State of the Union

Statement

By Senator Mike Lee

Upon taking office, President Obama encountered one of the worst recessions in the country's history. He faced tremendous challenges and made a compelling case during the election that he could solve them. To be sure, it would have been difficult for any President to make reforms that would have had an immediate effect on an economy that many believed had not yet hit bottom. But the country was ready to give "hope and change" a chance.

By July 2009, after the last contested Senate race had been decided, President Obama and the Democrats had a 78-vote advantage in the House and a filibuster-proof Senate. If the President had been focused on enacting an agenda to create jobs and get the economy moving again, there would have been little in the way to stop him.

But, we all know what really happened.

Instead of focusing on jobs, President Obama and the Democrats used their tremendous advantage to push for greater government control over Americans' health care choices, more burdensome and debilitating regulations on businesses, and a failed stimulus package that led to record-setting annual deficits.

The unemployment rate when the President took office was 7.8 percent. It ballooned to a high of 10 percent by October of that year and has slowly declined by just a point-and-a-half in more than 2 years, much of that time hovering around 9 percent.

The President has added more than $4 trillion to the national debt and recorded the three largest annual deficits in the country's history. Our debt is now larger than our entire economy thanks to his out-of-control spending and, under the President's own budget proposal, will require $1 trillion per year to service that debt in the next 10 years.

He brought the country to the brink of economic collapse by refusing to consider any significant spending reforms as a condition for raising the nation's debt ceiling. He presided over the downgrading of America's credit rating - the first in our country's history. And he has taken every opportunity to block the development of America's energy resources -- a source of much needed revenue and jobs.

Most troubling, the President has intentionally divided the country by waging a vicious class warfare campaign, separating average hardworking Americans by income and then pitting them against one another. The President's record on this score has been repugnant.

Americans sent President Obama an unmistakable message in the midterm elections: stop doing harm, undo the damage, freeze and then cut spending, and put the budget on a sustainable path toward balance.

The President responded by starting his reelection campaign early. In a continuing series of taxpayer-funded campaign stops the President sharpened his divisive class warfare message and, astoundingly, blamed Republicans -- who control just one-half of Congress -- for legislative gridlock. Never mind that the President's most recent budget proposal failed to attract a single vote in the Senate, and it was, in fact, Senate Democrats who refused to bring the President's "jobs plan" to the floor for a vote.

Even today, less than a year before Americans head to the polls, members of the President's own party are lining up against him to oppose his tone-deaf decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. The project would create 20,000 American jobs, inject much-needed private sector capital into our economy, and increase the country's energy security, but the President has chosen to block the project as an election-year nod to his friends in the extreme left-wing of the environmentalist movement.

President Obama has put the state of the union in disarray. Certainly he inherited a poor economy, but the decisions he has made since taking office are making it worse. He was handed an economic emergency and instead of taking the challenge head-on he chose to ignore it and turned it into a national tragedy.

Leadership means more than trying to fulfill campaign promises. It also means dealing directly and decisively with the needs of the country. The President has very little time left to show the American people that he can be the kind of leader who will put the country before his own political interests.

For the sake of all Americans, I hope he uses that time wisely.

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