Biden will press GOP on debt ceiling, tout economy in annual address

When President Biden delivers his address this evening, he will have to explain to the public how the U.S. plans to exit a three-year-long Covid emergency without leaving anyone behind.

The White House announced last week that the Covid public health emergency will end in May. The U.S. also plans to stop buying vaccines and antivirals and distributing them to the public for free as soon as this fall, shifting that task to the private sector.

But U.S. plans to manage the virus more like other seasonal respiratory diseases such as the flu, if not executed carefully, could leave behind even more inequality in a battered health-care system and among an exhausted public.

It’s true that the U.S. is in a stronger place in its fight against Covid today than the nation was during Biden’s last State of the Union in March 2022. At that time, the U.S. was emerging from the pandemic’s largest wave of infection due to the highly contagious omicron variant, which had caught the White House by surprise and upended its Covid response.

Although the virus is still spreading widely, deaths and hospitalizations have declined dramatically as vaccines and antiviral treatments have become widely available in the U.S. Weekly deaths have dropped 80% and hospitalizations are down 84% since the 2022 omicron peak.

But the virus is still killing more than 3,000 people a week as the U.S. transitions out of the emergency phase.

— Spencer Kimball

The heavily scrutinized Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., has invited a former firefighter to attend the State of the Union as his guest.

Michael Weinstock, the Democrat who once ran for Santos’ congressional seat, is set to attend the historic event as the controversial lawmaker’s guest.

Santos has seen a wave of criticism from Democrats and some Republican lawmakers for embellishing, or, in some cases, outright lying, about key elements of his resume.

One of Santos’ questionable claims is whether his own mother died during the Sept. 11 attacks.

NBC News reported that while Santos was running for Congress he tweeted that 9/11 claimed his mother’s life, while his campaign website previously noted “George’s mother was in her office in the South Tower on Sept. 11, 2001, when the horrific events of that day unfolded. She survived the tragic events on September 11th, but she passed away a few years later when she lost her battle to cancer.”

Yet, according to NBC News, records show Santos’ mother wasn’t in the United States at the time of the attack.

Santos recently chose not to serve on two House committees to which he was assigned until a slew of investigations into his campaign and personal finances have concluded.

— Brian Schwartz

President Joe Biden will highlight the positive job numbers and the nation’s continuing recovery from historic inflation during his address to Congress, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said.

“I know President Biden will talk about that … the unemployment rate is at a 53-year low of 3.4%,” Yellen told ABC’s George Stephanopolous on Monday. “Last month, we created over 500,000 jobs, more than 12 million since the President took office, and inflation is coming down.”

The projections are a welcome trend amid the worst inflation in 40 years. Nonfarm payrolls increased by 517,000 in January, eclipsing analysts’ estimates of 187,000.

Yellen attributed much of the economic turnaround to interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve; economic policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and CHIPS and Science Act; the Biden administration’s efforts to lower soaring gas prices and a multinational decision to cap the price of Russian oil products.

— Chelsey Cox

Congressional Democrats “will extend an open hand to the Republicans to try to work together” on legislation — but the GOP should agree to pass a “clean debt ceiling” increase without spending cuts, Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Neguse said Democrats were ready to work with the Republican majority in the House “to lower costs, to build safer communities and to create better-paying jobs for the American people.”

But Neguse, who is part of the House Democratic leadership, criticized Republicans over their stance on the United States’ debt ceiling, which last month hits its statutory limit of $31.4 trillion. The U.S. is at risk of default on its loan obligations if the ceiling is not raised by June, when a series of extraordinary measures implemented by the Treasury Department to avoid such a fate are expected to stop working.

Neguse said that fiscal hawks who want to lower the U.S. debt and deficit by cutting government spending should address those areas “during the budget process.”

“It should not happen in putting the full faith and credit of the United States, a sacrosanct commitment and our status as the world’s reserve currency, potentially in peril. Which is what Republicans are doing right now,” he said.

“And I think that’s a dangerous game,” Neguse said. “We ought to do what we did during the Trump administration, which is a clean debt ceiling. The Republicans did that when they were in control of the House and Senate.”

— Dan Mangan

Biden’s speech is expected to be seen as his blueprint for the 2024 campaign. The White House has repeatedly stated the president intends to run for another term, but he has yet to officially announce his plans.

The State of the Union gives him the opportunity to take a victory lap of the previous two years.

“You’ll hear the president trying to put in context the progress we’ve made,” outgoing National Economic Council Director Brian Deese told reporters Monday. “And speak to the work yet to come. The president uniquely understands that we have a lot more work to do when it comes to the economy, even as we’ve seen real progress.”

He will likely outline his successes to date from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to management of the coronavirus pandemic to his handling of the economy with recent unemployment numbers showing a nearly 54-year record low.

— Emma Kinery

U2 frontman Bono, Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S. and a wide range of other guests will join first lady Jill Biden in the viewing box of the House chamber during President Joe Biden’s state of the union address.

Each of the group’s 27 members was selected “because they personify issues or themes to be addressed by the President in his speech, or they embody the Biden-Harris Administration’s policies at work for the American people,” the White House said.

Among them is Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who last year was attacked with a hammer by a person who broke into the couple’s San Francisco home. The attacker allegedly asked Paul Pelosi “where is Nancy?” during the incident, which the White House noted was similar to the shouts and chants of some pro-Trump rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Oksana Markarova, the Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S., will join the first lady for the second year in a row “in recognition of sustained U.S. support for Ukraine nearly a year after Russia launched its unprovoked attack,” the White House said.

Bono, a longtime activist and lead singer of the world-famous rock band U2, was recognized by the White House for his work fighting HIV/AIDS and extreme poverty.

The first lady also invited Brandon Tsay, who disarmed the gunman suspected of carrying out a mass shooting in Monterey Park, Calif., during the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations there. Tsay, whose struggle with the gunman was captured on video, has been hailed as a hero and credited with preventing a potential second shooting.

Other guests include an immigration activist and DACA beneficiary, the father of a daughter who died of a fentanyl overdose at age 20, a woman suffering from breast cancer, and a mental health advocate.

Second gentleman Douglas Emhoff will also sit in the viewing box during Biden’s speech. Holocaust survivor Ruth Cohen, whom Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband met last year, is joining the group as Emhoff’s special guest, the White House said.

— Kevin Breuninger

Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Oksana Markarova, will attend the State of the Union for a second time as a guest of first lady Jill Biden.

Markarova joined the first lady in her viewing box last year and received a standing ovation after President Joe Biden called for a show of solidarity with Ukraine.

Markarova, who is Ukraine’s former Minister of Finance, has served as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s top diplomat in the United States since 2021.

— Amanda Macias

President Joe Biden will take aim at tech companies in his address tonight, calling for bipartisan support to ban targeted online advertising for America’s youth and demanding transparency about how tech companies collect Americans’ personal data, the White House said.

He will also argue it is the responsibility of companies, not consumers, to minimize the amount of information they collect.

The White House said social media companies often do not enforce their terms of service with respect to minors. Biden will discuss how his administration plans to build on the surgeon general’s youth mental health advisory, the Department of Health and Human Services’ new Center of Excellence on Social Media and Mental Wellness, and the Children and Media Research Advancement Act.

— Ashley Capoot

President Joe Biden will lay out an expansion of his “unity agenda,” unveiling new policies aimed at ending cancer, supporting veterans and seniors, tackling mental health issues and cracking down on the opioid crisis, top White House aides said.

In a call previewing his second state of the union address, they touted the progress that the Biden administration has made on those issues since he announced the four-pronged unity agenda last year. Some of those accomplishments include signing into law a veterans’ benefits bill and the establishment of an agency dedicated to researching diseases including cancer.

The White House said Biden will build on the agenda in this year’s address, in part by calling on Congress to take a series of actions, including:

• Reauthorizing the National Cancer Act to update U.S. cancer research efforts
• Working to ban targeted advertising online for children and young people and enact protections for their online privacy and safety
• Imposing stricter limits on targeted advertising and personal data collection by Big Tech companies
• Permanently labeling all “fentanyl related substances” as Schedule 1 drugs — subject to the strictest regulations and penalties — in order to close a “loophole” exploited by drug traffickers
• Pass plans to expand housing access for low-income veterans, to be detailed in Biden’s forthcoming budget proposal

— Kevin Breuninger

Biden takes the podium tonight as Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine enters its second year with tens of thousands of casualties and no end in sight.

While Russia poses an urgent threat to world peace, China presents an even longer and trickier challenge to the United States.

This was compounded by the high-altitude Chinese surveillance balloon that moved over the United States in the last week before it was shot down by the U.S. military.

Biden will address the U.S.-China relationship in the speech, but he will not announce new retaliatory actions against Beijing over the balloon, White House aides told NBC News. 

Following Biden’s address, Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders will deliver the GOP response to the speech. This will be followed by a Republican Spanish-language response, delivered by the newly elected Rep. Juan Ciscomani of Arizona. 

— Christina Wilkie

President Joe Biden is expected to lay out a hopeful and optimistic message in his address Tuesday night. But to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., America’s lingering inflation woes paint a more dire picture of the state of the union.

“It’s not great,” McCarthy, the top Republican in Congress, said Tuesday morning on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“I mean, people are worried. Every breakfast, people used to have eggs and think it was no big deal, just some protein. Now it’s almost a specialty because the price is so high,” McCarthy said.

Americans are “worried about the fuel, they’re worried about their jobs,” he said, “and then when you look at the latest polling, they’re worried about the government.”

McCarthy chalked that trend up to the public perception that politicians are “just bickering back and forth and not solving problems.”

One way to counteract that, he argued, would be for both sides to engage in negotiations on raising the debt ceiling. Biden has taken a hard line against those proposed talks, vowing not to let the threat of a U.S. default be used as a “bargaining chip” for Republicans to try to cut spending.

“We need to do the most basic things. And what is that? Pass a budget,” McCarthy said on CNBC. “Not bickering about a debt ceiling but sitting down like adults and utilizing it to put us on a path to more fiscal responsibility.”

— Kevin Breuninger

Biden delivers his second State of the Union address with a 41% approval rating, higher than his predecessor Donald Trump but below that of the previous four presidents at the same time in office, according to Gallup data.

Trump’s approval rating sunk to 37% in January of his third year in office. At the same point in their terms, former presidents Barack Obama had 49%; George W. Bush 60%; Bill Clinton 47%; and George H.W. Bush 75% at the beginning of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

The average for a president at this point in office is 54% approval, according to Gallup historic data. Biden’s highest approval rating was 57% shortly after he took office and again in April of his first year.

— Emma Kinery

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave a formal speech Monday night on the debt ceiling, but one that echoed the style of a presidential State of the Union address.

“Good evening. I’m Kevin McCarthy. I have the honor of serving as the Speaker of the House. Tonight, however, I stand before you not only as the Speaker, I speak to you as a father,” McCarthy said at a lectern before a formal backdrop of American flags.

McCarthy defended House Republicans’ longstanding refusal to pass a debt ceiling increase the House unless they secure major federal spending cuts in return.

The Republican leader did not break any new ground in his remarks, but the prose and the pomp of the televised address were unmistakable.

Biden and McCarthy are currently engaged in the early phases of what is expected to be a months long negotiation on the debt ceiling vote.

— Christina Wilkie