Biden Administration
Floor Speech
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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, we have a tendency in this Chamber to talk about hindsight being 20/20, and I think that this is what we will be doing in 10 or 20 years when we look back on the Biden administration. I really expect that we will highlight all of the big talk here in DC that has led to some really bad ideas the White House has tried to legitimize through legislation and budget requests.
If you remember, even before the 2020 election, Biden's big talk on amnesty welcomed the hundreds of thousands of migrants who are currently flooding the southern border. He said: We expect to see these migrants at the border.
So, yes, they heard him say, ``Y'all come,'' and they are coming.
His big talk on Green New Deal programs got us the boondoggle of an infrastructure package that all but ignores roads, bridges, and broadband. The people in Memphis, TN, have not appreciated some of this talk of other items as infrastructure. They want bridge repairs immediately. Then, just before Memorial Day, we got some more big talk in the form of his $6 trillion budget request that reads like an instruction manual on how to make our country less secure, less free, and less competitive.
Back home in Tennessee, people looked at this thing, and they didn't believe what they were seeing. At church last Sunday, I had some friends ask me if the budget proposal was supposed to be a joke or if this were serious because, when they look around, they see real need. They see communities without broadband, small businesses that are struggling to get back on their feet, and crumbling roads and bridges.
Yet what did the administration choose to do with their first budget? They turned away from those needs. They decided to throw billions of dollars at the environmental lobby to make it happy. They put in money to abortionists and to an already bloated Federal bureaucracy.
Tennesseans are looking at their own budgets and thinking about all of the ways they have had to make tough choices over the past year, and they are wondering why the Biden administration cannot seem to bring itself to show some fiscal restraint. Why is it that they just say: Crank up the printing press. Let's print more dollars. Let's put more money in the system. Let's give everybody a check--and no worries about who is going to pay the bill?
They are used to seeing the Democrats act in a very cavalier manner about spending, and they are very much concerned about what they see happening in Washington, DC. They know, without a doubt, that this is really going to cost them and that it is going to cost their children and their grandchildren, and as someone said this weekend, it is the great-grandchildren who will bear the brunt of the Biden extravaganza. They know better than to nod along with the administration's promises that only the rich and the megacorporations will be responsible for offsetting this massive spending program
I will tell you that they know how this works. They have seen it before. They know that there are higher taxes at the top and that higher taxes at the top of this wish list and on the top earners will mean less investment in their communities, which will lead to stagnant economic development, which will land them in the exact same place that they were during the Obama-Biden years, except there will be the added expenses of having to comply with future mandates the administration is going to pile on them.
They know, when you take from the people who create the jobs and make the investments and provide the goods that drive our economy, that you are taking from the middle class, that you are taking from small businesses on every Main Street in this country. You are making opening that business too expensive to afford because you have taken those tax dollars and you are using those dollars to grow union membership, to show favoritism, and to pick winners and losers Washington, DC, style.
That is exactly how you destroy that competitiveness that makes companies want to do business here and to emigrate here, and that makes other countries a little nervous to stand toe to toe with us on the international stage. This international element is important, and I fear the Biden administration has lost that perspective.
If you look at the budget items related to immigration, it is clear that the White House still thinks they can make it out of this border crisis without having to admit that their policies have, indeed, caused this crisis at our Nation's southern border. Yes, indeed, this is the Biden border crisis. Instead of securing the border by investing in the technology, infrastructure, and manpower our Border Patrol agents have repeatedly asked for, the administration wants to focus on sending foreign aid to the Northern Triangle, foreign aid without accountability. This is a noble effort, but it will do nothing to mitigate the disaster on the border that has since bled into the communities that are now playing host to busloads of unaccompanied migrant children, like we see in Chattanooga.
At least they decided to invest in a few more immigration judges. Yet what we see them doing through this is making every town a border town and every State a border State. They are transferring the costs to our States and to our local communities--the costs for education, for healthcare, for children's services, for social services, for housing. The Federal Government doesn't want to admit they are incurring that cost.
So what are they doing? At taxpayer expense, they are putting these over a half-a-million illegal entrants onto airplanes, onto buses, and they are sending them to communities around this country. That is what they are doing, and that is what millions of Americans, including thousands of Tennesseans, are pushing back on.
I have to tell you, I had a telephone townhall last night. It was with some of the counties that are around Chattanooga, TN, in that area, and COVID-19 and the immigration policies of the Biden administration were the top questions that came up.
I will tell you that things don't look any better on the national security front. If you account for inflation, you find out that the topline request for the Department of Defense represents a $7 billion decrease compared to fiscal year 2021 funding levels. That is right, a $7 billion decrease for defense. Maybe they forgot that what we are responsible for, first and foremost, is providing for the common defense.
Talk about misplaced priorities. The Biden administration picked the absolute worst time to undercut the military and employ President Obama's demand to do more with less. We know from experience that it takes between 3 and 5 percent in annual growth to keep our military and national security programs competitive, and this budget doesn't even come close to hitting that mark. For reference, China increased their defense budget by 6.8 percent this year--oh, and who is our main competitor when it comes to great power competition? You are right. The answer is China, absolutely.
Biden's budget, on the other hand, asks for $112 billion in R&D spending, but it cuts procurement spending. Imagine that. This means, as of right now, the administration has no plan to put that R&D to good use. Keep doing the research and development, but by the way, we are not planning to purchase. Think about that. Think about the message that sends to our allies and the message it is sending to our adversaries.
They paid lip service to supporting our nuclear programs, but earlier this month, the Secretary of the Navy sent a strategic memo ordering the service to defund the development of the nuclear sea-launched cruise missiles that are essential for deterring China in regional waters. That is right. The Secretary of the Navy sent a strategic memo ordering the Navy to defund the development of the missiles that are essential for deterring China in regional waters.
The kicker? All of this is to be done before the Nuclear Posture Review is even completed. So don't wait for the report. We need an outcome, and the outcome is, Let's make ourselves less competitive.
This is astounding. Instead of following the directives that have clearly been laid out by last year's NDAA and investing in a combat- credible force, the budget guts and confuses the mission driving the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, and this has had bipartisan support. Keep in mind that this is the best set of tools we have against Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region, and the Biden administration has decided to use it like some sort of slush account for projects that, in a normal year, would be funded under other categories.
They are going for an outcome. The outcome is not ``America first'' or an America able to defend. Their budget is cutting defense. Their budget is cutting these cruise missiles. It makes no sense.
And I can assure you, as we begin the NDAA negotiations, that this is something that will deserve and will get a full review.
I have said it before and I will say it again: The American people understand that elections do have consequences. They knew that some priorities would change with President Biden. Even my friends back home who voted for President Biden will tell me they liked what they heard on the campaign trail from him. But they will also tell you they did not vote for this.
They did not vote for what is happening, for the Executive orders that are coming out of this administration, for the ridiculousness that they see in this budget. They did not vote for tax plans that will stand in the way of local investment with small businesses. They did not vote to make things more expensive and scarce at the grocery store. They did not vote to fund a bloated and power-hungry Federal bureaucracy. They didn't vote to leave our border in shambles, to wreck our Nation's sovereignty.
They certainly didn't vote for a defense strategy that will allow the Chinese Communist Party to expand their influence into underdeveloped countries and threaten our allies in the Indo-Pacific. No, they did not vote for that.
Our National Guard men and women, our men and women who every day are in service there at Fort Campbell--God bless them. And we worry about the lack of attention to defense.
I would remind my Democratic colleagues that any action they take on this budget proposal won't exist in a vacuum, and I ask them to reconsider their justification for asking the American people, who just survived a global pandemic and a near total economic collapse--I think they should reconsider their justification for asking them to bankroll an activist-driven, radical, fantasy budget that nobody really asked for.
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