Biden news: President’s border czar resigns as White House asks private investors to stem migrant surge

Welcome to our live coverage of the Biden administration, Capitol Hill, and the whole spectrum of American politics.

Ron DeSantis’s lawsuit against the Biden administration is specifically targeted at saving the cruise industry, but the governor’s announcement of it made clear that he and his administration are taking aim at compulsory public health-focused restrictions in general.

“No federal law authorises the CDC to indefinitely impose a nationwide shutdown of an entire industry,” he said. “This lawsuit is necessary to protect Floridians from the federal government’s overreach and resulting economic harm to our state.”

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Based on the intensity of the response to Mr Biden’s six executive orders on gun safety – and indeed, the euphoria and rage that preceded them – we can expect more analysis and argument today. For now, many on the right are focusing on their basic argument that the president is violating the second amendment, something Mr Biden addressed head-on yesterday.

Dismissing that claim as “a phony argument” and “bizarre” given the amendment’s true history, Mr Biden yesterday called gun violence “an epidemic and an international embarrassment”.

The prosecution witnesses in the trial of Derek Chauvin so far have given devastating testimony, but yesterday saw a particularly stunning blow. Whereas many defenders of Mr Chauvin have claimed that Mr Floyd may have died from some underlying cause, including drug use, forensic medical expert Dr Bill Smock said bluntly that “Mr Floyd died of positional asphyxia, which is a fancy way of saying he died because he had no oxygen in his body.”

Another expert witness, pulmonologist Dr Martin Tobin, came to a similar conclusion.

“Mr Floyd died from a low level of oxygen,” he said. “It’s like the left side is in a vice. It’s totally being totally pushed in, squeezed in from each side.”

And with a sentence that directly hits a key argument put forward by Mr Chauvin’s defenders: “A healthy person subjected to what Mr Floyd was subjected to would’ve died as a result.”

Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman embroiled in an ever-more-complicated sex scandal involving at least one underage girl, is “feeling very uncomfortable” – at least according to the lawyer representing his sometime associate Joel Greenberg, who faces federal child sex trafficking charges of his own.

As a 2019 video resurfaced showing Donald and Melania Trump meeting another key player in the scandal, Jason Pirozzolo, Mr Gaetz tweeted out a strange statement from “we, the women of Congressman Matt Gaetz’s Office”.

“Congressman Gaetz has always been a principled and morally grounded leader,” it read. “At no time has any one of us experienced or witnessed anything less than the utmost professionalism and respect. No hint of impropriety. No ounce of untruthfulness.”

Meanwhile, a former staffer to Bill Clinton has taken out a billboard targeting Mr Gaetz with an outrageous statement...

It was a lurid night on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. The host crossed two particularly shocking lines, both showing lurid pictures ostensibly from Hunter Biden’s laptop – something that critics have compared to “revenge porn” – and approvingly discussing the “great replacement” theory, a white supremacist canard that claims left-wing Democrats are conspiring to demographically re-engineer the US by allowing in Latino people.

On the latter point, he drew a strange comparison with childhood.

“If you were in sixth grade, for example, and without telling you your parents adopted a bunch of new siblings, and gave them brand new bikes, and let them stay up late or helped them with their homework and gave them twice the allowance that they gave you, you would say to your siblings, ‘I think we’re being replaced by kids that our parents love more.’”

The White House has added its voice to the list of governments calling on unionists and loyalists in Northern Ireland to end the violence that has now been going on for several days.

“We are concerned by the violence in Northern Ireland,” said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki yesterday, “wand we join the British, Irish, and Northern Irish leaders in their calls for calm.”

To understand what’s causing the clashes on the streets of Belfast and Derry, here’s an explainer. Follow our dedicated live blog here.

Amid the fanfare over Joe Biden’s new gun orders came a major legal change in Tennessee, whose governor signed into law a bill that allows most adults over 21 to carry handguns with few checks or requirements.

Hunter Biden’s TV book tour continues

Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been promoting his memoir of grief and addiction on the airwaves this week, and last night appeared with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to talk about his experiences.

Explaining that he wrote the book “to humanise people suffering from addiction” and as “a love letter to the people that are loving someone that’s struggling with addiction. Because it’s so hard for them to understand why it is that their love just can’t get through”.

He and Mr Kimmel also found time to kick around the vicious criticism he’s taken from the Trump family – though Mr Biden insisted that “I don’t spend too much time thinking about them.”

CNN reports that federal prosecutors have been given the go-ahead from the Department of Justice to negotiate plea bargains with defendants charged with taking part in the 6 January storming of the US Capitol.

There is so much evidence, including hours upon hours of video, that many of the cases aren’t thought to be disputable enough to take to trial.