Republican reaction to Joe Biden’s first congressional speech on Thursday centered as much on what the new president was perceived to have omitted as much as the policy proposals he did lay out.
“He didn’t discuss the border and the fact that tens of thousands of people are pouring into our country,” former president Donald Trump said during a morning appearing on Fox News’ Mornings with Maria, seizing on a familiar grievance.
“It’s out of control. It could destroy our country.” (Biden did, in fact, address immigration, and his proposed plan for border issues and paths to citizenship.)
The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs was another to criticize Biden for not addressing the situation at the southern border, which has seen migrant apprehensions surge.
“That is the worst crisis that America is facing today and I was sorely disappointed that the president did not take that on,” he told Fox & Friends.
Biggs said Biden “was more methodical and not as dramatic or energetic” as Trump was while delivering his final address to Congress last year, but praised elements of the speech.
“When he started talking about the need to end forever wars, and getting us out of Afghanistan, that was good. When he started talking about being competitive with China and we need to buy America, support America, those things, on narrative messaging point, were right on the money,” he said.
“However, his policy statements affiliated with those things are dubious. You can’t throw $6tn in spending out the door as quickly as they want to do, we just don’t have the money for that. Taxes will have to go up across the board.”
It was Biden’s ambitious social agenda, and accompanying price tag, that led senior Republicans to frame Biden’s address as a “bait and switch” operation
“He talks like a moderate but is governing to satisfy the far left,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said, according to the Kentucky Courier Journal, rehashing a favored Republican talking point.
“I think the storyline on the Biden administration, underscored by the president’s speech tonight, could best be described as bait and switch. The bait was that he was going to be a moderate, a unifying force, and bring us all together. The switch is that Bernie Sanders, for all practical purposes, won the debate in the Democratic party over what it ought to look like.”
The perceived lack of a unifying message was the main topic of the South Carolina senator Tim Scott’s rebuttal, the only Black Republican in the chamber insisting that: “The actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart.”
Predictably, Scott’s performance drew praise from Trump, who said: “I thought Tim Scott last night was fantastic. I thought he did an incredible job.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
