complaining of illnesses since the chemical exposure they are. welcome to fox news live. hello, everyone. we have two other big stories that we are this moment. presidential race 2024 talk heating up as the republican candidates, they sharpen their attacks on president biden. he has not yet announced he is running for reelection. the former governor now says he is out. tensions with china rising yet again amid fears it plans to invade taiwan. beijing just announced a $230 billion increase to its military budget. house foreign affairs military on that in just a moment. eric: talking about china and the threat from beijing, but first we have live team coverage. lucas with the latest on the presidential race but first nate with the developments on ohio train derailment. it s happened again. yeah, it has. the good news is it does not appear it is a repeat of last month s toxic derailment in east palestine. they say that there is no evidence of any spillage after this most r
since 1955. the motorcade of his funeral also with the first crossed over the bridge. as i mentioned, there been movements to rename the john r lewis bridge. that has stalled since in the legislature. president biden will be behind me addressing the american people. the crowd calling for renewed voting rights changes and protections. that will be at 330 eastern time in about three hours. arthel. arthel: you will be there, the president will be there. making his remarks live, we will bring it to our audience. thank you. eric. a follow-up about tony gonzales. he is heading back at the state republican party. the two-term lawmaker broke with his party to support new gun safety laws after the school shooting in his district.
georgia in this moment above all else. yeah, and i heard the governor s comments earlier, and remember, you know, he s running first in a primary on the republican side against david purdue, former senator, but if he gets through that in the general election against stacey abrams. i think it s striking that stacey abrams is not there today. i think the president was asked about that, got a little bit prickly with the answer saying it was a scheduling mess-up, scheduling mess-ups don t happen when the white house is moving a giant organization like this to a state where she is running for governor on an issue that she spent years doing, voting rights changes. we should also point out ebenezer baptist church is where rafael warnock, the current senator from georgia was a pastor as well, so there s a lot of politics in and around the atlanta area that is fascinating to watch today as this pitch is made for voting rights.
walking i was out for a walk in my neighborhood yesterday, and i can t tell you how many people stopped me on that walk to talk to me about how frustrated they were that there s this no action and this continued emphasis that somehow voting rights needs to be bipartisan. i just want to remind all of your viewers that voting rights has almost never been bipartisan, with the exception of the mid-20th century when there were particular circumstances, but in most of our country s history, voting rights changes for the better have been rammed through by one party because it is a polarizing, unfortunately, it shouldn t be, but it has been polarizing because it is a tool for one party to use to suppress the vote to try to win the election, which then, again, you go back to january 6th, this is another piece of this coordinated attack to try to win elections, not legitimately, but by these different tacks. so i have hope.
getting major voting rights changes made coming up in 2022. yeah. let me get your thoughts on a few other items. the prisom of 2022. the biden administration announced it will enhance the pause from february to may 1st on student loans. the white house announced some blowback, including criticism it s going to hurt the party politically since the president said he would be canceling student debt. but if payments start up may 1st without any forgiveness, don t democrats risk facing even bigger blowback because it s going to be that much closer to the election in november. you know, i think back to when i first ran for congress and i announced it would have been july of 2011, and i was very, very careful about the campaign promises that i made. and i wanted to make sure that when i was going to be running for re-election two years later that i would point to that i lived up to those promises.