WASHINGTON — Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., is not pleased with what she sees coming out of the White House, saying Pres. Joe Biden’s administration is showing no signs of dealing with many major problems happening in the country.
During a virtual press conference as well as a speech on the floor of the Senate last week, Capito blasted the Biden Administration’s failure to come up with a plan to tackle things from the border crisis to inflation.
New numbers for the year show that more than 1.7 million illegals were arrested a the southern border, the most ever, she said, with 192,100 in September alone.
“For some reason, the Biden Administration is not really responding to this,” she said. “The numbers are not going down.”
Capito refutes the White House’s claim it is “seasonal” because the numbers have been consistently high.
“I think the Biden Administration has basically not put forward a plan to deter people form coming into this country,” she said. “That is something I am very concerned about.”
Capito wants the Trump Administration’s “remain in Mexico” back, a program that forces immigration cases to be adjudicated in Mexico, not the US.
“That is a great deterent,” she said, adding that Vice President Kamala Harris was put in charge of handling the border crisis and has done nothing.
Biden has yet to visit the border since he was inaugurated, but said last week he plans to do so.
Capito also said inflation is a major problem now, blaming to a degree the federal dollars that have been spent during the pandemic.
Almost every product costs more now, she said, and she is concerned about seeing inflation numbers similar to the 1970s.
“Thanks to inflation, fueled in part by excessive government spending to the tune of trillions of dollars, and I’m afraid we haven’t seen the end of it, Americans are paying higher prices for many of the things they just can’t do without,” she said. “Over the past year, consumer prices have risen 5.4 percent, the largest one-year jump in 13 years. So, if you’re saving up to buy a new or used car or truck, keep saving because it costs more under President Biden.”
The numbers don’t lie, she said, and people see every day “the real-life consequences of misguided economic policies from the left … and unfortunately, for working class Americans, it means the only thing we’ve ‘built back better’ is the return to soaring inflation and economic misery that many of us remember from the Jimmy Carter years.”
Capito also said those years are reminiscent of another problem now: the rising cost of gasoline, which in West Virginia has risen more than $1 a gallon since last fall.
“The White House has insisted that they’re working on it,” she said. “And, on behalf of everyone in my state who drives to work, drops their kids off at school, and hops in the car to visit their families, I sure hope they are.”
Home heating bills are also going up, with costs of natural gas rising as much as 30 percent compared to last winter.
“Families are having to cut back basic necessities just to heat their homes and make ends meet,” she said.
Another growing problem is the supply chain, she said, which has not only helped drive up prices but created a situation where products are not making it to store shelves or to people’s homes as container ships stay at port waiting to be unloaded.
“I see no effort by the Biden Administration to turn this ship,” she said of the growing severity of the problems.
Capito told colleagues on the Senate floor the first year of this administration has been “failed policies and broken promises.”
“We were promised a secure nation. Instead, our borders are open, and a humanitarian crisis rages on our southern border,” she said. “We were promised a repaired reputation on the world stage. and instead, we’ve led from behind and abandoned our own people abroad in Afghanistan. We were promised unity, but instead we’ve heard divisive rhetoric that demonizes half of our country. The better version of America President Biden was selling, as some of us had feared, was just too good to be true.”