House Republicans focused heavily on the issue of immigration in a Wednesday press conference in advance of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Thursday night, slamming the administration for its handling of the border in the wake of the high-profile killing of college student Laken Riley in Georgia at the hands of an illegal immigrant.
House GOP conference chairwoman Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) opened the presser with a nod toward “families who have lost loved ones due to Joe Biden’s dangerous open-border policies” and introduced Representative Jen Kiggans (R., Va.), who emphasized how the chaos at the border has impacted her life as a mother of four children.
“I worry about my kids’ safety every day,” Kiggans said. “Joe Biden has made our communities less safe . . . we’ve seen human trafficking, fentanyl trafficking, and also a sharp rise in violent crimes just in our own communities.”
Representative Marc Molinaro (R., N.Y.) noted that the illegal immigrant who killed Riley was arrested and almost immediately released in New York in 2023, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said soon after the murder, and Representative Zach Nunn (R., Iowa) told the story of a family in his district — his guests for the State of the Union — whose son died from fentanyl poisoning after taking a laced Prozac pill.
“The reality is,” Nunn said, “we now have three years where choices were made in the White House that threaten the lives of families across America.”
Many of the lawmakers who spoke with National Review on Wednesday criticized Biden for his attempts to tie Republicans tie the situation at the border. Representative Cory Mills (R., Fla.) told NR that he expects the president to attack GOP lawmakers over immigration during his address even though “an HR to secure the border has been sitting at the Senate for almost a year,” and Representative Lisa McClain (R., Mich.) said Biden “is going to try to blame everyone but himself, when we all know that the border was secure under the previous administration.”
Representative Eric Burlison (R., Mo.) told NR he thinks Biden will “try to lay blame on Republicans . . . because we weren’t going to pass that garbage border bill that was really going to whitewash all the mistakes Biden has had on the border.” Representative Scott Franklin (R., Fla.) said the president “assumes he can say whatever he wants and the press is going to pick it up and allow him to hide.”
The House Republicans who spoke with NR also mentioned the recent New York Times/Siena College poll of registered voters, in which 61 percent of respondents who voted for Biden in 2020 said he is now too old to be effective in the White House. They argued that the president’s inability to carry out the demands of his office has contributed to the geopolitical chaos that has plagued his term thus far.
Representative Harriet Hageman (R., Wyo.) told NR that she believes Biden’s inability to project strength on the international stage has directly contributed to developments like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel. She also had harsh words to say about the president’s mental and physical capacity for the job.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan, she said, “sent a message worldwide that we had a very fickle president who was largely incompetent, but keep in mind, he’s been on the international stage for over 50 years . . . the international community had a pretty doggone good idea who Joe Biden was before he became president.”
Since then, in Hageman’s view, things have changed, and not for the better.
“What we’re seeing now is he’s suffering from severe dementia, and his body also is failing him,” she told NR. “Despots and dictators are moving right now, malign actors are moving right now, because they’re looking at the chessboard and they recognize that America is being run by a very weak president who isn’t capable of carrying out the job, and his vice president is even worse.”
Representative Buddy Carter (R., Ga.) agreed, telling NR that, since the Afghanistan withdrawal, “Joe Biden — and therefore America — is viewed as being weak on the global stage, and that’s not good for America. It’s not good for democracy.”
On the topic of the president’s fitness for office, he said Biden’s advanced age does concern him.
“I do question his cognitive abilities,” Carter told NR. “I’m not a gerontologist, but at the same time, I am a pharmacist and I’ve dealt with this sort of thing; I was a nursing home consultant. I have some experience in that field, and I can tell you you’re not as sharp at 81 as you are at 61 or 41.”
When asked about the age problem, Burlison said he believes Biden is not “in a cognitive state to challenge his more ideological staff when they want to implement some of these policies . . . Some of these decisions are asinine, and the only explanation is that they’re coming from someone who’s not at a cognitive ability to think things through.”
Hageman also cast doubt on the decision-making process in the Biden White House, telling NR she does not “believe it’s any one person” wielding absolute authority, that the important actors in the executive branch “have been siloed off from each other.”
“I think you’ve got a Game of Thrones-type of situation in the White House,” she said. “I think people are jockeying and elbowing and trying to figure out how they’re going to be best positioned after November.”