On Wednesday evening, President Biden delivered remarks to a Joint Session of Congress which revealed he could not be more out of touch with average Americans. Outside of Biden’s Washington D.C. bubble, Americans know that tensions are high, and morale is low. President Biden promised unity, but during his first one hundred days, Americans have footed the bill for his expensive Government First Agenda. He has welcomed chaos at the southern border, prioritized foreign economic interests over American jobs, and charged taxpayers trillions of dollars for exorbitant spending packages. This is the ongoing cost of Biden’s failure to put America First.
The Biden administration has essentially abandoned the southern border. Through his words and actions, Biden sent a signal to the world that our border is wide open. He sought to suspend deportations, wants to end border wall construction, and has deprived immigration enforcement officers of resources they need to keep our country safe. In addition to compromising national security, the Biden administration’s border policies have sparked a massive humanitarian crisis. In March alone, 19,000 unaccompanied minors were taken into custody, the highest ever recorded. They travel to our border alongside gangs, traffickers, smugglers, and other bad actors, who exploit the border crisis and endanger the communities they migrate through, as the President of Mexico pointed out.
On the economic front, President Biden has been more focused on rebuking President Trump’s policies than creating jobs. His anti-energy agenda sacrifices thousands of American jobs to appease the interests of other countries. His decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement will destroy nearly 3 million jobs, and thousands of Keystone Pipeline workers were forced into unemployment with Biden’s stroke of a pen. Meanwhile, he has taken more meetings on climate change with Russia and China than with Congressional Republicans.
The cornerstone of Biden’s so-called “infrastructure” package, in which only 7% goes to actual infrastructure, is a huge tax hike which will hit every American directly in the pocketbook. Experts warn that the President’s proposal would kill nearly 200,000 jobs, shrink the economy, and lower wages. In addition, Biden’s proposed corporate tax rate hike would cut one million jobs in two years. As we come out of the COVID Crisis, our country needs jobs, not tax hikes.
Under the Republicans’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the economy boomed and led to historically low unemployment rates among Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and women. Biden’s disastrous policies are reversing these gains and driving more voters to the Republican Party every day. In the last decade, the percentage of blue-collar voters who identify as Republicans increased by 12%, whereas the percentage of blue-collar Democrats shrunk by 8%. And now that the 2020 census report revealed a mass exodus from blue states to red states, could there be a clearer rejection of Democrats’ job-killing agenda?
Rather than trying to achieve the unity that he called for in his Inaugural Address, Biden has relentlessly pursued the radical Democrats’ agenda, including HR1, packing the Supreme Court, eliminating the Electoral College, and defunding the police. These divisive proposals have not improved the lives of everyday Americans, and they sure haven’t inspired national unity. Republicans, however, have never been so united around the America First agenda. Here in North Carolina, Biden’s first one hundred days have served as a rallying cry for the Republican Party, and it will drive us to the polls next November.
Michael Whatley is the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party
