Politico

Joe Biden became president promising a 180-degree turn from Donald Trump.

But the two men do have one big thing in common: similarly poor approval ratings heading into the start of their reelection bids.

Biden has not yet officially announced he’s running again next year, though he has said he plans to. Polls show his approval rating is hovering in the low 40s, right around the mark where some of his predecessors who were denied second terms sat at this point of their presidencies.

According toFiveThirtyEight, Biden’s average approval rating stands at 43 percent, about 9 points lower than his 52 percent disapproval rating. That’s only 1 point higher than Trump’s FiveThirtyEight approval rating on April 15, 2019, at the same point in his one-term presidency.

Determining the extent to which Biden’s poor job rating endangers his likely reelection bid is not just an academic exercise. A deep dive into the numbers reveals Biden isn’t just struggling with independents and near-unanimous disapproval among Republicans. He’s also soft among Democrats and left-leaning demographic groups, a weakness that suggests a diminished enthusiasm for his candidacy — though something that could be papered over by partisan voting patterns in the general election.

That’s because the possible “alternative” to Biden next November could be Trump, whose personal favorability ratings are generally worse than Biden’s. Even as Trump has expanded his lead in the GOP presidential primary, he remains less popular than his Oval Office successor.

For Biden, the polling presents both serious warning signs and reasons to think his peril may be overstated. Here’s why:

Biden’s tenuous place in history

Biden’s 43-percent approval rating at this juncture of his term puts him roughly even with past presidents who have both won — Barack Obama (43 percent), Ronald Reagan (41 percent) — and lost, like Trump (42 percent) and Jimmy Carter (40 percent).

But to underscore how things can change between mid-April of the year before the election and the next November, both George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush, sported high approval ratings at this point. George H.W. Bush was just a couple of months removed from the successful Operation Desert Storm and had an approval rating of 77 percent in mid-April, according to Gallup, which maintains the deepest archives of presidential job ratings.

The elder Bush would go on to win only 37 percent of the vote in a three-way race with Bill Clinton (43 percent) and independent Ross Perot (19 percent), owing to economic woes that overshadowed the credit he’d gotten from the first Iraq war.

George W. Bush had a 75 percent approval rating in a Gallup poll in mid-April 2003 — about a month into the second Iraq War. He won reelection, though by just 2 percentage points over Democrat John Kerry.

For Biden, not only is 18 months a long time, but he faces challenges both foreign and domestic, including slowing-but-persistent inflation and a possible economic recession.

Trouble with swing voters

Biden ousted Trump from the White House thanks to a coalition that combined the entire Democratic base with key swing groups who don’t identify with either party. But now both blocs show significant cracks in their approval of Biden.

Among independents, a group Biden won by double digits in 2020, the president is now underwater by a roughly 2-to-1margin, according to two polls released in late March from Fox News and Quinnipiac University.

In the Fox News poll, only 35 percent of voters approved of the job Biden is doing, while 65 percent disapproved. In the Quinnipiac poll, Biden’s numbers with independents are even worse: just 26 percent approve, and 67 percent disapprove.

Biden is 17 points underwater among suburban voters in the Fox News poll and 23 points in arrears in a Pew Research Center survey from late March and early April. Swingy suburban voters are a group Biden won narrowly over Trump in both the network exit poll (Biden +2 among suburban voters) and AP Votecast (Biden +10), a voter survey commissioned by The Associated Press and Fox News.

Biden won self-described moderates by 20 to 30 points in 2020, but the same group is evenly split on his job approval, according to the Fox News poll: 47 percent approve and 51 percent disapprove.

Softness among Democrats and core constituencies

 Perceptions of Biden’s job performance are uniquely tepid among base voters — Democrats and other left-leaning demographic groups — in ways that his most recent predecessors, Trump and Barack Obama, never experienced. Even as they inspired enmity among members of the opposite party, both Trump and Obama won the same level of approval from their own party.

But that’s not happening with Biden. Virtually all Republicans say they disapprove of his job performance — 90 percent or greater in each of the three polls referenced above — but Democrats aren’t answering with their own approval.

In the Fox News and Quinnipiac polls, approval of Biden’s job performance among Democrats is around 80 percent. The Pew Research Center survey combines Democrats with independents who say they lean more toward the Democratic Party — still a must-win group for Biden — and finds his approval rating lower, at 67 percent.

Moreover, Biden is struggling with key subgroups of the Democratic base. He won around 9-in-10 Black voters in 2020, but only 59 percent of Black respondents to the Pew Research Center poll said they approve of how Biden is handling his job as president.

So far, Biden isn’t facing a credible threat for the presidential nomination within the Democratic Party. Should he enter the race, the only announced challengers with any degree of name ID he’d face are Marianne Williamson, who dropped out of the 2020 race before voting began, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the senator whose most prominent public advocacy in recent years has been against vaccinations (according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation polling, only 8 percent of Democrats say they won’t receive the Covid vaccine, underscoring how difficult it will be to sell primary voters on an anti-vaccination platform).

Still, Biden faces a distinct — and without recent precedent — lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy among Democrats. In a CNN poll from last month, only 68 percent of Democrats said Biden deserves to be reelected next year.

In this way, Biden’s approval rating might actually overstate his electoral position: Around 1-in-10 Americans who say they approve of Biden’s job performance, 11 percent, say they don’t think he deserves to be reelected. In other words, they think he’s doing a good job, but harbor doubts about another term.

CNN noted that the 11 percent is a greater share than the overlap between Trump and Obama approvers and those who thought they deserved second terms. Those numbers were 3 and 5 percent for Trump and Obama, respectively.

But there’s also reason to believe Democrats will come home next November. Even as his approval rating and reelection numbers lag, Biden is still running neck-and-neck with Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in general-election matchups — and winning most Democrats in the process.

In the Quinnipiac poll, despite his 80 percent approval rating with Democratic voters, Biden wins 93 percent of Democrats in a head-to-head with Trump and 94 percent in a faceoff with DeSantis.

For four days, a Biden traveled across Northern Ireland and Ireland, meeting with the nations’ top dignitaries, waving to the crowds, and sentimentally retracing his family’s lineage throughout the Emerald Isle.

His father, Joe, was also there.

If ever there were a question as to Hunter Biden’s whereabouts, the answer this week was obvious: He was overseas, glued to President Joe Biden’s side during the entirety of a whirlwind trip that mixed global diplomacy with a sprawling exploration of his ancestral roots.

There was Hunter, chatting with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on the tarmac in Belfast. There he was again in Dublin, huddled in the rain with Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. He was in County Louth, absorbing the sights. In a local Dundalk market, he surveyed the menu, interrupting his dad’s conversation to suggest he may order something.

Hunter was at the Irish president’s residence, shaking hands and telling its occupant, Michael D. Higgins, that he was “a fan of your poetry.” He was in the audience at Ireland’s Parliament as Biden addressed a joint session of the legislature. Later that night, he attended a banquet thrown in his father’s honor, mingling with Irish ministers before dining with the widow of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.

For much of Biden’s presidency, Hunter has been at the center of controversy and the subject of heightened scrutiny. He is a fascination of the conservative mediasphere and a target of federal investigators and Republicans in Congress. But an ocean away, he was mostly just a son and close travel companion, tagging along with his aunt Valerie Biden Owen.

It was, ostensibly, a business trip for his dad. But the president himself explained that he’d decided to take family members “who hadn’t been there before.” And by all appearances, Hunter thoroughly enjoyed the jaunt.

He served as a particular point of pride for Biden, who has refused to distance himself from his son even as the attention on Hunter’s foreign business dealings, the “laptop from hell,” and his personal struggle threatened to cast a cloud over the administration’s agenda.

“I’m here with my sister, Valerie, and my youngest son, Hunter Biden,” the president told residents at a pub in Dundalk. “Stand up, guys. I’m proud of you.”

It’s not unusual for a president’s family members to join trips abroad, and Hunter did not sit in on Biden’s private meetings with heads of state. But his ubiquity nonetheless (and unsurprisingly) gained traction in conservative circles.

“Hunter Biden should not be on foreign trips with Joe Biden while under federal investigation,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.)tweeted. “Is this really the image America wants to project to the world?”

The White House dismissed criticism of Hunter’s involvement in the trip. “Historically family members of Presidents and First Ladies have frequently joined them during international travel,” a spokesperson said. “Current practices are consistent with those used by prior Administrations.” The spokesperson also confirmed that Hunter, as well as Biden Owen, were paying their own way.

At times, Hunter’s presence was something of a nuisance to the media on the ground. When Biden arrived in Dundalk, Hunter hopped out of the Beast before the president, inadvertently blocking reporters’ view of his father as they greeted the crowd and leaving the pool photographers with plenty of clear shots of Hunter, but not nearly as many of Biden.

Though he may not have had any formal role in Biden’s entourage, Hunter did find ways to make himself useful. He held an umbrella at one point to shield Biden from the rain. At a noisy firehouse meet-and-greet with embassy workers,he helped moderate a brief Q&A between Biden and some children. And importantly for a president with a tendency to get off schedule, he sought to gently steer things back on task, though not always with much success.

“You’re supposed to do the rope line, Dad,” Hunter reminded Biden, as he chatted away with the kids. “Just to say hi to everybody.”

DUNDALK, Ireland — They came by the thousands, crammed several lines deep along the narrow sidewalks, clutching flags and braving rain and bitter cold in hopes of catching a glimpse of the most Irish of American presidents.

And for a moment, it seemed as if Joe Biden might greet every single one of them.

Wearing a blue cap and an ear-to-ear smile, Biden lingered in the main thoroughfare of this county town along Ireland’s eastern coast. He shook hands, posed for photos and soaked in the warm embrace that its residents had prepared for a president many refer to simply as “Joe.”

“When you’re here, you wonder why anyone would ever want to leave,” Biden marveled soon after his arrival at the Windsor Bar and Restaurant. A capacity crowd had waited for hours to see him in the rustic pub. “Coming here feels like coming home.”

When presidents travel abroad, they are traditionally tight, focused affairs calibrated with a specific goal in mind: To advance the White House’s interests and shape the place they will soon leave behind. But for three days in Ireland, as Biden roamed the countryside by motorcade with his sister Valerie and son Hunter in tow, the president seemed content to exist within it.

He met dignitaries and townspeople. He toasted his Irish ancestors, the Irish people, Irish Americans and even the “quite a few,” he said, “who wish they were lucky enough to be Irish.”

He took a selfie with nationalist politician and alleged former Irish Republican Army member Gerry Adams, as well as with an Irish reporter and nearly anyone else who wanted one. He kissed babies and had a close encounter with a sliotar.

He butchered the name of New Zealand’s famed rugby team — badly. At one point he tried, unsuccessfully, to make friends with the Irish president’s dog. In a surprise to nobody, he quoted at least three different Irish poets but may have quoted his Grandpa Finnegan even more.

And all that came before Friday evening, when Biden traveled west across the country to County Mayo, where he was slated to recall “the history and hope and the heartbreak” of his ancestors in front of an estimated 20,000 gathered at a 19th-century cathedral along the River Moy.

Just hours before his remarks, Biden visited the Knock Shrine, a pilgrimage site for Catholics made all the more significant by a chance meeting with the priest who administered last rites to his late son, Beau, reportedly bringing Biden to tears.

Biden had come to Ireland to reaffirm its close relationship with the U.S. — and to reaffirm his own personal relationship with a place he credits for shaping him. It was here that the criticisms he faces at home seemed to fade away: His age didn’t make him old, it provided him wisdom. His gaffes didn’t make him shaky, they gave him charm.

Biden has made no secret of his deep fascination with his ancestral origins. And since visiting Ireland as vice president to trace his lineage, he’d eagerly sought a reason to come back. The White House found its justification in the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement that largely ended sectarian violence in Northern Ireland — a U.S. brokered deal that’s served as an integral element of the island’s tight relationship with America.

Yet Biden spent only a handful of hours in Northern Ireland before jetting off to his ancestral homeland. Combined with the dearth of policy announcements or apparent progress on political priorities, the move raised questions over whether the trip was, as one reporter put it, “a taxpayer-funded family reunion.”

The White House rejected the characterization, pointing to his speeches and meetings with Irish and U.K. leaders. Biden, though, appeared otherwise determined not to let thorny political demands intrude too much on his mutual lovefest with the people of Ireland.

The president has answered only a single question unrelated to his visit, on the search for the Pentagon document leaker. The most substantive answer he gave all week to any query came in response to the child who had asked about the key to success — prompting Biden to launch into a winding and often-told anecdote about the late conservative Sen. Jesse Helms and the importance of not judging people’s motives.

“That’s a long answer to a real quick question,” he conceded, well after the child had lost interest.

At times, it was tough to tell where Biden as president ended and Biden as tourist began. His tour through the country was sentimental and joyful. During a visit to Carlingford Castle, he peered across the water through gathering fog, chatting quietly with a local guide enlisted to bring him through the last Irish landmark Biden’s great-great-grandfather saw before embarking for America over 170 years ago.

“It feels wonderful,” Biden said of his emotions upon visiting the site, as a bagpipe and drum ensemble prepared to strike up an original piece entitled: “A Biden Return.”

In Dundalk, a short ride from the castle through the County Louth where his Finnegan ancestors once lived, Biden bantered with workers at a local market, debating which food and souvenirs to buy. (He left, the town paper later reported, with a bounty: Lemon meringue, chocolate eclairs, bread and butter pudding, pear and almond cake, and a mug with an image of a dog on it.)

And on Thursday, as he became the fourth U.S. president to address a joint session of Ireland’s Parliament, Biden paused to recognize the familial significance of what he would term “one of the great honors of my career.”

“Well mom,” he said, looking skyward, “you said it would happen.”

In between speeches and state dinners, the scenes at times bordered on chaos. Throngs of well-wishers lined Biden’s routes, some stationing themselves mere inches off the road as the motorcade whipped by. Others gathered on highway overpasses in the driving rain, waving Irish and American flags.

As Biden stopped in local towns and businesses, the tight spaces and swelling crowds caused visible alarm among his Secret Service detail. “A security nightmare,” one agent muttered at one point.

But Biden, basking in the middle of it all, seemed unconcerned.

“I wish our mom, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, were here today. She’d be so damn proud,” he said in the Windsor Bar, surrounded by a mix of relatives, Irish officials and local residents. “Louth held such a special place in her heart, it really did.”

As the trip wore on and the outside world fell away, Biden appeared to feel increasingly at home — a sentiment he expressed so frequently that some reporters and aides joked he might actually stay.

“I don’t know why the hell my ancestors left here. It’s beautiful,” he said on Wednesday.

“I only wish I could stay longer,” he told Irish lawmakers on Thursday.

“I’m not going home,” he said, admiring the Irish president’s residence.

Biden, however reluctantly, would eventually have to head home, set as he was to depart the Irish coast late Friday for his family’s adopted shores of Delaware. But well before then, he made permanent his intention to return.

“Your feet will bring you to where your heart is,” Biden wrote in the guestbook at the Irish president’s residence, in reference to a line he attributed to William Butler Yeats that he said his grandfather often quoted.

It was a slightly more poetic way of reiterating a pledge that he’d already made at the Windsor Bar, before striding back into the cold, where the crowds stood eager and waiting: “The bad news for all of you is, we’ll be back,” Biden said. “There’s no way to keep us out.”

The Biden administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to take emergency action to stop lower courts from sharply restricting access to mifepristone, a drug commonly used for abortions.

The Justice Department filed the emergency application with the high court after a federal appeals court rolled back a series of measures that had expanded the availability of mifepristone in recent years.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar called the potential impact of the decision “profoundly damaging” and asked the high court to put the ruling on hold while litigation continues. If the justices aren’t willing to do that, the Justice Department asked that the rollback be suspended temporarily and that the justices hear arguments on the issue before their summer recess.

One of the drug’s manufacturers, Danco Laboratories, also asked the justices to put the appeals court ruling on ice and preserve existing access to the drug while litigation over the issue continues. The appeals court’s action “has created regulatory chaos across the country,” the company’s lawyers said.

The emergency appeals stem from a ruling last week by a federal district court judge in Texas and a subsequent decision on Wednesday by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Texas-based judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, said the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone — as well as the agency’s more recent policies to expand access to the drug — should be suspended. A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit blocked the portion of Kacsmaryk’s ruling that suspended the original approval, but the panel agreed with him that the policies expanding access should be paused.

Those policies had, among other things, authorized a generic version of mifepristone and allowed the drug to be sent through the mail, prescribed via telemedicine, and dispensed at retail pharmacies. The policies also expanded the drug’s approved use through the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, up from the first seven weeks.

The Justice Department and Danco submitted their requests to Justice Samuel Alito, who initially handles emergency appeals from the 5th Circuit. Alito is likely to refer the requests to the full Supreme Court.

Without action by the high court, the 5th Circuit’s decision is scheduled to take effect on Saturday and access to mifepristone — which is used in more than half of abortions nationwide — could be immediately curtailed.

The Justice Department complained that the “arbitrarily compressed” timelines set by the lower courts had led to unforeseen consequences that could imperil women.

“Issues of such imperative public importance should not be litigated in this manner,” Prelogar wrote.

Danco argued in its appeal that while the 5th Circuit’s ruling on the case technically leaves the original FDA approval of mifepristone in place, it could function as a temporary ban on the drug in practice.

It would be “exceedingly difficult, if not impossible” for Danco to keep making and selling mifepristone if the Supreme Court doesn’t intervene, the company’s lawyers wrote.

That’s because the company might have to stop distributing the drug altogether for a time because the medication’s official labeling needs to be revised to comply with the court’s directive — a process that could take months. In the meantime, selling the medicine in its old packaging could be considered a crime, the firm said.

The drugmaker also said it faces a potential catch-22: It needs approval for new labels and other materials in order to comply with the 5th Circuit’s directive, but the FDA may be unable to give that approval due to a separate order from a judge in Washington state barring the FDA from taking any action to restrict access to the drug in many states.

“In the face of this uncertainty, Danco may well be forced to halt operations,” the company said.

Both Danco and the Justice Department emphasized the confusion created by the conflicting court orders. While the 5th Circuit ordered that access to the drug be rolled back nationwide, the Washington judge, Thomas Rice, ordered the FDA to maintain the current level of access to the drug in 17 states and Washington D.C.

“FDA faces an obvious threat of irreparable harm from conflicting court orders,” Prelogar wrote on behalf of the U.S. government.

“The result is an untenable limbo, for Danco, for providers, for women, and for health care systems all trying to navigate these uncharted waters,” the firm’s attorneys added.

Danco and the DOJ also argued the anti-abortion doctors that brought the challenge lack the standing to do so, disputing the claim that they face imminent harm from possibly having to treat patients who took the pills and experienced a complication.

“Their allegations of future harm amount to nothing more than a general statistical possibility that out of the universe of all women who may seek a medication abortion, one of their physician-members will be ‘forced’ to treat such a woman sometime, somewhere,” Danco’s attorneys wrote, adding: “A doctor’s job is to treat patients. That is true regardless of whether the doctor agrees with the patient’s choices that have led them to seek medical care.”

Federal investigators looking into the Pentagon document leak are “getting close,” President Joe Biden said on Thursday.

When asked by a reporter in Ireland to provide an update on the investigation, Biden said, “I can’t right now. There’s a full-blown investigation going on, as you know, with the intelligence community and the Justice Department, and they’re getting close.”

He didn’t clarify what “getting close” meant, and the White House deferred comment to the Justice Department. Both the FBI and Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I’m concerned that it happened. But there’s nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that’s of great consequence,” Biden said outside the Irish president’s residence, allaying worries about a massive breach that has exposed worldwide U.S. intelligence secrets and angered allies.

Since the leak became public last week, a trove of classified Pentagon documents have been published sporadically. The Defense Department has so far been unable to make much progress on the leak’s origin, officials said.

“Well, they were somewhere in the web,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters Tuesday, referring to the classified documents. “And where exactly and who had access at that point, we don’t know. We simply don’t know at this point.”

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the original leaker is a young man who worked on a military base, according to a friend in the Discord community where the documents leaked.

While working in a secure facility that contained secret information, the leaker would at first copy the classified documents by hand before posting them to the Discord group composed of religious gun and military enthusiasts, the Post reported. When that became too laborious, he switched to photographing the documents and posting them.

For the first few weeks, it took White House staffers by surprise. There would be a quiet knock at their door (if their office had a door). And then an unexpected visitor — their boss — walked in.

Since taking over as chief of staff, Jeff Zients has spent much of his days moving through the West Wing. Often, instead of responding to questions via email, he’ll do so in person, popping upstairs to see senior adviser Anita Dunn, or down to the basement to see speechwriters and checking in on various teams clustered throughout the building, according to several staffers familiar with Zients’ roaming.

Recently, after dropping in on National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, he joined the NSC’s all-staff meeting that had been underway. Zients has also wandered across West Executive Drive and into the EEOB, as he did last week for Ike’s Taco Tuesday lunch, the staffers said.

“Jeff is definitely getting his steps in,” one staffer quipped.

Zients is known as an experienced manager comfortable with delegating assignments down the chain of command and setting internal deadlines for goals, results and determining next steps. But he has also spent his early time in the chief of staff role brandishing his accessibility and building relations. It’s not just the random stop-bys and taco noshing. Starting this week, he will start holding town halls on campus to facilitate more direct communication among staff. The first is set for Friday.

The meetings, which will be open to several dozen aides chosen by lottery to attend in person, will provide “an opportunity to hear from senior staff on policy and priorities and for staff to provide feedback to the Chief of Staff and White House leadership,” one White House official told West Wing Playbook.

The plan is for Zients and one or two other senior officials to give a short presentation at the outset and then open things up for roughly 45 minutes of questions, the official said.

It’s not clear how frequently the gatherings will take place, possibly every few months, but more are in the offing to accommodate those who aren’t invited to this week’s, which will take place in the EEOB’s South Court auditorium. And all administration staffers will get a Zoom link to watch live.

The town hall idea comes on top of other traditions Zients has implemented inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., including Wednesday morning bagel deliveries from Call Your Mother, the D.C. franchise he helped start.

Zients has also penned hand-written thank you notes to several staffers and continues to utilize the chief of staff’s office — and outdoor patio — for Friday happy hours. According to people familiar with the gatherings, he’s held recent happy hours for members of the budget team and for those involved in the reopening of the Navy Mess, the basement cafeteria where staffers with access often eat breakfast and lunch.

Zients is a familiar face to many given his work leading the administration’s early Covid-19 response and, last year, a quiet effort to manage staff transitions following the midterms. And at Biden’s request last year, he helped oversee the building and launch of the government website for the administration’s student loan forgiveness program, working with the Office of Management and Budget and Dept. of Education to ensure the site, where people can determine if they qualify, was operational. The role, which has not been reported on previously, was a reprisal of Zients’ initial work with then-Vice President Biden to fix the glitch-prone online healthcare marketplace during the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act roll-out in 2013.

Despite all that history, he also embarks on the staff outreach from the perch of a relative outsider in a White House filled with longtime Biden loyalists. His predecessor, Ron Klain, had worked with the president for decades and had years-long relationships with other staffers and Democratic lawmakers.

Zients, who is an increasingly active caller and texter (although this reporter’s most recent text to Zients went unresponded to 🙁), has worked to keep in touch with staff in the building and a growing number of key allies on the Hill. According to a person familiar with the conversation, he texted Rep. Primila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the leader of the House Progressive Caucus who had a close relationship with Klain, on Tuesday to discuss her Seattle Times op-ed praising Biden’s economic agenda.

The United States will widen its efforts to crack down on the fentanyl crisis, announcing new sanctions targeting drug traffickers on Tuesday.

In a fact sheet outlining the administration’s efforts to combat the opioid epidemic, the White House said it will increase sanctions and other measures against targets to stymie drug traffickers’ access to the U.S. financial system and illicit financial flows.

“The nature of these drugs, and their ease of access and potency, presents a national security, public safety, and public health threat,” the White House said in a statement.

Washington will build a global coalition to combat the illicit synthetic drug trade, the statement said, in an effort to “develop solutions, drive national actions, and create synergies and leverage among like-minded countries.”

The fresh sanctions come as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and members of his security cabinet plan to meet with U.S. officials this week about fentanyl and arms trafficking.

President Joe Biden’s push to counter drug traffickers also coincides with numerous lawmakers’ critiques that his administration has not done enough to stem the tide of drugs flowing from Mexico. As tensions with the southern neighbor rise, prominent Republicans have even called for bombing drug cartels in Mexico to solve the problem.

Former President Donald Trump, who is seeking a second term in the White House, has floated the idea of sending “special forces” and using “cyber warfare” to target cartel leaders. Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) introduced a bill seeking authorization for the use of military force to “put us at war with the cartels.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said he’s open to sending U.S. troops into Mexico to target drug lords — even without Mexico City’s permission.

“We need to start thinking about these groups more like ISIS than we do the mafia,” Waltz told POLITICO.

President Joe Biden on Monday signed a House bill immediately ending the Covid-19 national emergency, first enacted during the Trump administration in 2020.

The White House initially announced plans to extend the Covid-19 national emergency, as well as the public health emergency, until May 11. But shortly after, House Republicans put forth bills to end both imminently. The bill that the president signed into law on Monday ended only the national emergency.

The White voiced opposition to the bills, saying the resolutions “would be a grave disservice to the American people.”

In a Statement of Administration Policy, the Biden administration said that an abrupt end to the emergency declarations would “create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system.”

Despite this, Biden told Senate Majority Chuck Schumer last month that he did not plan to veto it — marking the second time in recent weeks that the president has signaled opposition to a Republican-sponsored bill, only to later decline to veto it. Last month, Biden told the Senate that he would not veto a GOP-back bill that would repeal changes to the D.C. criminal code, a move that came as a surprise to Democrats.

Ending the national emergency will end the use of some waivers for federal health programs meant to help health care providers during the height of the pandemic.

The law Biden signed Monday did not affect the public health emergency, which is still set to expire in May — along with the Trump-era Title 42 border policy. In the Statement of Administration Policy objecting to the GOP bills seeking to end the pandemic emergencies, the White House warned that an abrupt end to the public health emergency and Title 42 would prove particularly problematic, and could “allow thousands of migrants per day into the country immediately without the necessary policies in place.”

The Biden administration is asking a judge to clarify how the federal government is supposed to comply with Friday’s dueling court orders on the abortion pill mifepristone, even as Justice Department lawyers move to have one of those decisions put on ice.

One ruling, from a conservative judge in Amarillo, Texas, essentially invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug. The other ruling, issued about 20 minutes later by a liberal judge in Spokane, Wash., directed the FDA to maintain access to it in much of the country. Mifepristone is used in more than half of all abortions nationwide and is also used to manage miscarriages.

The two rulings appear to be “in significant tension,” the Justice Department told the Washington-based judge, Thomas Rice, on Monday. DOJ asked Rice to “clarify” the government’s “obligations” in light of the conflict.

Also on Monday, DOJ and a drug company that makes mifepristone asked a federal appeals court to freeze the ruling of the Texas-based judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk. Kacsmaryk has put his ruling on hold until this Friday, but the government and the drug company want the appeals court to keep the ruling on hold while they pursue their appeals.

The legal turmoil caused by the rival decisions may ultimately need to be resolved by the Supreme Court, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion 10 months ago.

Kacsmaryk, an appointee of President Donald Trump, acted in a lawsuit filed by anti-abortion medical groups that claimed the FDA broke the law when it approved mifepristone for abortion in 2000 and recently expanded access to the drug.

Kacsmaryk’s ruling appears to be the first time that a court has invalidated an FDA drug approval. If the ruling takes effect, selling the drug would become a criminal offense nationwide.

The Justice Department immediately appealed Kacsmaryk’s ruling on Friday night, even as some prominent Democrats — and at least one Republican — called on the administration to ignore the ruling. The administration suggested that step is premature and signaled that it would work through the appeals process for now.

It did just that on Monday, following up its notice of appeal with a 49-page emergency motion asking the conservative-leaning 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to keep the ruling on hold.

“If allowed to take effect,” DOJ said in its motion, Kacsmaryk’s ruling “will irreparably harm patients, healthcare systems, and businesses.”

In a similar filing, the drug maker Danco, which produces the brand-name version of mifepristone, called Kacsmaryk’s ruling “an extreme outlier” and contended he bent “every rule” to reach it. The company also said that Rice’s ruling indicates that Kacsmaryk’s decision went too far and should be blocked.

“The public is understandably confused by these two orders, issued the same day,” the company’s lawyers wrote. “Staying the nationwide injunction that alters the status quo would avoid creating an unnecessary judicial conflict.”

Rice, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, issued his ruling in a case brought against the FDA by blue-state attorneys general who want to further loosen the agency’s restrictions on how mifepristone can be dispensed. Rice ordered the FDA to maintain current access to the drug in 17 states and the District of Columbia, the plaintiffs in the case.

Technically, the two rulings may not be incompatible. Kacsmaryk’s ruling is framed as a “stay” of the FDA’s approval of mifepristone — an order that would subject Danco and others to a risk of criminal liability but does not actually order the FDA to do anything. So, it’s possible that the agency could comply with both by doing nothing at all.

But the rulings have created sufficient uncertainty that the Justice Department asked Rice on Monday to fast-track the government’s request for clarification about how the two rulings interact.