March 11, 2024 12:36 PM UTC

Ridiculous GOP State of the Union Response Goes from Bad to Worse

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• by: Colorado Pols

President Biden delivered a passionate State of the Union (SOTU) speech on Thursday that was more political than most but appeared to hit all of the right notes. As The Hill newspaper reported on Sunday, even former Biden detractors were applauding his SOTU remarks:

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein walked back his previous demands for President Biden not to run for reelection, calling his State of the Union speech a “comeback” for his electoral hopes on Sunday.

“If the Joe Biden who showed up to deliver the State of the Union address last week is the Joe Biden who shows up for the rest of the campaign, you’re not going to have any more of those weak-kneed pundits suggesting he’s not up to running for re-election,” Klein wrote, referring to himself…

…“Biden’s refrain of the American comeback is a sharp one,” Klein wrote. “It does two things simultaneously. It reminds voters that there is something America is coming back from — namely, the dislocations of the pandemic, and the wild, erratic management style that Trump brought to it — and it lets Biden point to progress without declaring victory.”

“It’s the right message for an incumbent: There are good things happening,” he continued. “Let’s keep going.”

The reviews for the Republican response to the SOTU, delivered by Alabama Sen. Katie Britt, were significantly less enthusiastic. Republicans were calling Britt a “rising star” before her remarks; now, they’re just calling her “Senator Britt” or “That weird lady from Alabama.”

[If you missed it, The Associated Press has the full video and transcript of Britt’s SOTU response]

As The Guardian explains:

Katie Britt’s Republican response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address drew reactions ranging from the baffled to the satirical to the appalled, even among fellow rightwingers.

“What the hell am I watching right now?” an unnamed Trump adviser told Rolling Stone.

“It’s one of our biggest disasters ever,” another unnamed Republican strategist told the Daily Beast. [Pols emphasis]

That’s saying a lot considering the state of the Republican Party over just the past decade.

Britt was in full damage-control mode over the weekend after an incredible “Saturday Night Live” performance from actress Scarlett Johansson mocking Britt’s overly-dramatic monologue. As MSNBC reports today, Britt is trying to control the backlash on two fronts:

The initial problem with Katie Britt’s response to the State of the Union address was her delivery. The lingering problem is a misleading story she told.

“Misleading” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Critics quickly latched on to this section of Britt’s speech:

BRITT: “We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

Here’s the short version of what went wrong, courtesy of Johansson and SNL:

JOHANSSON (AS BRITT): First and foremost, I’m a mom. And like any mom, I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere to a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking. And, rest assured, every detail about it is real…except the year, where it took place, and who was President when it happened.

Gah!

The Washington Post did a fact check of Britt’s story and awarded her the dreaded “Four Pinnochios” rating:

[This] story is tragic and may be evocative of other Mexican girls trapped in the sex trade in that country. But she was not trafficked across the border — and her story has nothing to do with Biden. Britt’s failure to make that clear earns her Four Pinocchios.

Things have gotten so bad that the woman whose story was, uh, “referenced” by Britt is furious and speaking out. From POLITICO:

Karla Jacinto Romero, the woman whose story Sen. Katie Britt appeared to have shared in the Republican response to the State of the Union last week, slammed the Alabama senator for inaccurately using her story to highlight Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

“In fact I hardly ever cooperate with politicians because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo, and that to me is not fair,” Romero told CNN on Sunday…

…Romero also told CNN that Britt told an inaccurate story of Romero’s experience. Romero said that she was trafficked by a pimp who operated as part of a family that entrapped vulnerable girls to force them into prostitution, not by Mexican drug cartels. Romero also said that she was never trafficked in the United States, as Britt suggested.

Britt’s speech was so over-the-top that a news outlet in her home state of Alabama put together a side-by-side comparison of what Britt sounds like in real life:

How do these things keep happening to Republicans?

The answer starts with the fact that Congressional Republicans aren’t doing anything; they are ranked among the most ineffective Congresses of all time. When you combine an inability to govern with a predilection for performative politics over substantive policy discussions, you end up with Sen. Katie Britt’s Republican response to the SOTU…and the four days (and counting) of negative news coverage it generates.