Biden news today: Senator Susan Collins will vote for president’s Supreme Court pick Ketanji Brown Jackson

CBS White House correspondent Weijia Jiang has this intel on Joe Biden’s upcoming speech on the administration’s response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Joe Biden yesterday signed a bill that makes lynching a federal hate crime, a measure that has been waiting to pass into law for more than a century.

Named for Emmett Till, the Black teenager whose brutal 1955 murder helped galvanise the civil rights movement, the bill faced only seven “no” votes in the House of Representatives and passed the Senate by unanimous consent.

“From the bullets in the back of Ahmaud Arbery, to countless acts of violence, countless victims both known and unknown … racial hate is not an old problem, it’s a persistent problem,” Mr Biden said at the signing ceremony. “Hate never goes away. It only hides, it hides under the rocks. Given just a little bit of oxygen it comes roaring back out, screaming. What stops it is all of us, not a few.”

In a development that all but assures Joe Biden’s first Supreme Court nominee will be confirmed, Maine Republican Susan Collins has said she will vote for Ketanji Brown Jackson when the vote to put her on the bench comes to the Senate floor.

Ms Brown Jackson has already secured the support of Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator who was thought the most likely to withhold his backing.

Eric Garcia has the news:

Joe Biden’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year includes more than $3bn for law enforcement, making good on the president’s promise at the State of the Union that he would fund, not defund, the police. The move raises the prospect of a serious clash with the vocal and organised “defund” wing of the Democratic Party, but as Eric Garcia writes, the gap may not be unbridgeable.

Russian forces have failed in their mission to encircle and capture Kyiv, leading to Moscow’s announcement that military action around the Ukrainian capital would be scaled back, the US Department of Defense said on Tuesday.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby made clear during his remarks at a daily press briefing that Russian forces, and concurred with a reporter’s assertion that the Russian military had suffered a “defeat” on the outskirts of Kyiv.

“I said as much in my opening statement. They failed to take Kyiv,” Mr Kirby told reporters.

Roll Call’s John T. Bennett – late of The Independent – writes that it is the White House, not Joe Biden, who made a mess of the president’s speech in Poland this weekend, specifically by trying to “walk back” his declaration that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power”.

Joe Biden’s overall approval ratings may not be in good shape these days, but on another measure, he is apparently doing relatively well. According to a poll from Morning Consult, the president enjoys a higher approval rating than many of his counterparts in other countries when it comes to handling the Covid-19 crisis.

He is performing better than leaders in Brazil, the UK, Australia and Spain, and even France’s Emmanuel Macron – though he lags far behind India’s Narendra Modi and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

That said, his rating of 41 per cent approval to 50 per cent disapproval is obviously not much good in an absolute sense – and that it looks good by global standards says a lot about how governments have been damaged by the pandemic.

Speaking on MSNBC last night, veteran civil rights leader Al Sharpton gave his view on the significance of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which Joe Biden signed into law yesterday.

“I was talking to the president and the vice president after the signing,” he said, “and to think that we are just getting this signed… to think that we had to get to 2022 to make lynching a federal crime, it is a bittersweet day”.

Former President Donald Trump would win the 2024 election were it held today, a new poll published this week in The Hill found.

The 45th president, who faces widespread blame for spreading false claims about the last presidential election that led to a riot at the US Capitol, slightly leads Joe Biden in a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll published on Monday. Mr Trump would have the support of 47 per cent of voters while 41 per cent would back Mr Biden. The gap between the two was well within the 12-point margin that represents the current share of undecided voters.

Read John Bowden’s full report

The US State Department has issued a new travel advisory warning all its citizens against travelling to Russia, saying Americans could be targeted with “harassment” by government security officials in the country.

This could include “detention and the arbitrary enforcement of local law” said the department, adding that there was also a risk Americans’ mobility may be affected by “limited flights into and out of Russia”.

Read full report by Namita Singh