State of the Union Address
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. President, tonight, just down the hall, the President will stand before Congress and the American people. He will paint a picture of strength, prosperity, and national renewal. He will claim credit for successes he did not achieve and deny responsibility for crises that he created. He will tell us that America has never been greater, but the American people deserve the truth. And the truth is that over the past year, we have not moved closer to forming a more perfect Union. Tragically, it is quite the opposite. Our disunion has only grown.
Our Founders understood something when they chose the words ``a more perfect Union.'' They didn't contemplate achieving perfection. They envisioned something more realistic, more achievable--the pursuit of a more perfect Union, a constant effort to push the country forward, a grinding, slow and sometimes painful process. They recognized that America is not a finished product but a beautiful, ongoing experiment in self-governance that requires hard work and constant perseverance.
For 250 years, through wars and depressions, through slavery and Jim Crow, through periods of bitter division and hard-won reconciliation, Americans have honored our Founders' intention and moved the Nation forward. We have stumbled; we have fallen short; and at times, we have failed to live up to our promise. But we have always eventually bent the arc of our own national story towards justice, towards fairness, and towards a more perfect Union.
And yet from the moment he inflicted himself on our public life, Donald Trump has done everything possible to reverse that progress. By design, it appears, by virtue of the product of some defect of character perhaps, but in every way he can and every moment he can, he has sought to divide us. Today, in fewer words than the President will use tonight, I want to talk about some of the ways that President Trump has not only failed to advance our Union, but done so much to bring about our disunion.
Now, I have served in the Capitol for over two decades, and I have visited the capitols of our friends and some of our adversaries across the world. I have seen firsthand that, notwithstanding our possession of the strongest and most courageous military in the world, America's greatest strategic asset is not the might of our arms or size of our aircraft carriers; it is the strength of the alliances we have around the world.
The web of partnerships we built after World War II, NATO, our Pacific alliances, our hemispheric relationships, they are force multipliers. They help us keep the peace. They are the reason that a nation of 340 million people can project power and values across a globe of more than 8 billion. Yet, tragically, President Trump has systematically taken apart the advantage these allies give us. He has insulted the leaders of Canada, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom--our closest democratic allies--not to mention countries like Denmark.
He has questioned whether America would defend NATO members under article V, the collective defense provision that has kept most of Europe peaceful for 75 years. He has treated longstanding security commitments as protection rackets, demanding payment as if our allies were vassal states rather than partners. And he has done all this while praising Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and other dictators. The result? Our allies don't trust us, and our most powerful adversaries don't fear us, and that makes America less safe.
When the next crisis comes--and it will come, and it may even be precipitated by this President--we will find ourselves isolated in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. This weakens and endangers our Union. But the power of our Union isn't just about the strength of our military or our ties abroad. It is also about the strength of our intellect here at home.
I find myself thinking about an exchange from the television series on Chernobyl. A scientist tells a Soviet bureaucrat:
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.
This administration has run up a debt to the truth that will take generations to repay.
Over the last several years, the President of the United States suggested people inject bleach to cure COVID, that windmills cause cancer, that climate change is a hoax invented by China, that Tylenol use in pregnancy causes autism--the list goes on and on. And over this past year, we have seen systematic attacks on scientists at CDC, at NOAA, the EPA, and the NIH--career professionals driven from public service for the crime of publishing findings the President doesn't like, DOGE'd for speaking truth to power, for respecting facts and science, or simply--seemingly and perversely in this cruelest of administrations--fired for the apparent fun of it.
We have seen university researchers lose Federal funding, not because their work lacks merit, but because their conclusions contradict preferred political narratives.
We have seen attacks on vaccines and changes to our public health system that have caused needless outbreaks of disease. This President has most assuredly not made America great again, but he has managed to make measles great again. And when experts gently try to correct these falsehoods, they are attacked, doxed, and threatened. This is part of a deliberate cultivation of ignorance as a political strategy.
When you undermine expertise, when you treat all opinions as equally valid regardless of evidence, when you replace scientists with sycophants, you make people vulnerable to con artists and demagogues. You make democracy itself impossible because democracy requires an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing truth from lies.
The debt to the truth will come due. And when it does, our country will pay an enormous price.
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