The Constitution requires that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union.” From President Thomas Jefferson to President William Taft, this communication was delivered by letter, not by speech.
President Joe Biden would have benefited from a return to that tradition Tuesday night.
Apart from a brief introduction touching on recent events in Ukraine, almost all of Biden’s address could have been pulled from any boilerplate Democratic campaign speech delivered in the past two decades.
The section on immigration completely ignored what his own administration has admitted is a “crisis” on the southern border. He instead adopted tired calls to “secure the border and fix the immigration system.” No mention was made of the record 2 million arrests made at the border for illegal entry or the million migrants whom the Biden administration has shepherded to their desired destinations throughout the country. The millions of Hispanics living on the border who are switching from Democratic to Republican allegiances because of Biden’s open border policies will not feel heard after this speech.
On energy, Biden returned to a playbook that has failed Democrats since 2008, when then-candidate Barack Obama promised a home weatherization campaign that would create thousands of new jobs and lower energy bills for consumers. When Obama became president, he even placed Biden, his vice president, in charge of ensuring the program worked and that no money was wasted. He called him the “sheriff.”
But Biden couldn’t even manage to police his own home state of Delaware, where the weatherization program was suspended due to “gross mismanagement and fraudulent activity.”
Biden had nothing new to say on taxes either. He again repeated the completely false claim that former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts only “benefited the top 1% of Americans.” As the nonpartisan Tax Foundation has ably demonstrated, both low- and middle-income earners saw significant benefits from the Trump tax cuts. The only taxpayers who did see their bills rise were high-income earners from predominantly Democratic states who were hit by the new cap on deductions for state and local tax payments.
Even on the rare occasions when Biden ad-libbed in his speech, he used old material. In his section on combating rising crime and murder rates, he made yet another useless call for more gun control. “You think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests?” he asked, invoking a tiresome line that he and so many other Democrats have used so many times before.
No mention was made of all the far-left prosecutors in Democratic cities who have been busy releasing repeat violent criminals onto our streets so that they can commit additional murders.
Poll after poll before Tuesday’s speech showed a disillusioned electorate with little to no faith in Biden’s leadership abilities and policy solutions.
What Biden needed last night was a course correction. His lazy, mail-it-in State of the Union wasn’t that.
