This week, a group bearing bullhorns gathered outside the home of Jessica Lewis, assistant secretary for political-military affairs at the State Department. The protesters shouted while holding up posters reading “14,500+ children murdered thanks to Jessica Lewis” and “Jessica Lewis you have blood on your hands.”

Police were called at 7:47 a.m. to her Capitol Hill home and soon broke up the disturbance as residents walked their children to school.

The movement has grown increasingly personal in recent weeks as Congress approved further funding for Israel to advance its war against Hamas, which the protesters say has led to far too many civilian casualties.

Georgetown University professor Michael Kazin told Politico in February that he couldn’t “think of a demo held at the house of a cabinet official or leading senator” before the modern era. That story was about protesters camping outside Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s home.

Blinken is not an elected official and serves at the pleasure of President Joe Biden. But some protesters are now targeting people at an even lower level who they feel have a role to play in Israel’s war campaign.

“Advocates are looking for more ways to draw more attention to their issue and to their cause, and one way to do it is to find a new way, a new thing to do,” Peter Loge, a political communications professor at George Washington University, said. “Two dozen people on the National Mall protesting is a regular Thursday afternoon in Washington, D.C. Going to someone’s house is different.”

The practice has become somewhat less different in recent years, though the target is usually a very high-level public official. Protesters set up outside of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house in 2021, for example, drawing a bipartisan rebuke. The next year, more than 100 immigrants bused from Texas were dropped off in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’s official residence.

There are two questions to consider, Loge says, when it comes to protests at someone’s private home. One is whether it’s appropriate, and the other is whether it’s effective.

“I understand why they would do it; I think it’s a tactic,” he said. “Strategically, if you want to change people’s minds or change public policy I’m not sure it has a great effect [in Lewis’s case]. Assistant secretaries don’t have any policymaking power. You’re not talking to the decision maker, but you’re making noise at somebody who talks to somebody who talks to the decision maker.”

Washington, D.C., police spokesman Lee Lepe said there were no arrests outside Lewis’s home and that “PD continues to monitor for First Amendment activities throughout the District.” A State Department spokesperson said, “Our position on the right to peaceful protest is well known. We refer you to local law enforcement for further information.”

Protesting at a public place such as the Capitol, National Mall, or White House is generally seen as a protected First Amendment activity. Lines get blurred when it comes to private residences, especially those in busy neighborhoods. The Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance in 2021 banning protests within 300 feet of a targeted residential dwelling.

Pro-Palestinian protesters have been particularly intense since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks sparked the latest round of conflict in Israel.

They have trailed Biden nearly everywhere he goes since that date, including fundraisers, family vacations, and even funerals. Last month, a group camped out at Biden’s hotel in Scranton, Pennsylvania, chanting for three hours late at night, blasting rap music and banging on drums in an effort to keep him from sleeping.

Demonstrators at Blinken’s house have yelled at his children while pouring out gallons of fake blood, Politico reported. More broadly, demonstrators have blocked traffic in major cities and paraded through retail stores in support of their cause.

As the Israel-Hamas war drags on, those groups may continue seeking out new ways to make sure everyone knows who they are. Loge said it’s important to balance the need to protest with the need to have real conversation rather than shouting.

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Former President Barack Obama made a similar point when pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted a joint fundraiser he was hosting with Biden and Bill Clinton.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “You can’t just talk and not listen. Because that’s part of democracy. Part of democracy is not just talking — it’s listening. … That’s what the other side does.”

“So currently, marijuana is classified on the same level as heroin and more dangerous than fentanyl,” Harris said in a video. “We are finally changing that. I want to thank all of the advocates and everyone out there for helping to make this possible, and we are on the road to getting it done.”

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Now marijuana will become a Schedule III drug alongside drugs like ketamine, anabolic steroids, and testosterone. In his own video, Biden called the move “monumental.”

“Look folks, no one should be in jail for merely for using or possessing marijuana, period,” Biden said. “Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana, and I’m committed on righting those wrongs. You have my word on it.”

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This follows Biden’s move last month that granted clemency to 16 drug offenders.

Around the same time, Harris hosted reality TV star Kim Kardashian at the White House with some of the pardoned offenders. Biden and Harris are in the middle of their reelection campaign.

Downgrading marijuana will remove “barriers to critical research,” according to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. It will also build on pardons and sentence commutations Biden has provided to people convicted for federal and Washington, D.C., offenses of simple possession, which has lifted other “barriers” to housing to small business loans.

“The reality is while white, black, and brown people use marijuana, black and brown people have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionately higher rates,” Jean-Pierre told reporters Thursday. “The president’s actions today further his commitment to reverse long-standing injustices and to right historical wrongs.”

The announcement comes as the White House steps up its outreach to black voters who are critical to his 2024 reelection hopes but who have expressed concern over Biden’s presidency in recent polls. This week, the White House touted more than $16 billion in support for historically black colleges and universities and marked the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that struck down institutionalized racial segregation in public schools. Biden will then deliver the commencement address at historically black college Morehouse College this weekend.

Biden and officials from his administration have been confronted with pro-Palestinian protests during public appearances since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks against Israel.

White House Office of Public Engagement Director Steve Benjamin, who met with Morehouse College students last week before Biden’s remarks, underscored Biden’s support of free speech.

“The right to free speech extends, even those who protest,” Benjamin told reporters during Jean-Pierre’s briefing. “As long as they’re peaceful protests, as long as they don’t disrupt the amazing moment it is for the graduates, we’ll consider it a success.”

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris shared videos on social media marking the Drug Enforcement Administration‘s submitting a notice of proposed rulemaking to the Federal Register, which starts a 60-day comment period.

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“Far too many lives have been upended because of a failed approach to marijuana,” Biden said in his video.

The White House advised House Oversight Committee and Judiciary Committee Chairmen James Comer (R-KY) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) of Biden’s decision regarding the tapes of his interview with Hur and his memoir ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, which have been subpoenaed by Comer and Jordan’s panels, through a letter from White House counsel Edward Siskel, obtained by the Washington Examiner.

“Because of the President’s longstanding commitment to protecting the integrity, effectiveness, and independence of the Department of Justice and its law enforcement investigations, he has decided to assert executive privilege over the recordings,” Siskel wrote on Thursday.

In the letter, Siskel underscored Biden’s cooperation with Hur and lawmakers interested in the special counsel’s investigation, adding the president did not assert executive privilege over Hur’s report. The White House and Biden’s personal attorneys, most notably Bob Bauer, however, did try to discourage Hur from including assessments of Biden’s memory and mental acuity in it.

“As you know, the Attorney General has warned that the disclosure of materials like these audio recordings risks harming future law enforcement investigations by making it less likely that witnesses in high-profile investigations will voluntarily cooperate,” Siskel wrote. “In fact, even a past President and Attorney General from your own party recognized the need to protect this type of law enforcement material from disclosure.”

“The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal — to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes,” he added. “Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally protected law enforcement materials from the Executive Branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate.”

Siskel also criticized Comer’s hearing on Thursday, scheduled to mark up a resolution holding Garland in contempt of Congress for not handing over the tapes.

“Rather than demonstrating respect for the rule of law, this contempt proceeding is just the latest in the Committees’ damaging efforts to undermine the very independence and impartiality of the Department of Justice and criminal justice system that President Biden seeks to protect,” he wrote. “Your subpoenas and contempt threats come in the wake of the Committees’ efforts to go after
prosecutors you do not like, attack witnesses in cases you disapprove of, and demand
information from ongoing investigations and prosecutions, despite longstanding norms that these
law enforcement processes should be allowed to play out free from such political interference.”

Garland asked Biden to assert executive privilege over the tapes in his own letter on Wednesday, contending Comer and Jordan’s committees’ needs “are plainly insufficient to outweigh the deleterious effects that production of the recordings would have on the integrity and effectiveness of similar law enforcement investigations in the future.”

“We have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that the committees get responses to their legitimate requests, but this is not one,” Garland told reporters on Thursday at the Justice Department. “The only thing I can do is continue to do the right thing. I will protect this building and its people.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) condemned Biden’s decision, claiming that the president “is apparently afraid for the citizens of this country and everyone to hear those tapes.”

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“They obviously confirm what the special counsel has found, and would likely cause I suppose, in his estimation, such alarm with the American people that the president is using all of his power to suppress their release and rather than defend our closest ally at war, President Biden is using his authority to defend himself politically,” Johnson told reporters.

Hur declined to prosecute Biden in February, in part because he thought a jury would find him to be “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” with the president not remembering with precision when his son Beau died.

Cami Mondeaux contributed to this report.

Biden likes to point out that inflation has tumbled from its high of 9% in June 2022, even claiming it was that high when he came into office. But prices are still rising and are far above where they were when Biden entered the White House.

“On Wednesday, the country hit a sad milestone: Inflation under President Biden hit 20%,” Job Creators Network CEO Alfredo Ortiz said following the latest consumer price index report. “As a result, ordinary Americans face a cost-of-living crisis and declining living standards, with price increases outpacing wages.”

With that figure in mind, Republicans are going to harp on “Bidenflation” as an evil force zapping away earnings regardless of what happens from here until Election Day.

“Not one thing is cheaper under Crooked Joe — food, gasoline, cars, trucks, rent, and mortgages are all through the roof,” Trump said in a video released Wednesday morning. “Biden’s price hikes are killing the American dream.”

Biden is still holding out hope the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates before November, giving him a win he can sell on the campaign trail as “Bidenomics.” The April CPI report was a step in the right direction as inflation fell slightly to 3.4% year-over-year.

“Inflation has come down very significantly,” David Madland, an economist with the Center for American Progress, said. “It’s pretty low, and if you look at the latest news, in certain ways, it’s really quite low. The question is what the Fed will do about it.”

The Fed’s target inflation rate is just 2%, meaning prices are still rising faster than the agency would like. But Madland thinks an interest rate cut before the fall is a realistic proposition.

On the wider issue of what spiked inflation in the first place, he pointed to supply chain crunches brought on by lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.

“Inflation rose in every country, no matter what response they had to COVID-19,” he said. “If you compare the U.S. inflation rate to any other country, you’d say we are doing pretty well. So presumably, Biden has something to do with why we are doing better than most other countries. He should get some credit.”

Republicans point to other factors as the cause, especially spending bills like the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which Congress passed in March 2021 with no Republican votes. Even if consumers don’t blame government spending, most will remember how much things cost four years ago.

The time to change those perceptions may be closing. RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende wrote last week that “the political science literature is pretty consistent that this is the time when the electorate’s views about the election start to harden, particularly with respect to the economy.”

Biden is focusing on the positive, which is that inflation is falling. In fact, he has claimed twice that inflation was at 9% the day he took office when it was actually 1.4% and started rising later in the spring.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended her boss’s comments during Wednesday’s news briefing.

“The point he was making is that the factors that caused inflation were in place when he walked into the administration,” she said. “The pandemic caused inflation around the world by disrupting our economy and breaking our supply chains.”

A reporter had asked if Biden was deliberately misleading the public or if he just didn’t realize that inflation was at 1.4% when he took office.

“Reopening after the pandemic unavoidably increased inflation by unleashing pent-up demand,” Jean-Pierre continued. “Annualized core CPI in the second term of 2021 was 9%. So he was talking about the factors that were in place that led to that.”

Biden’s approval rating on the economy overall is 39% but falls to 34% when pollsters ask about inflation alone. A recent ABC News-Ipsos poll found that Biden and Trump are neck and neck but that Trump leads on the economy.

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The Biden campaign will continue promoting other economic figures, such as unemployment which remains near historic lows, and the more than 15 million jobs that have been added to the economy since he took office. But it will also be closely watching the monthly inflation reports, as will much of the electorate.

“We want to make sure that we’re fighting inflation and continue to do so,” Jean-Pierre said. “And so we understand we have a lot more work to do. We get that.”

The gift was revealed in financial documents that the president and vice president are legally obligated to disclose. Harris posted about the concert in August of last year.

“Thanks for a fun date night, @Beyonce!” Harris said in an August X post, which included a picture of her and her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff.

The Beyonce gift wasn’t the only ticket gifted to the former vice president — ESPN gifted her $1,890 tickets to the December 2023 Cricket Celebration Bowl game in Atlanta.

Also notable in the disclosure were royalties from her published books. Her 2019 children’s book, Superheroes Are Everywhere, got her $8,254 in royalties. However, her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold, garnered her only $234.13.

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Neither Harris nor President Joe Biden showed any major changes in income sources in their financial disclosures. Biden did not declare any gifts.

Beyonce is an open supporter of Biden and Harris, endorsing the duo in a Nov. 2, 2020, Instagram post just days before the election.

Speaking at a forum last weekend, grandson Jason Carter said his grandfather is doing OK but recognized that the former president’s time is coming to an end. When Jimmy Carter dies, his funeral will be the first for a Democratic president in half a century. 

What’s happened before

There have only been five state funerals for former presidents since 1973, including Lyndon B. Johnson’s funeral in 1973, Richard Nixon’s in 1994, Ronald Reagan’s in 2004, Gerald R. Ford’s in 2007, and George H.W. Bush’s in 2018. 

Day of mourning  

After a former president passes away, the current president is expected to announce the former president’s death and issue an executive order closing the federal government for a National Day of Mourning for the deceased president. The sitting president will also mandate that all flags remain at half-staff for 30 days.

State presidential funerals last five days and are broken up into three stages. The first stage consists of ceremonies in the state where the former president lived, and the second stage includes ceremonies within Washington, D.C.

To begin the ceremonies in Washington, D.C., the deceased president’s body will lie in state, meaning it will sit in the Capitol rotunda so the public can pay their respects. Some presidents, such as Gerald Ford, have opted to place their bodies not in the rotunda but instead in the chambers of the House and Senate. 

The long road to the funeral

Prior to the funeral, a procession typically travels down Pennsylvania Avenue. However there have been variations to the procession, for example when Ford requested no horse and a procession that instead went through Alexandria.

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Following the procession, the state funeral occurs at the Washington National Cathedral. All surviving presidents and the first ladies sit together, regardless of political party.

State celebrations

The third stage consists of ceremonies in the state where the president is buried. A memorial will be held for the president, followed by a burial. Regarding final resting spots, the former president will typically choose to rest in their home state. However, John F. Kennedy and William Howard Taft were buried at Arlington National Cemetery. 

Biden has said so twice now, but in reality, inflation stood at just 1.4% in January 2021. It did reach 9% — in June 2022, when he’d been in office for nearly 18 months. When a reporter brought up the discrepancy, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre spoke to wider forces in the economy.

“The point he was making is that the factors that caused inflation were in place when he walked into the administration,” she said. “The pandemic caused inflation around the world by disrupting our economy and breaking our supply chains.”

The reporter had asked if Biden was deliberately misleading the public or if he just didn’t realize that inflation was at 1.4% when he took office.

“Reopening after the pandemic unavoidably increased inflation by unleashing pent-up demand,” Jean-Pierre continued. “Annualized core CPI [consumer price index] in the second term of 2021 was 9%. So he was talking about the factors that were in place that led to that.”

Inflation has dogged Biden since it began rising in the spring of his first year in office. It surged to 5% by May 2021 and peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 before falling steadily over the last year. But it remains elevated today at 3.4%, well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

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Biden first made the 9% claim in an interview with CNN, saying, “No president’s had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office, 9%.” He then repeated a version of it to Yahoo Finance, claiming, “It was at 9% when I came in, and it’s now down around 3%.”

Republicans were happy to point out the error, with former President Donald Trump saying, “Biden’s price hikes are killing the American dream.”

“First of all,” she said when asked if prices would jump the way they did following Donald Trump‘s tariffs, “I think that that link in terms of tariffs to prices has been largely debunked.”

If so, that’s news to economists.

The Washington Examiner spoke to three economics experts, all of whom disagreed with Tai’s assertion.

“Tariffs are sales taxes on imported goods,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “There is an enormous amount of research on sales taxes, and they raise the price paid by consumers. Period.”

He says the Biden White House is wary of giving the impression that its actions will hike prices further than they have already, but “what she said is false.”

“It has not been debunked,” Holtz-Eakin, now president of the American Action Forum, said. “The opposite is true.”

After leaving most of Trump’s China tariffs in place, the Biden administration has announced it will raise tariffs on certain Chinese steel and aluminum products from 7.25% to 25% this year, on Chinese electric vehicles from 25% to 100%, and on semiconductors from 25% to 50% next year.

While the trade-offs could be worth it via stronger U.S. manufacturing and less reliance on a hostile foreign power, the idea that it won’t raise prices doesn’t hold water, according to University of Massachusetts Amherst economics professor Gerald Friedman.

Friedman is a self-described Biden supporter, but could not abide the assertion.

“When you put tariffs on, you raise prices,” he said. “You reduce competition. And that raises prices. Maybe that’s a good thing anyway! But don’t bulls*** us.”

China has made strides in the growing field of electric vehicles, offering a small EV that received praise from the Associated Press for as little as $10,000 brand new. But that vehicle would cost at least twice as much once Biden’s tariffs take effect.

Friedman says the low price is exactly what the tariff is designed to target.

“If that stuff wasn’t cheaper, nobody would be buying it anyway. You wouldn’t need the tariff,” he said. “I don’t know any economist who would say otherwise.”

The rest of Tai’s answer gets into some of the complexities mentioned by Friedman and Holtz-Eakin.

“What the president has instructed that we do is to focus on making our supply chains more resilient,” she said. “That means we need more options. That means here in America, we need to have more manufacturing capacity.”

Tariffs may help that to happen, but at prices that can pay for U.S. worker wages and domestically produced goods.

A third economist, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Bill Hoagland, offered a more nuanced response hinging on whether Tai meant prices on goods subject to the tariff or prices overall.

“Those who have studied it carefully, e.g., Economic Policy Institute, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, [found] that tariffs have had a small, negligible impact on inflation,” he said.

“On the other hand,” Hoagland added, “if I were in the market for an EV, clearly the China EV would lower my cost. If many of us were in that market … the current tariff today would translate down the road into higher inflation.”

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Even if tariffs do hike prices on at least some of the things people buy, the issue may not harm Biden in the 2024 election.

Trump backed tariffs during the 2016 election and implemented them after taking office. He’s now proposing a universal tariff, taxing all goods from foreign producers by 10%.

“I admire your courage in being here, and I hope you take comfort in the knowledge that their sacrifice will never be forgotten,” Biden told the crowd on Wednesday.

Biden also reflected on the deaths of his wife Neilia, daughter Naomi, and son Beau, describing his grief as “that black hole in the middle of your chest.”

Biden’s address coincides with expectations that Biden’s 2024 Republican general election opponent, former President Donald Trump, will be endorsed by many police unions before November’s contest.

During his speech at the 40th service, Biden spoke of paying his respects to the families of the four law enforcement officers who were killed by Terry Clark Hughes Jr., 39, in Charlotte, North Carolina, last month as they tried to serve felony arrest warrants on him.

Despite Biden’s support of police officers, he has had an uneasy relationship with law enforcement, exacerbated by calls during the 2020 election to defund departments across the country. For instance, he was criticized in March for not attending the funeral of New York City Police Department Officer Jonathan Diller, who was shot dead during a traffic stop in Queens. Trump made an appearance at the Diller funeral, held the week of Biden’s million-dollar fundraiser with former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

“As the president says, we must do more to protect our brave men and women in law enforcement,” the White House said earlier Wednesday. “That means funding for more officers, more detectives, and more technology — so officers have what they need to do their jobs safely and protect us, and taking additional action to counter gun violence.”

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Regardless, Republicans sense a political weakness, with the House Republican campaign arm, for example, releasing an ad this week attacking Democratic candidate Dave Min over his past positions regarding defunding the police.

“The ad unmasks Dave Min, Democrats’ nominee in the highly competitive open California 47th Congressional District, as a radical law-breaker who sides with criminals over cops,”
National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Ben Petersen told reporters.