Biden Live News: Updates on Census, Presidential Address and More

A president’s address to a joint session of Congress is typically a crowded affair, as lawmakers from both parties — and their guests — pack the House floor. But President Biden’s speech on Wednesday, his first before Congress since his inauguration, will look very different.

The event is invite only to comply with public health guidance during the coronavirus pandemic. A limited number of tickets were sent to members of Congress, and only about 200 people will be allowed into the chamber. Typically, all 535 members of Congress are invited to attend — and bring guests — in addition to other high-ranking Washington officials.

Lawmakers also will not be able to enter the Capitol after 5 p.m. if they are not invited to the speech, according to a memo sent by the House sergeant-at-arms.

Jill Biden, the first lady, is expected to attend the event in person, said the White House, which has also limited the number of guests invited. But most, if not all, of the staff will watch virtually, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Friday. Also missing: the traditional box for presidential guests, she said.

“It will not look like or feel like, in many ways, what past joint addresses have,” Ms. Psaki said.

Mr. Biden’s advisers expect him to spend the next two days preparing for the speech, which they say will focus heavily on his $4 trillion plan to reshape the nation’s economy. The proposal includes plans to restore aging roads and bridges, lift wages and improve high-speed internet service across the country.

He is also expected to present a more detailed argument for his plan to reduce poverty and child care costs for families. The $1.5 trillion proposal, called the American Family Plan, would be funded by increasing taxes paid by corporations and the rich.

Ms. Psaki said other issues on the president’s mind before the speech included “police reform, health and his commitment to expanding access to health care.”

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina will deliver Republicans’ response to Mr. Biden’s address. Mr. Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, is seen as both a rising star in the party and a rare figure able to unite competing factions on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Scott said in a statement that he would deliver an “optimistic vision” for the country focused on economic growth and “empowering working families.”

The Supreme Court said on Monday that it would review a New York law that imposes strict limits on carrying guns outside the home, setting the stage for its first major Second Amendment case in more than a decade.

The move came in the wake of a recent spate of mass shootings, which were followed by calls from President Biden and other Democrats for stricter restrictions on firearms.

The Supreme Court has turned down countless Second Amendment appeals since it established an individual right to keep guns in the home for self-defense in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Since then, lower court have generally sustained gun control laws. But they are divided on the fundamental and open question posed by the new case: whether states can stop law-abiding citizens from carrying guns outside their homes for self-defense unless citizens can show they have a good reason for doing so.

The Supreme Court now has a six-justice conservative majority, and its two newest members — Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — took a broad view of Second Amendment rights as appeals court judges.

The new case is a challenge to a New York law that requires people seeking a license to carry a gun outside their homes to show a “proper cause.” Two men denied licenses, along with the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, sued, saying “the state makes it virtually impossible for the ordinary law-abiding citizen to obtain a license.”

California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island have similar laws, according to gun rights groups.

The precise question the Supreme Court agreed to answer was: “Whether the state’s denial of petitioners’ applications for concealed-carry licenses for self-defense violated the Second Amendment.”

The Supreme Court’s most conservative members have long decried the court’s reluctance to explore the meaning and scope of the Second Amendment.

In June, however, the court turned down some 10 appeals in Second Amendment cases. Since it takes only four votes to grant review, there is good reason to think that the court’s conservative wing, which at the time had five members, was unsure it could secure Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s vote.

Justice Barrett’s arrival changes that calculus.

President Biden will sign an executive order on Monday creating a task force to promote labor organizing, according to a White House fact sheet.

The task force, to be led by Vice President Kamala Harris and populated by cabinet officials and top White House advisers, will issue recommendations on how the federal government can use existing authority to help workers join labor unions and bargain collectively. It will also recommend new policies aimed at achieving these goals.

The White House document notes that the National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 law governing federal labor rights, explicitly sought to encourage collective bargaining, but that the law has never been fully carried out in this regard. “No previous administration has taken a comprehensive approach to determining how the executive branch can advance worker organizing and collective bargaining,” the document states.

The task force will focus, among other things, on helping the federal government encourage its own workers to join unions and bargain collectively, and on finding ways to make it easier for workers, especially women and people of color, to organize and bargain in parts of the country and in industries that are hostile to unions.

Even before the announcement of the task force, many labor leaders regarded Mr. Biden as the most pro-union president in generations. They cited his quick ouster of Trump appointees they regarded as anti-labor, the tens of billions of dollars for shoring up union pension plans enacted in his pandemic relief bill and a video message during a recent union campaign at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama warning employers not to coerce or threaten workers who are deciding whether to unionize.

The task force comes at a particularly frustrating moment for organized labor. Roughly two-thirds of Americans approve of unions, according to a 2020 Gallup poll, but just over 6 percent of private-sector workers belong to them.

Union leaders say the law, which allows employers to saturate workers with anti-union messages and does little to punish employers who threaten or fire workers seeking to join a union, makes it very difficult to unionize.

Mr. Biden’s task force will solicit the views of union leaders, academics and labor advocates and is to deliver its recommendations within 180 days.

Labor Secretary Martin J. Walsh will serve as vice chair of the group, which will include Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the White House economic advisers Cecilia Rouse and Brian Deese, and the White House climate adviser, Gina McCarthy.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland announced on Monday a sweeping Justice Department investigation into the Louisville, Ky., metro police and the county government there, the second time in a week that the department has opened a civil investigation into a police force that prompted national furor for the killing of an unarmed Black person.

The Louisville police came under fire after officers mistakenly raided the home of a Black medical worker named Breonna Taylor last March and shot her to death. Her killing helped fuel nationwide racial justice protests last year.

Critics have decried the pace of the investigation into her death. A grand jury indicted Brett Hankinson, a former Louisville detective involved in the raid, for wanton endangerment of Ms. Taylor’s neighbors, whose apartment was hit when he fired his gun. No one was charged for the death of Ms. Taylor.

“Today’s announcement is based on an extensive overview of publicly available information,” Mr. Garland said in brief remarks at the Justice Department. He said that the inquiry into both the police and the Jefferson County government will be conducted by the department’s Civil Rights Division and that it will assess whether the police department “engages in a pattern or practice of using unregulated or unreasonable force.”

Mr. Garland said last week that the Justice Department had opened an investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, a day after the former officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in the death of George Floyd.

The inquiries show that the Biden administration is seeking to apply stricter oversight of local departments amid a national outcry over police abuse.

Derrick Johnson, national president of the N.A.A.C.P., applauded Monday’s announcement, saying “true justice comes with accountability and action.”

“The relationship between law enforcement and our community has been deeply fractured and shattered by the lack of trust and the little-to-no accountability enforced when police commit a crime,” he said. “For far too long, killings at the hands of police have only led to one hashtag after another.”

Such investigations into whether a department’s policing practices are unconstitutional are often the precursors to court-approved agreements between the Justice Department and local governments that create and enforce a road map for operational changes at police departments.

The investigation into the Louisville Police Department that Mr. Garland announced on Monday is separate from the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigation into the death of Ms. Taylor, announced last May.

Representative Tim Ryan, a gruff-voiced, 10-term Democrat representing Ohio’s 13th Congressional District, jumped into the race for an open Senate seat on Monday, brandishing blue-collar talking points in what is expected to be one of the most closely watched, hard-fought contests of 2022.

Mr. Ryan, 47, supported tariffs on China before President Donald J. Trump came along, and after the election in 2016, he challenged then-Representative Nancy Pelosi for Democratic leadership in the House, arguing that she was out of touch with working class voters.

He will seek to capture the seat of the retiring senator, Rob Portman, a Republican, in a state that has moved sharply to the right in the Trump era.

The Republican primary is already off to a clamorous start with multiple candidates and possible contenders seeking to position themselves as the most aligned with Mr. Trump, including Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer; Jane Timken, a former state party chair; and J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Mr. Ryan, who ran a brief, little-noticed race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, represents a district in eastern Ohio stretching from Youngstown to Akron. It is a region where globalization closed factories, driving traditional white working-class Democrats into the arms of Mr. Trump. Mr. Ryan made it clear that he will seek to win back those voters.

“The success of America isn’t housed in the halls of Congress — it lies in the calloused hands and unrelenting grit of America’s workers,” he said in a three-minute video, wearing a T-shirt and a sweatshirt. “I’ll work with anyone to rebuild our economy, but I’ll never sell out our workers.”

The seat is rated “lean Republican” by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. In a state that Mr. Trump carried by eight points in 2020, the path to statewide victory for a Democrat is increasingly narrow.

Mr. Ryan will seek to duplicate the 2018 victory by the state’s Democratic senator, Sherrod Brown, who convinced enough blue-collar voters that while they might not like his overall progressivism, he stood with them on kitchen-table issues.

Mr. Ryan, who was in danger of being redistricted out of his safe House district ahead of the midterms, was a protégé of Jim Traficant, the longtime Democratic congressman from Youngstown. Mr. Ryan defeated his mentor in 2002, after Mr. Traficant was convicted on criminal charges and sought re-election from a prison cell.

(An earlier version of this article misstated how many terms Mr. Ryan had spent in Congress. It is 10 terms, not five.)

Doug Collins, a former U.S. congressman and ardent defender of former President Donald J. Trump, announced on Monday that he would not seek any statewide office in 2022, at once narrowing the field of Republican candidates for Senate in Georgia and removing a potential intraparty challenge to Gov. Brian Kemp.

Mr. Collins’s decision is a setback for Mr. Trump’s hopes of fielding a strong, experienced Republican candidate for Senate or governor next year. Mr. Collins was widely seen as more likely to run for Senate; his announcement now deprives the Trump-supporting wing of the Georgia Republican Party of an experienced challenger to Senator Raphael Warnock, a freshman Democrat who won a special election in January and will be up for re-election to a full term next year.

Herschel Walker, the former N.F.L. and University of Georgia football star, has been rumored to be considering a run, and Mr. Trump has urged him to jump into the race. Kelvin King, a contractor and Trump supporter, announced his candidacy earlier this month, and Latham Saddler, a former Navy SEAL and former White House fellow in the Trump administration, has filed paperwork stating his intention to run.

Other ambitious Georgia Republicans seeking higher office may also end up trying their luck in the primary. Mr. Warnock is a political newcomer, and Republicans are hoping that his election this winter, as well as that of Senator Jon Ossoff, a fellow Democrat, were anomalies explained in part by the false claims of election fraud pushed by Mr. Trump and his allies, which may have depressed turnout in those Senate races.

Mr. Collins was also seen as a potential primary challenger to Mr. Kemp, the Republican incumbent who drew the ire of Mr. Trump for refusing to acquiesce to the former president’s demands to try to subvert the election results.

Mr. Trump has vowed to campaign against Mr. Kemp and may get behind other pro-Trump statewide candidates in advance of the November 2022 election. Vernon Jones, a former Democrat turned Trump ally, announced his candidacy for governor earlier this month.

Mr. Trump had hinted at the idea of backing Mr. Collins for statewide office, although he mentioned him as a potential candidate for governor, rather than senator, at a rally in Georgia in December.

As Democrats in Congress consider a colossal elections system overhaul, Black leaders are facing some unexpected resistance from lawmakers who fear that it would endanger their own seats in predominantly Black districts.

Republicans have often used the redistricting method to pack Black Democrats into one House district. The practice has diluted Democrats’ influence regionally, but it also ensures that each Southern state has at least one predominantly Black district, offering a guarantee of Black representation amid a sea of mostly white and conservative House districts.

Most Black Democratic lawmakers in the South have so far remained relatively muted about these concerns of self-preservation, worried that it places their own interests above the party’s agenda or activists’ priorities. Still, the doubts flared up last month when Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, a Democrat whose district includes Jackson, surprisingly voted “no” on the House’s federal elections bill.

Recently, other Congressional Black Caucus members have urged Democratic leadership to focus more narrowly on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act — which aims to restore key parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, including the requirement that some states get federal approval before changing election laws — rather than pushing for the sweeping provisions of the For the People Act, officially known as H.R. 1.

Southern Democrats and civil rights activists are also frustrated by what they view as a belated sense of urgency about the challenges Black voters face in the region. In interviews, they described a Democratic Party that has been slow to combat Republican gerrymandering and voting limits, overconfident about the speed of progress, and too willing to accept that voter suppression was a thing of the Jim Crow past.

After President Donald J. Trump lost the election and was impeached for his role in the Capitol riot, democracy preservation groups pointed with urgency to what they called a last, best chance to address the holes in the Constitution exposed by his presidency.

But a suite of legislative responses, like requiring the release of presidential tax returns and barring presidents from channeling government money to their private businesses, is now hostage in the Senate to a more public fight over voting rights. And competing priorities of President Biden’s may ensure that the moment to fortify constitutional guardrails that Mr. Trump plowed through may already have passed.

Most Democrats and a coalition of watchdog groups say the ethics and voting rights sections in a sprawling Senate bill known as the For the People Act, or S.1., should remain intact and entwined. But solid Republican opposition to the legislation’s voter access proposals threatens less debated elements in the measure, part of what was envisioned to be the most comprehensive ethics overhaul since Watergate.

Even Democratic support for the bill has begun to splinter, as the Congressional Black Caucus and some advocacy groups pivot from the full 800-page legislation to pushing for narrower proposals.

The measure will undergo changes in a formal drafting on May 11 by the Senate Rules Committee that aims to clarify confusing provisions, conflicting deadlines and redundancies. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, vowed last month to bring the full bill to a vote. “If our democracy doesn’t work, then we have no hope — no hope — of solving any of our other problems,” he said.

The act would expand voting access, curb partisan gerrymandering and curtail the influence of secret donors, special interests and foreign governments in American elections, all hot-button issues that Republican leaders strongly oppose.

“This is clearly an effort by one party to rewrite the rules of our political system,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said last month in a hearing on the bill. “This legislation would forcibly rewrite the election laws in all 50 states.”

Four months after Congress approved tens of billions of dollars in emergency rental aid, only a small portion has reached landlords and tenants, and in many places, it is impossible even to file an application.

The program requires hundreds of state and local governments to devise and carry out their own plans, and some have been slow to begin. But the pace is hindered mostly by the sheer complexity of the task: starting a huge pop-up program that reaches millions of tenants, verifies their debts and wins over landlords who don’t always share the same interests as their renters.

Congress approved $25 billion in December and added more than $20 billion in March. The sum the federal government now has for emergency rental aid, $46.5 billion, rivals the annual budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Experts say careful preparation may improve results; it takes time to find the neediest tenants and ensure payment accuracy.

One in seven renters report that they are behind on payments. The longer it takes to distribute the money, the more landlords suffer destabilizing losses, and tenants risk eviction.

Estimates of unpaid rents vary greatly, from $8 billion to $53 billion.

While some pandemic aid has flowed through established programs, the rental help is both decentralized and new, making the variation especially pronounced.

In Charleston, S.C., housing became a subject of concern after a 2018 study found the area had the country’s highest eviction rate. Charleston County ran three rounds of rental relief with CARES Act money, and the state ran two.

The second state program, started with $25 million in February, drew so many applications that it closed in six days. South Carolina is still processing those requests as it decides how to distribute the new federal funds.

Antonette Worke is among the applicants awaiting an answer. She moved to Charleston from Denver last year, drawn by cheaper rents, warmer weather and a job offer. But the job fell through, and her landlord filed for eviction.

Ms. Worke, who has kidney and liver disease, is temporarily protected by the federal eviction moratorium. But it does not cover tenants whose leases expire, as hers will at the end of next month. Her landlord said he would force her to move, even if the state paid the $5,000 in overdue rent.

Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, was in an uncharacteristically dark place after the Capitol siege of Jan. 6.

He was getting pounded from all sides. He was being accused, accurately, of promoting President Donald J. Trump’s stolen-election lies. But Mr. Trump was still enraged at him for not doing more, and his supporters had just ransacked Mr. McCarthy’s office.

“This is the first time I think I’ve ever been depressed in this job,” Mr. McCarthy confided to his friend, Representative Patrick T. McHenry, Republican of North Carolina. “Patrick, man, I’m down, I’m just really down.”

Mr. McHenry told him to gather himself. “You’re dazed,” Mr. McHenry said, recounting the exchange. “You have to try to think clearly.”

As the end of the Trump presidency devolved into turmoil and violence, Mr. McCarthy faced a dilemma, one that has bedeviled his party for nearly five years: Should he cut Mr. Trump loose, as many Republicans were urging?

Or should he keep trying to make it work with an ousted president who remains the most popular and motivating force inside the G.O.P.?

Mr. McCarthy chose the latter.

Nearly four months after Jan. 6, Mr. McCarthy continues to defend his support for Mr. Trump’s bogus assertions that the election was stolen from him. Friends say that he knows better and is as exasperated by Mr. Trump’s behavior as other top Republicans, but that he has made the calculation that the former president’s support is essential for his ambitions to become speaker after the 2022 elections, when Republicans have a decent chance to win back the House.

The Biden administration, under intense pressure to address the devastating coronavirus crisis in India, intends to share up to 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine with other nations, so long as the doses clear a safety review conducted by the Food and Drug Administration, officials said Monday.

The announcement, first reported by The Associated Press, came after President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, “committing that the United States and India will work closely together in the fight against Covid-19,” according to statement from the White House.

But the commitment is a tricky one to make: The AstraZeneca doses are manufactured at the Baltimore plant owned by Emergent BioSolutions, where production has been halted amid fears of contamination. The New York Times has reported extensively on problems at the plant, which had to throw out millions of doses of AstraZeneca vaccine between October and January, and later discarded up to 15 million doses of the vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson, also because of concern about possible contamination.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine, unlike those of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, has also not been granted emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration. And the administration would not specify which countries will receive the vaccine.

The situation in India is dire; the country is experiencing what may be the worst crisis any nation has suffered since the pandemic began. Hospitals are overflowing and desperate patients are dying as they wait to see doctors. On Sunday alone, the Indian government reported more than 349,000 new infections, a world record for a single day.

Mr. Biden, who has already released a total of 4 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to Canada and Mexico, said last week that he was considering sending more overseas: “We’re looking at what is going to be done with some of the vaccines that we are not using,” the president said. “We’ve got to make sure they are safe to be sent.”

Monday’s move came just a day after Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, publicly announced a series of steps short of actually providing the vaccine. But as the conversations intensified inside the National Security Council, it became clear that alliance politics, along with saving lives, were all at stake.