Republican response to Biden’s speech: “The American dream has become a nightmare for many families” | International

President Joe Biden closed his State of the Union address by mentioning his age. “The dilemma facing our nation is not how old we are, but how old our ideas are,” the 81-year-old Democratic president said after a night in which he discussed his project with who will be his November presidential rival. contradicted. election. , Donald Trump, 77, whom he did not name. “Hate, anger and revenge are old ideas. “You cannot lead this country with old ideas,” the president said. And age is the first point of attack in the response of Republicans, who have given the job to the youngest senator, 42-year-old Katie Britton. “The president has more years in political office than I have in my life,” the lawmaker began while drawing the president away from American reality.

Brits have opened their doors to Americans. Dressed in a green blouse and with a cross-shaped pendant hanging from her chest, the senator used her kitchen table to respond to the President. “It’s in places like this where our family has serious conversations (…) This is where we ask God to guide us,” said the Alabama representative, who came to the upper house in January last year after decades of being an assistant. to Senator Richard Shelby, who preceded him.

The senator used an affected tone to assert that “the United States is slipping out of our hands.” At another time, he said that “the American dream has become a nightmare for many families.” The lawmaker’s dramatic and exaggerated performance turned her question into a meme that hit the social network minutes after it started.

Britt asked his audience to focus on the border with Mexico. “The president inherited one of the most secure borders ever, but minutes after taking office, he stopped deportations. “He stopped the construction of the border wall and announced plans to amnesty millions of people,” he said. “We know the president not only created this crisis at the border, but he fueled it by issuing 94 executive orders in his first 100 days,” said Britt, who traveled to Texas to witness what Republicans described as a “crisis.” “

In his speech, Biden reminded Republicans that he was the one who ended the possibility of Congress passing a bipartisan border bill. The agreement, worked out since November by senators from both parties and Arizona independent Kirsten Cinema, had the support of the Border Patrol Agents Union and the Chamber of Commerce. “I have been told that my predecessor in office called Republicans in Congress and demanded that they block the legislation. He believes it will be my win and my loss (…) We can fight on the border or we can fix it. “I’m ready to do it, vote for that law!” Biden shouted in the legislature.

Some versions suggest that Britt himself was part of the border law negotiations. This would have allocated more resources to hire 1,500 new surveillance agents, a hundred immigration judges and another 4,300 officials in charge of processing asylum requests to reduce waiting times for migrants. “She was part of a group of senators who negotiated and helped shape the legislation and then voted against it when Trump called on lawmakers to kill her,” MSNBC reporter Rachel Maddow said tonight. James Lankford, the Republican senator who led the effort, was marginalized in his party after the fiasco.

Answer, without mentioning Ukraine or Israel

The border occupied a good portion of the response from Brits, who also spent several minutes blaming Democrats for defunding the police, rising gasoline and mortgage prices, and rising crime for allowing the Chinese government to spy on Americans. By Tik Tok. He mentioned the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in passing, but didn’t spend a single word talking about Ukraine or Israel, two geopolitical conflicts to which Biden devoted several minutes.

“We have to decide whether our future is going to be good or we are going to settle for the downfall of the country,” Britt said before concluding. The lawmaker’s name appears in Donald Trump’s long list of potential vice-presidential candidates. Party leaders chose her because she is the only senator in the caucus who has school-aged children. So sitting in his kitchen, the MLA talked about the family: “We want families to grow. “That’s why we strongly support access to in vitro fertilization.”

The statement doesn’t seem to have come out of nowhere, but was in the context of recent news that has worried and confused voters. In late February, the Supreme Court of Alabama, the state Britt represents, ruled in a ruling that frozen embryos are people. The court’s decision, the product of a literal interpretation of the Constitution, threatens to harm in vitro fertilization clinics and people who use the method for reproduction. The issue is also part of Republican lawmakers’ fight against abortion, one of the issues that will guide the campaign heading into the Nov. 5 election. (Trump had already spoken out on his social network, Satya, the same week that the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in favor of in vitro fertilization.)

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