Biden says gun violence is ‘ripping our communities apart’ after Nashville school shooting – as it happened

We’re closing the politics blog now, but you can follow developments in the Nashville school shooting through our ongoing news coverage.

Here’s what we were following today:

• Joe Biden condemned the “sick and heartbreaking” elementary school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, that claimed the lives of three children and three adults. The president repeated his call for lawmakers to pass an assault weapons ban, saying gun violence was “ripping our communities apart”.

• The New York grand jury mulling a felony charge for Donald Trump over a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels convened for the first time in a week. But it’s still unclear when the panel might be asked to vote on a possible criminal indictment.

• A judge in Georgia ordered Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis to respond by 1 May to a motion by Trump’s legal team to throw out a report by a grand jury investigating his interference in the state’s 2020 presidential election.

• Only one in four Democrats want Biden to run for a second term in 2024, a poll by Monmouth University found. More than four in 10 would prefer to see the president step aside for another candidate, according to the poll of self-identified Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters.

• Elizabeth Warren, Democratic senator for Massachusetts, said she’s running for a third term in the chamber, and has plans to “end corruption in Washington, make the economy work for the middle class, and protect democracy”.

• Kamala Harris is in Africa, meeting the leaders of Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia, and seeking to rebuild bridges with nations previously neglected by the US. The vice-president arrived in Africa with a $139m package of bilateral security, economic and development assistance.

Joe Biden spoke of his heart going out to parents of the children killed in Monday’s school shooting in Nashville.

Parents of students murdered in previous school shootings, and other activists have taken to Twitter to vent their frustrations, demand action, and send condolences to today’s bereaved families.

Here’s Manuel Oliver, a gun reform activist whose 17-year-old son Joaquin Oliver was among the 17 victims of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school massacre in Parkland, Florida:

Kimberly Garcia lost her 10-year-old daughter Amerie Jo Garza in last year’s shooting at Robb elementary school, Uvalde, Texas:

From the March for Our Lives student group founded after the Parkland shooting:

Here’s Shannon Watts, a gun reform activist who founded the Moms Demand Action group after the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school killings of 20 children and six adults:

And one from the White House:

A Fox News producer who claimed she was “intimidated” into giving misleading testimony in the $1.6bn Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit has made an updated court filing after she was fired, Reuters is reporting.

Abby Grossberg said Fox’s lawyers left her feeling she “had to do everything possible to avoid becoming the ‘star witness’ for Dominion or else I would be seriously jeopardizing my career at Fox News”.

Grossberg is a former producer for Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday morning show and later Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show.

Both presenters relentlessly pushed Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, and frequently entertained Trump’s acolytes and supporters who falsely claimed Dominion machines switched his votes to Joe Biden.

Grossberg said Fox fired her on Friday, four days after she originally sued and was put on administrative leave. Her amended lawsuits filed Monday in Manhattan federal court and Delaware superior court accuse Fox of discrimination, retaliation, sexism and misogyny.

She also filed complaints against Fox on Monday with the US equal employment opportunity commission and New York city commission on human rights, Reuters said.

Fox, part of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp, said Grossberg “ignored” its warning that she might lose her job if she revealed privileged communications with lawyers. It also said it would defend against Grossberg’s legal claims, which were “riddled with false allegations against Fox and our employees.”

More on this story:

Joe Biden has just spoken at the White House about the Nashville school shooting, calling it “sick”, and “a family’s worst nightmare”.

The president was addressing a summit of women business leaders in the East Wing, but veered from scripted remarks to address Monday’s elementary school shooting that claimed the lives of three children and three adults:

It’s heartbreaking, a family’s worst nightmare, and I want to commend the police who responded incredibly swiftly, within minutes.

We have to do more to stop gun violence. It’s ripping our communities apart, ripping at the very soul of the nation. And we have to do more to protect our schools so they are not turned into prisons.

Biden repeated his call, made at his state of the union address in February, for lawmakers to act on gun reform:

So I call on Congress again to pass my assault weapons ban. It’s about time that we begin to make some more progress, but there’s more to learn.

He also addressed mental health, and referred to military personnel who returned home after experiencing trauma:

My son [Beau] was in Iraq for a year, [in] other places. So many members of the military are coming back with post traumatic stress after witnessing the violence and participate.

Well, these children, these teachers should be should be focusing on their mental health as well.

Only one in four Democrats want Joe Biden to run for a second term, a just released poll by Monmouth University has revealed.

More than four in 10 would prefer to see the president step aside for another candidate, according to the poll of self-identified Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters.

These voters, however, do not have a clear idea of who they would like to see as the party’s nominee.

Three in four Democrats (74%) have a favorable opinion of Biden, and just 14% hold an unfavorable view. Yet 44% would like Biden to make way for someone else to run for the White House as a Democrat.

Only 25% say their preference is for Biden to pursue a second term, while 30% say they have no preference either way.

You can read the Monmouth poll here.

The Biden administration has welcomed Monday afternoon’s announcement by Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he was delaying a judicial overhaul until the next parliament session in a few weeks’ time.

There has been widespread unrest in the country in protest at the unpopular reform bill.

Speaking at her afternoon press briefing, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, praised the Netanyahu move:

We welcome this announcement as an opportunity to create additional time and space for compromise. A compromise is precisely what we have been calling for.

And we continue to strongly urge Israeli leaders to find a compromise as soon as possible. We believe that it is the best path forward for Israel and all of its citizens.

Democratic societies are strengthened by checks and balances, and fundamental changes to a democratic system should be pursued with the broadest possible base of popular support.

You can follow the latest on the protests in Israel on our live blog here:

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Joe Biden had been briefed on the “heartbreaking news of another shooting of innocent schoolchildren”.

Speaking at her afternoon briefing, Jean-Pierre said “enough was enough”, and reminded reporters that the president called in his state of the union address in February for lawmakers to act:

How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the assault weapons ban, to close loopholes in our background check system, or to require the safe storage of guns?

Once again the president calls on Congress to do something before another child is senselessly killed in a preventable act of gun violence.

Jean-Pierre said Biden had taken more action than any president before him on gun safety, including a sweeping bipartisan package of reforms last year. But, she said, that wasn’t enough:

While we don’t know yet all the details in this latest tragic shooting, we know that too often our schools and communities are being devastated by gun violence.

Schools should be safe spaces for our kids to grow and learn and for our educators to teach.

Jill Biden has reacted to the elementary school shooting in Tennessee that claimed the lives of three children and three adults.

The first lady was speaking at an event in Washington DC:

We just learned about another shooting in Tennessee, a school shooting. I am truly without words. Our children deserve better and we stand, all of us, we stand with Nashville in prayer.

More on this story:

An airport executive who was Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) blasted “cheap, unfounded partisan attacks” for his decision to withdraw, Reuters reports.

Phil Washington, chief executive of Denver international airport, said Monday he wrote to the president over the weekend to say he was stepping down:

I no longer saw a respectful, civil, and viable path forward to senate confirmation.

I faced cheap and unfounded partisan attacks and procedural obstruction with regard to my military career that would have further lengthened the already delayed confirmation process.

Senate Republicans said Washington was unqualified to serve, citing his limited aviation experience and failure to answer some key questions.

Democrats were forced to cancel a planned committee vote last week on his confirmation after some senators remained undecided.

Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, was one of those unconvinced by Washington, even after a one-on-one phone call.

“The administration should quickly nominate a permanent FAA administrator with the necessary, substantial aviation safety experience and expertise,” she said Monday.

There are developments in another of Donald Trump’s legal battles, this time in Georgia where a judge has ordered the Fulton county district attorney’s office to respond to a motion by the former president to throw out a report by a grand jury investigating his interference in the state’s 2020 presidential election.

Trump’s legal team also wants all testimony from the inquiry rejected, and district attorney Fani Willis to be barred from continuing to investigate or prosecute Trump.

Fulton county superior court judge Robert McBurney ordered Willis to respond by 1 May and state if an in-person hearing is needed to resolve any issues.

A spokesperson for Willis said her office would reply through its court filings, the Associated Press reported.

The filing is a longshot effort by Trump to escape one of many legal challenges he faces, including the state inquiry in New York into a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

The grand jury in that case reconvened this morning as it mulls a felony charge for Trump for hiding a $130,000 payment to cover up an affair.

He also faces a twin justice department investigation into his efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, and his hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he left office in 2021.

The Georgia investigation began shortly after the release of a recording of a January 2021 phone call between Trump and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in which suggested his fellow Republican should “find” the exact number of votes needed to overturn Trump’s narrow loss in the state to Biden.

The special grand jury heard from about 75 witnesses and considered other evidence before issuing a report that includes recommendations for Willis on criminal charges, the AP reports.

Donald Trump has increased his national lead in the Republican presidential primary but could face a closer tussle with his chief rival, Ron DeSantis, in the first two states to vote, new polls show.

DeSantis has not declared his run but is expected to do so later this spring. Trump has hit the campaign trail, staging his first 2024 rally in Waco, Texas on Saturday.

DeSantis has struggled to reconcile support for Trump over the former president’s reportedly imminent indictment in New York with political attacks as he looks to differentiate himself in the primary. Correspondingly, Trump has begun to attack DeSantis in familiar slashing fashion.

This morning, a new survey from the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard and the Harris Poll gives Trump a 26-point national lead over DeSantis, by 50% to 24%, a four-point gain since February.

The former vice-president Mike Pence was third with 7%. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, was fourth with 5% support.

The website Axios, meanwhile, published the results of two polls from a Republican firm.

In head-to-head matches, Public Opinion Strategies put DeSantis eight points up on Trump in Iowa, which will kick off the primary in February 2024, and level in New Hampshire, the second state to vote.

But there was better news for Trump when Public Opinion Strategies asked respondents to choose from the whole field of declared and potential contenders.

Then, Trump and DeSantis were tied in Iowa while Trump led by 12 points in New Hampshire.

Other surveys have shown such potential for anti-Trump candidates to split the vote and give the former president the nomination without a majority.

That happened in 2016, when Trump first won the Republican nomination. That year, the Texas senator Ted Cruz won Iowa before Trump swept to victory in New Hampshire.

Trump was not seriously challenged thereafter.

Salomé Gómez-Upegui reports on troubling developments in Florida, a relative refuge in the US south for women seeking full access to reproductive healthcare…

A six-week abortion ban proposed by Florida Republicans earlier this month threatens to reverberate across the American south.

Following the supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn the federal right to abortion, Florida became a strategic refuge for women seeking to access reproductive healthcare from states that banned abortion – places as varied as Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and Texas.

“In the last six months since Dobbs, the number of out-of-state patients coming to [us] for abortion care has quadrupled,” Damien Filer, a representative of Planned Parenthood of South, East, and North Florida (PPSEN), told the Guardian.

“In Jacksonville and Tallahassee, our health centers on the state’s northern border, our general patient load has more than doubled, with the majority being from out of state.”

However, the proposed six-week ban introduced earlier this month is expected to pass the Republican-controlled Florida legislature and be signed by the governor, Ron DeSantis. It would go into effect only if the Florida supreme court upholds the current 15-week ban in a case it will decide at some point this year.

The six-week ban would include exceptions to save a woman’s life, and the limit would remain at 15 weeks in the case of rape or incest. However, women seeking an abortion under the rape and incest exception would be forced to prove their victim status with documents such as restraining orders, police reports or hospital records – often rendering these exceptions meaningless, advocates say, given the barriers to reporting assault.

Read on…