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Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, tonight President Biden will come to Congress to deliver his State of the Union Address. It is a natural time to look at a President's legacy. And if one thing is certain, it is that the Biden Presidency hasn't done much for the state of our union.

Yesterday, I came down to the floor to talk about the national security crisis we are facing at our southern border. It is a crisis we have been facing almost since the day the President took office.

The President marked his inauguration by taking measures that weakened our Nation's border security, including halting construction of the border wall, rescinding the declaration of a national emergency at our southern border, and pausing deportations except under certain conditions. The effect was to declare to the world that the U.S. borders were effectively open, and the number of migrant encounters at our southern border ticked up accordingly.

And the surge has never stopped. President Biden has presided over 3 recordbreaking years of illegal immigration at our southern border. And if we continue on our current track, he will likely be presiding over a fourth. The first 4 months of fiscal year 2024 saw nearly 1 million migrant encounters at our southern border--1 million in just 4 months. These kinds of numbers not only represent a logistical and humanitarian crisis, they represent a gaping hole in our national security.

There is no question that the kind of numbers we are seeing smooth the way for dangerous individuals to enter our country. Last year, 169 individuals on the Terrorist Watchlist were apprehended attempting to cross our southern border, and we are on track to exceed that number this year.

And those numbers only reflect individuals who were actually apprehended. With around 1.8 million known ``got-aways'' since President Biden took office and an untold number of unknown ``got- aways,'' I think we can safely assume that there are plenty of dangerous people making their way into our country without being stopped.

And President Biden's border crisis is not the only way in which he has jeopardized our national security. His disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan weakened our standing with our allies, and his failure to prioritize ensuring our military is equipped to meet and defeat current and future threats sends a dangerous signal to bad actors around the world.

Then, of course, there is the fact that the President is setting us up for a future energy crisis that will jeopardize our Nation's security by jeopardizing our energy security, not to mention jeopardizing American's pocketbooks. The President's hostility to conventional energy production and his determination to push us into a Green New Deal regime that our current energy system simply cannot cope with is setting us up for long-term instability in our Nation's energy supply.

That threatens our national security, which depends on stable access to energy; and it threatens America's financial security as an unstable supply will almost unquestionably result in higher prices. The steep rise in energy prices so far under the Biden administration could look small compared to the energy prices Americans could see under the Green New Deal regime President Biden envisions for the future.

Speaking of higher prices, perhaps the defining feature of the Biden administration is the inflation crisis the President helped create when he signed the so-called American Rescue Plan Act and flooded the economy with unnecessary government spending. Three years in, inflation is still well above the Federal Reserve's target rate.

Americans continue to suffer. Today, it costs the typical family $1,000 more per month to maintain the standard of living it had when President Biden took office--$1,000 more per month, just to tread water.

Grocery prices are up 21 percent under President Biden, and the cost of food now takes up a larger share of Americans' disposable income than it has at any point in more than 30 years.

Then there is the 31 percent increase in energy costs, as I alluded to earlier, the 19 percent increase in housing costs, the 27 percent increase in the cost of car repairs, and the list goes on.

The President likes to talk about giving American families breathing room. Well, President Biden has eliminated the breathing room for a lot of American families. Along with higher prices--much higher prices--on everything from groceries to gas, Americans are also dealing with the high interest rates the Federal Reserve has had to impose to deal with President Biden's inflation crisis.

Those interest rates have helped to drive up mortgage rates and credit card rates, compounding hardship for a lot of Americans.

It is no wonder that, in a recent poll, just one in three voters said the economy was on the right track, or that 57 percent of respondents in another recent poll rated the economy as ``fairly bad'' or ``very bad.'' Sixty-six percent of respondents in that same poll said that things in America are going ``somewhat'' or ``very'' badly.

The inflation crisis, the national security crisis at our southern border, and the potential energy crisis--it is no wonder that Americans aren't feeling very optimistic about the state of our Nation. It would be nice if the President spoke to their concerns tonight, but I expect that his speech tonight will involve more blame shifting than solutions to the crises that he has helped create, along with, of course, a host of election-year handouts designed to attract voters. If Americans are looking for relief, they are not going to find it from President Biden in his speech tonight on the state of the Union.

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