We love to report good news when we can get it, and this is good news. Not immaculately good, mind you, but when it comes to the Biden White House, anything which isn’t awful is a win. And the announcement yesterday that the COVID emergency declarations will be allowed to expire on May 11 qualifies.

President Biden, who declared the COVID-19 pandemic to be over during a “60 Minutes” interview in September of last year, informed Congress on Monday that he will officially end two emergency declarations related to the virus on May 11, nearly three years after they were first declared.

The 80-year-old president’s announcement came in a statement of administration policy from the Office of Management and Budget opposing Republican House bills calling for the immediate termination of the two national emergencies.

The White House pledged to wind down the pandemic-era declarations over the next 14 weeks, warning that ending the public health emergency and the COVID-19 national emergency immediately would have extensive consequences.

“An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system — for states, for hospitals and doctors’ offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote.

As part of the wind down, the two emergency orders will be extended one final time until May 11, which the OMB says aligns with the Biden administration’s commitment to give at least 60 days’ notice prior to termination of the public health emergency.

This climbdown comes as a reaction to a planned House vote on ending the emergency declarations. Biden is giving up his emergency powers on his terms, sort of, before there’s a big political fight over Congress taking them away.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise crowed about the win and then angled for a little more…

I am glad to see the White House is following the lead of House Republicans and announcing they plan to finally end the Public Health Emergency and the COVID Emergency Declaration, on the heels of our announcement last week that we will vote this week to immediately end this outdated declaration.

Rather than waiting until May 11, the Biden Administration should join us now in immediately ending this declaration. The vast majority of Americans have returned to work and resumed their lives months ago, yet the Biden Administration has lagged behind, attempting to keep things shut down under the guise of COVID.

With our votes starting tomorrow, House Republicans are making it clear that the days of the Biden Administration being able to hide behind COVID to waste billions of taxpayer dollars on their unrelated, radical agenda are over.

Yes, you’d still have to pass an end to the emergency through the Senate, and expecting Chuck Schumer to play along with the House Republican majority in doing that is a bit of a fool’s errand.

But there is value in forcing the ball into Schumer’s court. Because when the country can point to Schumer and the Senate’s Democrats as the holdup to making policy most Americans want, they’ve now got an issue to vote on in 2024. It amazes us how few people seem to realize how important it is to keep favorable issues front and center as a means of framing elections, but if you pay attention to how the other side does it you start to get the picture.

And pinning Biden’s Branch COVIDian lunacy on his party is going to be important, for two reasons. First, as a matter of protecting civil rights and individual liberty from anything like the COVID lockdowns EVER happening again, the 2024 election has got to become a reckoning for the mask-and-vaccine-mandate crowd.

Second, if Donald Trump is the GOP nominee, a lot of work will need to be done to frame the public’s understanding of the COVID issue. Because, as this new spat between Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis shows, Trump is problematic where COVID is concerned. Trump is criticizing DeSantis’ virus response, but the fact is once DeSantis had evidence to work with he was spot on in dealing with COVID and Florida flourished as a result.

Meanwhile, Trump threw untold billions of dollars at COVID, including fast-tracking vaccines which don’t work all that well and have nasty side effects for far too many people who now can’t recover damages from their injuries thanks to the legal immunity his “emergency use authorization” confers on Big Pharma. And Trump employed lunatics like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx who promoted the lockdowns in the first place.

If you’re going to run Trump as your nominee in 2024, you’ll have to build a COVID narrative that skewers Biden and protects Trump.

How do you do that?

This cessation of the public health emergency has something to do with that. Biden said COVID was “over” in September and yet he won’t relinquish the emergency until the next May? What kind of unresponsive inertia is that? Then there are the other stupid policies – student loan payment forgiveness, eviction bans and so forth – which have interfered with the normal workings of the economy. Asking, loudly, when all of this is going to stop is a good way to build public understanding of Biden’s culpability.

And then there are the vaccine and mask mandates. After all, Trump was the guy who produced the vaccines, which is something of an incomplete triumph, but it was Biden who demanded the whole country take them. Trump made them available, which is not the same thing as forcing the jab into everybody’s arms.

And when the FAA has to change the acceptable EKG readings of airline pilots because we otherwise wouldn’t have enough of them to fly planes thanks to what the jab has done to them, well.

Let’s just say there is a good argument to be had that the Democrats are the Branch COVIDians, that they’ve done too damn much damage, and that they’ve got to be swept out of office in favor of people who actually understand and respect freedom.

Whether we can get there or not is a viable question, but we’ll applaud the steps in that direction. This was one.