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President Joe Biden closed his State of the Union address by referring to his age. “The dilemma our nation faces is not how old we are, but how old our ideas are,” said the 81-year-old Democratic president, after a night in which he contrasted his project with who will be his rival in the November presidential elections. , Republican Donald Trump, 77, whom he never mentioned by name. “Hate, anger and revenge are old ideas. “You cannot lead this country with old ideas,” said the president. And age has been the first point of attack in the Republicans’ response, who entrusted the task to the youngest senator, Katie Britt, 42 years old. “The president has more years in political office than I have in life,” the legislator began by drawing a president far from the American reality.
Britt has opened the doors of his home 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 is in places like this where our family has serious talks (…) this is where we ask God to guide us,” said the Alabama representative, who arrived in the Upper House in January of last year after being for decades assistant to Senator Richard Shelby, who preceded her.
The senator has used a serious tone to affirm that “the United States is slipping out of our hands.” At another point, she stated that “the American dream has become a nightmare for many families.” The dramatic and exaggerated performance of the legislator turned her question into a meme that reached social networks a few minutes after it began.
Britt asked his viewers to focus on the border with Mexico. “The president inherited one of the most secure borders of all time, but minutes after taking office, he stopped deportations. “He stopped the construction of the border wall and announced a plan to grant amnesty to millions,” he noted. “We know that the president not only created this crisis at the border, but that he fomented it by issuing 94 executive orders in his first 100 days,” said Britt, who has traveled to Texas to witness firsthand what Republicans describe as a “ crisis”.
In his speech, Biden reminded Republicans that they were the ones who ended the possibility of Congress passing a bipartisan border bill. The agreement – which senators from both parties and Arizona independent Kyrsten Sinema have been working on since November – had the support of the Border Patrol agents union and the Chamber of Commerce. ”I’m told that my predecessor in office called Republicans in Congress and demanded that they block the law. He believes it would have been my triumph and my defeat (…) We can fight over the border or we can fix it. “I’m ready to do it, vote for that law!” Biden exclaimed, addressing the members of the Legislature.
Some versions indicate that Britt herself was part of the negotiation of the border law. 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 people crossing the border. “She was part of the group of senators who negotiated to shape the law and helped create the law and then voted against it when Trump called on legislators to kill her,” MSNBC journalist Rachel Maddow said tonight. James Lankford, the Republican senator who led this effort, was marginalized within his party after the fiasco.
The reply, without mentioning Ukraine or Israel
The border took up a good part of Britt’s response, who also spent a few minutes blaming Democrats for the increase in crime for defunding the police, for the increase in gasoline prices and mortgage rates, and for allow the Chinese Government to spy on Americans through Tik Tok. She mentioned in passing the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, but did not spend a single word talking about Ukraine or Israel, two geopolitical conflicts to which Biden did dedicate several minutes.
“We have to decide if our future will be better or if we will settle for the decline of the country,” Britt said before concluding. The legislator’s name appears on the long list that Donald Trump has with possible candidates for the vice presidency. Party leaders chose her because she is the only senator in the caucus who has school-age children. So sitting in her kitchen, the legislator spoke about the family: “We want families to grow. “That is why we strongly support access to in vitro fertilization.”
The statement seemed to come out of nowhere, but it was in reference to recent news that has worried and confused voters. At the end of February, the Supreme Court of Alabama, the state that Britt represents, stated in a ruling that frozen embryos are people. The court’s decision, the result of a literal interpretation of a conservative Constitution, threatens to harm in vitro fertilization clinics and people who use the method to reproduce. The issue is also part of the battle that Republican legislators are maintaining against abortion, one of the issues that will dominate the November 5 election campaign. [Trump ya se pronunció en su red social, Truth, la misma semana en que se produjo el fallo del Tribunal Supremo de Alabama, a favor de la fecundación in vitro].
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