CHARLESTON — It’s been more than a week since President Joe Biden gave his fourth State of the Union address to the nation, but U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito remains unimpressed.
Capito provided comments on Biden’s speech and other issues during an afternoon briefing Thursday with reporters from her offices on Capitol Hill. Capito said Biden’s State of the Union was less focused on how to make the country better and more focused on his presumptive Republican opponent — former President Donald Trump.
“It was a very political speech, very partisan,” said Capito, R-W.Va. “I kept sitting there in the third row wondering who is he talking to, because he’s not actually giving us solutions to problems. He’s just talking about President Trump and honestly, raising his voice to all of us and sort of lecturing.
“I left feeling sort of empty … because I just didn’t feel like it was a united speech toward the state of our union, when we usually have times where we could stand up and applaud and seek common ground,” Capito continued.
Earlier this week, Biden released details for his fiscal year 2025 federal budget. According to an analysis of the budget proposal by the Associated Press, Biden’s budget would raise nearly $5 trillion in tax revenue, with nearly $2 trillion going into federal programs and the rest going toward reducing the national deficit. However, that’s while spending more than $7 trillion and borrowing nearly $2 trillion.
Capito said Congress will begin holding budget hearings to go over every line item in Biden’s proposed budget, but she didn’t see it gaining traction in an already divided Senate and House of Representatives.
“No surprise there, it’s a basic tax-and-spend budget with huge deficits,” Capito said. “And honestly, when we see the results of the last three and a half years and his spending and the direction at which he’s going, I think he knows that his budget is dead on arrival here on Capitol Hill.”
On Wednesday, Capito announced her support for the Laken Riley Act, along with 31 over her Senate Republican colleagues. The Laken Riley Act would require U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to arrest undocumented immigrants that commit minor crimes, such as burglary, larceny and shoplifting. The act would require undocumented immigrants to remain detained until removed from the U.S.
The act is named for Laken Riley, a nursing student in Georgia who was murdered earlier this year. The suspect is believed to be an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela.
“I think we are all outraged as we see how this unfolded in terms of the young woman on the University of Georgia campus who was murdered by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela,” Capito said. “What this says is, if an illegal is picked up for robbing a store, theft or larceny, or other kinds of crimes, that they will be detained. They won’t go back onto the streets of America while they are working on deportation.”