The Daily 202: Immigration, North Korea, and guns – Biden’s news conference is a minefield

President Biden holds his first solo news conference today after days of trying to defuse bipartisan criticism of his handling of immigration and managing problems — like a pair of mass shootings barely one week apart — largely out of his control.

Biden, who held a CNN town hall in February and has taken questions from reporters since taking office but never in this formal format, is expected to tout progress on the economy and the national coronavirus vaccination campaign.

But in the run-up to the eagerly awaited question-and-answer session, a staple of the modern presidency, the administration has taken a series of steps suggesting that Biden sees the border as one of his most nettlesome policy problems — and a potential news-conference liability.

On Wednesday, Biden publicly entrusted Vice President Harris with the job of leading on the administration’s efforts to counter what he called “this new surge” of people across the border with Mexico.

“She is the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border,” he said.

On Monday, the White House took another two steps related to immigration, detailing its campaign to convince potential migrants from Latin America to stay put and announcing that senior Biden aides would visit Mexico and Guatemala.

And the White House announced last week it would share vaccines with Mexico, a policy reversal that followed Mexico’s announcement it was closing its southern border to nonessential travel (and therefore U.S.-bound migrants) until April 21.

As President Barack Obama’s point man on immigration, Biden is no stranger to the issue’s unique headaches and pitfalls, the cross-cutting domestic political pressures and diplomatic considerations that have doomed previous efforts to enact a solution. 

Immigration is just one of the problems bedeviling Biden as he looks to project an image of steady leadership with a low-profile approach that some observers — and some aides — have taken to describing as “boring.”

Coronavirus vaccinations may promise a return to normal, or normal-adjacent, by Independence Day, but the pandemic’s long-term health effects are unclear, as are the scope of the social and economic transformations it unleashed. And the sweeping policy reviews on everything from North Korea, to racial injustice, to relations with China give a sense of what’s on Biden’s plate. 

The North Korea missile launches, in particular, show that it’s not just reporters who set the agenda. Outside forces can force the White House’s hand, too.

On Tuesday, after Iraq reportedly pushed for new negotiations on the U.S. military presence there, the White House announced the resumption of a “strategic dialogue” on the subject.

On Thursday, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said in a forum hosted by Foreign Policy magazine that Biden would keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan past a May 1 deadline to withdraw. 

The White House declined to dispute the characterization, referring reporters instead to remarks Secretary of State Antony Blinken made in Brussels, where he repeated Biden’s recent comment that meeting the deadline would be “tough.”The press could seek the final word from the president.

Unexpected queries and one gaffe or revealing comment sometimes dominate headlines.

(There’s no guarantee reporters won’t fixate on one topic, like immigration, and leave other important issues untouched, or ask questions that seem designed more for Internet virality than informing the public. My colleague Margaret Sullivan has cast the news conference as “a major test” for the journalists questioning Biden.)

While Biden held the razor-thin Democratic congressional majority together to muscle his $1.9 trillion coronavirus package to passage, it’s not clear whether that will hold as he tries to move other key priorities from the climate crisis to gun violence.

On trade, for example, Biden is under pressure from some Democrats (and American whiskey producers) to end his predecessors’ tariffs, including 25 percent duties on steel imports. But many progressives favor keeping them. While the president doesn’t need Congress to remove them, he’ll have to decide whether it’s worth dividing his party.

Americans filed about 684,000 jobless claims last week, the lowest level of the pandemic. The Labor Department data shows that the pandemic’s economic impact is easing, Hannah Denham reports. 

More than 60 House Democrats are pressing Biden to sign an executive order to ban the importation of assault weapons. The Democrats sent Biden “a letter this morning urging him to keep his campaign promise and ban foreign firearms, including semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines,” Marianna Sotomayor reports. “The letter was led by Rep. Joe Neguse (D), who represents Boulder, where 10 people were killed at a King Soopers grocery store Monday.”

The Boulder shooting suspect will be held without bail, a judge ruled in his first court appearance. Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa’s lawyers asked to delay the next status hearing in the case for two to three months, saying “we cannot do anything until we are able to fully assess Mr. Alissa’s mental illness,” Timothy Bella reports. “The judge granted the request and called for a recess after roughly six minutes.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee this morning advanced Lisa Monaco’s nomination as deputy attorney general, the No. 2 position at the Justice Department, John Wagner reports. “The panel then launched into what could be an extended debate over Biden’s nomination of Vanita Gupta for associate attorney general, the No. 3 position at Justice,” Wagner writes. “Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the top Republican on the panel, called Gupta ‘a strident proponent of many very liberal causes’ and argued that ‘it’s hard to disentangle her legal career from her very progressive politics.’ Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the panel’s chairman, said Gupta is ‘exceptionally well-qualified’ and accused Republican senators of opposing her because of her advocacy of voting rights.”

Vilsack, speaking to Laura Reiley, for the first time noted the extent to which the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic exacerbated existing disparities across the U.S. economy. The distribution of coronavirus relief increased those gaps, Vilsack said. 

• “Vilsack said the Biden administration would be focused on closing those inequalities,” Reiley reports. “The USDA will battle three systemic problems concurrently, he said: a broken farm system, food insecurity and a health-care crisis.”
• “After months of national debate about systemic racism and reparations for slavery and segregation, Vilsack says he will make rooting out racism at the agency, and in agriculture, a priority. The American Rescue Plan will pay $5 billion to farmers of color, who have lost 90 percent of their land over the past century because of systemic discrimination and a cycle of debt.” 

• “The power of political disinformation in Iowa,” by the New Yorker’s Peter Slevin: “Republicans drove turnout to unexpected levels by crafting a blunt-force narrative anchored in puffery and lies when it came to Trump and caricature when it came to Democrats. The message was repetitive, it was relentless, it was thin on facts and policy detail, and it worked, especially in rural counties, where Trump and the G.O.P. won by significant margins.”
• “Biden may be the most pro-labor president ever; that may not save unions,” by the New York Times’s Noam Scheiber: “Despite Mr. Biden’s remarkable support for their movement, unions may not be much better off when he leaves office than when he entered it. That’s because labor law gives employers considerable power to fend off union organizing, which is one reason that union membership has sunk to record lows in recent decades. And Senate Republicans will seek to thwart any legislative attempts … to reverse the trend.”

• “Over three-plus decades in the Senate, now-President Biden repeatedly criticized his predecessors for deploying troops and attacking America’s adversaries without first seeking congressional consent,” Karoun Demirjian reports. “But while the Biden administration has committed to ‘ending the forever wars’ and replacing use-of-force authorizations ‘with a narrow and specific framework,’ there are so far few specifics on what the new commander in chief is willing to endorse.”
• “The House launched this year’s debate with a measure from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) to repeal the 2002 authorization … [that] presidents have used to justify operations against terrorist groups in Iraq and in defense of the 2020 strike to kill Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleiman… The House has passed Lee’s repeal on a bipartisan basis before; in the Senate, the chief bipartisan proposal from Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Todd C. Young (R-Ind.) would repeal the 2002 authorization and the still-lingering 1991 Gulf War AUMF.”
• “In the House and Senate, backers in both parties say there is little reason to wait for an additional green light from the Biden administration to move ahead,” Demirjian writes. “Kaine said in an interview that he has ‘not heard any opposition from the White House’ over repealing the measures. But not all war authorizations are created equal. Lawmakers are bracing for more complicated and potentially contentious negotiations to repeal and replace the 2001 AUMF Congress passed in the wake of 9/11.”

• “Among those who will brief senators are Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, whose department oversees the agency that is charged with caring for the unaccompanied migrant children who are arriving in increased numbers to the border, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas,” Seung Min Kim reports. “Other briefers include Amy Pope, the senior adviser for migration at the Domestic Policy Council; acting assistant secretary of state Dan Smith, and Bob Fenton, the acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

• “The administration will invest more than $6 billion in community health centers and make front-line essential workers and all people 16 and older with high-risk medical conditions eligible for vaccination at such sites,” Isaac Stanley-Becker reports. “Additional resources, the government promised, ‘will expand access to vaccines for vulnerable populations and increase vaccine confidence across the country.’”

• This is Buttigieg’s first appearance on Capitol Hill since he was confirmed on Feb. 2, Ian Duncan writes. “It comes as the administration is preparing a $3 trillion infrastructure and jobs package that is expected to call for a significant boost to transportation spending.”

• “I’m sure of one thing: It’s going to be enormous,” Manchin told reporters yesterday, NBC News’s Sahil Kapur reports. He didn’t name a price, but he said he favors some “tax adjustments” to President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law to build revenue to pay for the package. “He also suggested an ‘infrastructure bank’ paid for with revenues, potentially a value-added tax, that would be used for ‘rebuilding America.’”

• “In a blunt memo this month, one senior Biden appointee said political tampering under the Trump administration had ‘compromised the integrity’ of some agency science,” the Times reports. “The broader list of decisions where staff say scientific integrity was violated is expected to reach about 90 items, according to one person involved in the process. It currently includes well-known controversies like the ricochet of decisions around Pebble Mine, a proposed copper and gold mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region, as well as rulings around relatively obscure toxic chemicals.”

“It’ll be interesting to see if he’s more disciplined, or the settings have allowed him to be more disciplined,” a former Biden adviser told Matt Viser about the president’s news conference today. “Candor is an absolute blessing. … It comes with the occasional cleanup job and needed clarifications, but it’s also what people love about him.”

“More than a year ahead of the first state primaries, hard-edge pro-Trump conservatives are rushing into Republican Senate races that have been upended by the impending retirements of veteran lawmakers — heralding a long battle ahead over the direction of the GOP,” Mike DeBonis reports. Candidates include:

• Eric Greitens, who “resigned the Missouri governorship in disgrace, facing criminal charges and allegations that an extramarital affair had turned violent.”
• Mo Brooks, an Alabama congressman who “served as Trump’s warm-up act for the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally that preceded the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, urging participants to ‘start taking down names and kicking ass.’ ”
• Josh Mandel, an Ohio hopeful who “recently had his Twitter account temporarily suspended [after he] referred to some of the people crossing the southern border as ‘Muslim Terrorists’ and ‘Mexican Gangbangers.’ ”
• “Several GOP operatives … said the emerging field of Republican candidates is raising concerns, although they believe the issue is manageable since Brooks, Greitens and Mandel are running in favorable states for Republicans. But other pro-Trump stalwarts are eyeing races in other states where Republicans are trying to wrest power from Democrats,” DeBonis writes.
• In Arizona, for example, possible GOP candidates to oust freshman Sen. Mark Kelly (D) include Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward and Rep. Andy Biggs, leader of the House Freedom Caucus. They’re both key amplifiers of Trump’s unfounded voter fraud claims.
• “The picture is more unsettled in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina — where longtime GOP Sens. Patrick J. Toomey and Richard Burr, respectively, are departing — but among the rumored potential candidates in the latter state are Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law,” DeBonis reports.

• Those seven Republicans are members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which today will question the chief executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter about the spread of election fraud falsehoods in advance of the Jan. 6 riot, Cat Zakrzewski reports.
• They’re among 15 of the 26 GOP members of the committee who voted to overturn Biden’s victory.
• “Three Republican members of the committee, Reps. Markwayne Mullin (Okla.), Billy Long (Mo.) and Earl L. ‘Buddy’ Carter (Ga.), tweeted or retweeted posts with the phrase ‘Stop the Steal,’ ” Zakrzewski notes. “Other Republicans on the committee voiced their support for Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. … Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.) pushed his followers to visit a Trump website to report instances they saw of alleged voter fraud. Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) tweeted on Nov. 10 that he supported Trump’s efforts to ‘make sure every legal vote is counted.’ ”

• “We don’t hear enough about public confidence,” said Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican witness during a Senate hearing on Bill 1, the Democrats’ massive voting rights bill, Yahoo News’s Jon Ward reports. “Rokita said that evidence of voter fraud was not the proper standard for crafting laws that regulate when, where and how Americans can vote. ‘It’s a very difficult crime to spot,’ he said.”
• Basing voting laws on “public confidence” is “a difficult if not impossible to define metric,” Ward points out.

“The View” co-host Meghan McCain said she feared “identity politics” would allow Asian people to get jobs over White people. “McCain, who is considered the show’s conservative voice, questioned whether promoting AAPI figures would deal a blow to candidates who are more worthy of the positions — an assertion that earned a quick rebuke from many who said talent and diversity are not mutually exclusive,” Meryl Kornfield reports. “People pointed out that McCain’s argument was not an uncommon one in national discussions about race-conscious policies, including affirmative action, but that it was built around a perception that people of color fall short compared with White competitors. Others said McCain, the daughter of the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), was hypocritical, given the role her family’s identity has played in her media career.” 

A reporter asked Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to wear a mask during a press gaggle. He told the reporter he was welcome to step away. “When I’m talking to the TV camera, I’m not going to wear a mask,” Cruz said, per Fox News. “It’d make us feel better,” the reporter replied. “You’re welcome to step away if you’d like,” Cruz replied. Conservative commentators praised Cruz online, and later in the day the senator tweeted: “Lefty reporters have lost their minds.”  

Until the mass shootings this month, gun violence had been largely absent from the headlines. But 2020 was the deadliest gun violence year in decades.

The president will hold his first formal press conference today at 1:15 p.m. He will meet virtually with the European Council at 3:45 p.m. 

The vice president will participate in the White House’s virtual Passover celebration with second gentleman Doug Emhoff today at 5:50 p.m. 

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a nomination hearing today at 10:15 for Deanne Criswell, New York City’s emergency management commissioner, to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Criswell would be the first woman to lead FEMA. 

Seth Meyers said the nation’s Founders never intended the Second Amendment to be interpreted in the way we do now: 

And one of the world’s biggest ships remains wedged across the Suez Canal, affecting global trade: