[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 41 (Thursday, March 7, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Page S2251]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                       State of the Union Address

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, well, tonight, President Biden will 
deliver the last State of the Union Address of his term. For the past 3 
years, these speeches have served as mile markers but not of any 
meaningful progress toward a more perfect Union. Instead, each year, 
the American people tuned in to see just how far the President's own 
version of his record is from the reality of their lives.
  For 3 years, the President, who campaigned as a moderate, has 
governed like an activist from the furthest fringe of the Democratic 
Party.
  The Biden administration's agenda has meant pain at home and weakness 
abroad. It didn't have to be this way. President Biden took office amid 
strong tailwinds--from an economic recovery that was already restoring 
the record-setting prosperity we saw before the pandemic to a historic 
modernization of our military that was well underway. He inherited 
everything he needed to point our Nation toward further security and 
prosperity, but he chose weakness and invited danger instead.
  Today, nearly two-thirds of voters say our economy is worse than it 
was 4 years ago. Not even one in four thinks our country is on the 
right track. Barely a quarter of the country expects our economy to 
improve in the coming year. But that hasn't stopped President Biden 
from trying to convince working Americans to take his word for it and 
ignore their own shrinking paychecks. He has literally taken a victory 
tour to tout his disastrous economic record. His administration has 
declared Bidenomics ``the word of the year.''
  Meanwhile, American consumers are shelling out a bigger portion of 
their income on groceries than at any point in the last 30 years. A 
food pantry in Northern Kentucky is reporting ``more and more demand 
for . . . enough food to make people's income stretch.'' Across the 
board, consumer prices are nearly 18 percent higher today than they 
were when President Biden took office. This is what ``Bidenomics in 
action'' really means?
  At kitchen tables tonight, working families will probably wonder 
whether the President has any regrets, whether he wishes he hadn't 
ignored his party's top economists and rammed through trillions of 
dollars in leftwing spending, which brought on the worst inflation in 
40 years, or whether he wishes he hadn't declared total war on our most 
affordable sources of domestic energy, along with the jobs these 
American industries support. On President Biden's watch, overall energy 
prices are up nearly a third.
  Time after time, when given the choice to lead or to outsource his 
work to leftwing activists, President Biden has chosen the latter. He 
has handed his base a blank check for a wish list of social engineering 
and left the American people to foot the bill.
  Meanwhile, he has poured gasoline on the fire of leftwing, pro-
criminal, anti-police rhetoric across the country. The Biden 
administration has packed its Justice Department full of leftwing 
activists working overtime to tear serious crimes right out of the 
Criminal Code.
  A couple years back, a district attorney in Massachusetts declared 
she wouldn't prosecute crimes like breaking and entering or drug 
possession with intent to distribute. President Biden rewarded this 
behavior by making Rachael Rollins one of his first U.S. attorneys. 
Across the country, on this President's watch, leftwing prosecutors 
have turned repeated offenders into the streets--repeatedly. In 
President Biden's America, violent criminals have learned that they 
won't face serious consequences, and, of course, they are acting 
accordingly.
  At the same time, leftwing activists bent on attacking the Federal 
judiciary have found an ally in the Biden White House. The President 
has tried to give life tenure to a judicial nominee who identified 
himself as a ``wild-eyed leftist,'' another with a history of 
supporting terrorist sympathizers, and even one who had worked to 
undermine a teenage girl's claim of sexual assault. President Biden 
hasn't just tried putting the wrong people in our Nation's 
institutions, he spent 3 years undermining the institutions themselves. 
His Attorney General slow-walked urgent security measures to protect 
the Supreme Court Justices and their families from angry mobs, and his 
administration even stood up a commission to explore Court packing--a 
terrible idea that hasn't gotten any less terrible since it was killed 
back in the 1930s.

  So the rule of law is less stable on President Biden's watch. The 
streets of our major cities are less safe. And, of course, our borders 
are less secure.