocking and grim reading for the White House this morning.

The report laments a “country gripped by a pervasive sense of pessimism” and notes that voters across the nation gave the president a dismal 33% approval rating amid, overwhelmingly, concern about the economy.

More than 75% of registered voters think the US is “moving in the wrong direction” with a pessimism that “spans every corner of the country, every age range and racial group, cities, suburbs and rural areas, as well as both political parties,” the NYT reports.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Only 13% of American voters said the nation was on the right track — the lowest point in Times polling since the depths of the financial crisis more than a decade ago.

Biden had earlier as the presidential nominee signaled that he regarded himself as preparing the way for a new guard of Democratic leaders, but since he became president and has been pressed on whether he would seek a second term he has repeatedly said he would.

At 79 he is the oldest US president in history and, alarmingly, the Times reports that among Democratic voters under the age of 30, a staggering 94% would prefer a different presidential nominee for their party going into the 2024 presidential election.

Three quarters of voters surveyed said the economy was “extremely important” to them but only one percent think that current economic conditions are excellent.

Good morning, US politics blog readers, it’s summer time but the living isn’t easy in Washington whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. It’s going to be a busy day at the start of a busy week, so let’s get going.

• A new opinion poll in the New York Times this morning makes stomach-dropping reading for the US president, Joe Biden, reporting that 64% of Democratic voters don’t want Biden to be their presidential candidate in the 2024 election. The newspaper says: “With the country gripped by a pervasive sense of pessimism, the president is hemorrhaging support … [the majority of Democratic party voters would] prefer a new standard-bearer in the 2024 campaign,” according to a NYT/Siena College poll, “as voters nationwide have soured on his leadership, giving him a meager 33% job-approval rating.”
• The House January 6 committee investigating the insurrection by extremist Trump supporters at the US Capitol in 2021 is due to hold two hearings this week, tomorrow and Thursday. It will spell out tomorrow afternoon the connections between the leading rightwing domestic extremist groups in the US as they planned to descend on Washington to try to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and, ultimately, will set about “connecting the dots” between those groups and the then Republican president himself and his role in inciting their actions.
• Joe Biden and US vice president Kamala Harris will speak at the White House this morning at an event to mark the passing, against the odds on Capitol Hill these days, of the gun reform bill that followed the mass shootings in New York and Texas but before the Fourth of July massacre in Illinois.
• The January 6 panel is expected to hold a primetime hearing on Thursday evening as its grand finale after setting out vivid and potent testimony and evidence about the attack on the US Capitol in the dying days of the Trump administration.
• A court filing this morning has revealed that Justin Clark, an attorney to former president Donald Trump, was interviewed by the FBI late last month. The interview is ostensibly linked to the criminal contempt case against Steve Bannon for refusing congressional demands for his testimony in relation to the Capitol attack. But details are sparse so far and we’ll keep you abreast of developments.