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Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, well, tonight, President Biden will deliver the last State of the Union Address of his term. For the past 3 years, these speeches have served as mile markers but not of any meaningful progress toward a more perfect Union. Instead, each year, the American people tuned in to see just how far the President's own version of his record is from the reality of their lives.

For 3 years, the President, who campaigned as a moderate, has governed like an activist from the furthest fringe of the Democratic Party.

The Biden administration's agenda has meant pain at home and weakness abroad. It didn't have to be this way. President Biden took office amid strong tailwinds--from an economic recovery that was already restoring the record-setting prosperity we saw before the pandemic to a historic modernization of our military that was well underway. He inherited everything he needed to point our Nation toward further security and prosperity, but he chose weakness and invited danger instead.

Today, nearly two-thirds of voters say our economy is worse than it was 4 years ago. Not even one in four thinks our country is on the right track. Barely a quarter of the country expects our economy to improve in the coming year. But that hasn't stopped President Biden from trying to convince working Americans to take his word for it and ignore their own shrinking paychecks. He has literally taken a victory tour to tout his disastrous economic record. His administration has declared Bidenomics ``the word of the year.''

Meanwhile, American consumers are shelling out a bigger portion of their income on groceries than at any point in the last 30 years. A food pantry in Northern Kentucky is reporting ``more and more demand for . . . enough food to make people's income stretch.'' Across the board, consumer prices are nearly 18 percent higher today than they were when President Biden took office. This is what ``Bidenomics in action'' really means?

At kitchen tables tonight, working families will probably wonder whether the President has any regrets, whether he wishes he hadn't ignored his party's top economists and rammed through trillions of dollars in leftwing spending, which brought on the worst inflation in 40 years, or whether he wishes he hadn't declared total war on our most affordable sources of domestic energy, along with the jobs these American industries support. On President Biden's watch, overall energy prices are up nearly a third.

Time after time, when given the choice to lead or to outsource his work to leftwing activists, President Biden has chosen the latter. He has handed his base a blank check for a wish list of social engineering and left the American people to foot the bill.

Meanwhile, he has poured gasoline on the fire of leftwing, pro- criminal, anti-police rhetoric across the country. The Biden administration has packed its Justice Department full of leftwing activists working overtime to tear serious crimes right out of the Criminal Code.

A couple years back, a district attorney in Massachusetts declared she wouldn't prosecute crimes like breaking and entering or drug possession with intent to distribute. President Biden rewarded this behavior by making Rachael Rollins one of his first U.S. attorneys. Across the country, on this President's watch, leftwing prosecutors have turned repeated offenders into the streets--repeatedly. In President Biden's America, violent criminals have learned that they won't face serious consequences, and, of course, they are acting accordingly.

At the same time, leftwing activists bent on attacking the Federal judiciary have found an ally in the Biden White House. The President has tried to give life tenure to a judicial nominee who identified himself as a ``wild-eyed leftist,'' another with a history of supporting terrorist sympathizers, and even one who had worked to undermine a teenage girl's claim of sexual assault. President Biden hasn't just tried putting the wrong people in our Nation's institutions, he spent 3 years undermining the institutions themselves. His Attorney General slow-walked urgent security measures to protect the Supreme Court Justices and their families from angry mobs, and his administration even stood up a commission to explore Court packing--a terrible idea that hasn't gotten any less terrible since it was killed back in the 1930s.

So the rule of law is less stable on President Biden's watch. The streets of our major cities are less safe. And, of course, our borders are less secure.

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