Biden Administration

Floor Speech

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Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I want to thank my colleagues from North Dakota, Ohio, Wyoming, and Iowa, who have spoken before me, and my colleague from Kansas, after me.

I think Senator Portman ended his statement by saying that we have heard the rhetoric, but we haven't seen the actions. Well, in North Carolina, our State motto, in Latin, is ``Esse quam videri.'' It means: To be, rather than to seem.

I think our State motto does a good job of summarizing the first 100 days of the Biden administration. As a Presidential candidate, Joe Biden made it seem that he would govern as a moderate, pragmatic deal maker, and he set the bar high in his inaugural address. He said:

My whole soul is in this: bringing America together, uniting our people, [and] uniting our nation. I ask every American to join me in this cause.

I was actually inspired by that statement, and I am one of the Americans who was willing to work for him on that cause. In fact, I was 1 of the 10 Republicans who had the first official meeting with the President to see if we could come to common ground on the COVID relief package, after having successfully passed five bipartisan COVID relief packages in the last Congress.

Unfortunately, the President's actions have not corresponded with his promises to date. Instead of leading on his instincts to bring America together, President Biden has followed his advisers' recommendations to go it alone. He has pushed a highly partisan, ideologically driven agenda.

And you don't need to take my word for it. New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently declared that President Biden has exceeded the expectations of progressives.

Indeed, there has been a lot in Biden's agenda for the left to like. It is an agenda designed to pass with no need for moderation and not a single Republican vote--no consensus whatsoever--proposing tax hikes on American families and businesses at a time that they are trying to rebound from the pandemic.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are in the middle of a national emergency. We are in the middle of a pandemic. We have spent and appropriated billions of dollars to healthcare, to businesses to recover. And now, long before the national emergency has been declared done, we are talking about taking those same dollars away.

Offering mixed messaging and failed policies that have caused a humanitarian and security crisis at the southern border is another issue. When I went down to the border about a month ago, the Press Secretary said: It is not a crisis; it is a situation. Now, a month later, the Press Secretary and the administration say it is a crisis, but now it is a catastrophe.

I saw a dead body floating in the Rio Grande River. Other people died. We heard the report of a 9-year-old. That doesn't even count the number of people who died along the way.

It also doesn't count the 300 or 400 people who are called the ``got- aways''--not the thousands who are coming in and going to the border agents but the hundreds every night who are crossing. They are bad actors. Many of them are gang members or they are smuggling drugs or are human traffickers, who are evading arrest. It is creating a dangerous situation. It is a catastrophe. The President hasn't spoken on it. To my knowledge, the Vice President has never gone down there to get a bird's eye view.

The President has embraced the Green New Deal policies, like canceling the Keystone Pipeline. That one stroke of a pen ended thousands of labor union jobs, good-paying jobs. But even more heartbreaking are the communities that would have benefited from all of that commerce occurring in some of the most rural areas and most economically challenged areas in our country.

They rammed through an entirely partisan $2 trillion spending package. They called it COVID relief. But only about 9 percent of it actually had anything to do with continuing to recover from the damage that COVID has caused this country.

I am sure the President will talk about it tonight, a $2.3 trillion-- air quotes--infrastructure bill that isn't actually an infrastructure bill. In fact, they have been a little bit more intellectually honest. Now they are calling it human infrastructure.

I think most Americans, when you think about infrastructure, you think about roads, you think about bridges, you think about broadband. You don't think about human infrastructure. But that is what is being pitched today, and it is being pitched on a partisan basis, without even attempting to get a single Republican vote.

Americans did not elect President Biden to enact any of these partisan policies. They trusted him to come in and make deals--to settle for something less than 100 percent but something that was going to be embraced by more of the American people versus half, which is about where the President is today.

And he has pursued this for 100 days. I hope he changes his mind, but here is one reason why I am not optimistic. His most audacious action, in my opinion, is placating the far left and entertaining the idea of nuking the Senate legislative filibuster. In this very Chamber, 21 years ago, then-Senator Biden declared that defending the filibuster was about defending compromise and moderation. The promises he made on the campaign trail, the promise he made on the day of his inauguration--he noted that his speech was one of the most important he would ever give as a Senator, defending the filibuster. It is a shame that President Biden isn't demonstrating the same political courage that Senator Biden did two decades earlier--the kind of courage that we are seeing today demonstrated by Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema. Instead, the President has entertained the far left's push to eliminate the filibuster and destroy this institution, to end bipartisanship and compromise--they really are no longer a necessity--so that any piece of fringe legislation can pass with a simple majority.

The President, a 30-plus year defender of the filibuster, should know better than anyone. He knows that the left is demanding a Faustian bargain--trading 2 years for the far left to have free reign in exchange for permanent destabilization of our Republic, emboldening future demagogues on both ends of the spectrum.

Our country doesn't need more partisan pandering or political brinksmanship from this administration or from either party. That is why I stood against nuking the filibuster about 3 years ago, and I will as long as I am a U.S. Senator.

There are plenty of Republicans like me who are willing to work with President Biden and even put some of our supporters out of their comfort zone for the good of this Nation.

In fact, when I was sworn in, I said I would work to find common ground in areas where we may agree, and I would vigorously oppose policies where we do not. Unfortunately, to this point, I have only had the opportunity to do the latter.

The willingness to negotiate has only been a one-way street on the part of Republicans. I went to the White House to try to find common ground on another bipartisan COVID package, but it is ultimately up to the President whether he leads on bipartisanship instincts or follows his advisers who are pushing him to keep governing from the left.

Quite frankly, it doesn't matter what the President says about bipartisanship and uniting the country; it is what he does. And, tonight, I hope we will see it for the good of our great Nation.

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