Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Thursday (Jan. 21) that Joe Biden, who was just announced as president, implemented multiple missteps on his first day in office.
Speaking on the Senate floor in Washington, DC, McConnell said, “The president has rejoined the failed Paris Climate Accord – a terrible agreement that will cause serious economic pain to American working families by ourselves, and there is no guarantee that China or Russia will keep their promises. In fact, the U.S. is already reducing its carbon emissions, while China and other countries that signed the agreement are increasing them. Rejoining would only allow us to kill American jobs while our competitors continue to whiz by.”
He added, “The president also unilaterally canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. His first order of business on his first day in office was to eliminate thousands of American jobs, including union jobs, and to frustrate our strong ally Canada and reverse some of the progress we’ve made on energy security. This is a project that has the support of the liberal Canadian government and Prime Minister Trudeau and is an investment in North American energy. Even the Obama-era State Department had concluded that it would not harm the climate. But just because canceling the pipeline project might make it feel like an environmental thing to do, the new administration killed those jobs.”
McConnell also criticized the Biden Administration for issuing a proposed Amnesty for illegal immigrants and for firing the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) independent general counsel.
He said, “This is not the day that American workers deserve. It’s still early, and President Biden has had plenty of Time to remember that he does not owe his election to the far left. The president can and should focus his administration’s efforts on creating good-paying American jobs, not sacrificing the livelihoods of our people for liberal tokenism. Senate Republicans will be ready, willing and eager to help make that happen.”
This is McConnell’s first address to the new Congress as Senate Minority Leader. Earlier this month, Democrats won a runoff for the Georgia Senate, thereby winning a majority in the Senate.
After taking office Wednesday (Jan. 20), Biden signed a series of executive orders that dismantled some of former President Donald Trump‘s (R-Texas) accomplishments.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who also spoke before McConnell, praised Biden for the series of orders he signed.
Schumer said, “While celebrations are in full swing, our new president and the new Senate have begun the work of rebuilding our country and healing its wounds. With a stroke of a pen, President Biden began the process of rejoining the United States and the Paris Agreement; he extended the moratorium on student loan repayments; ended the Muslim travel ban; reinstated protections for our nation’s ‘Dreamer’ immigrants; and stopped the construction of an ineffective border wall.”
Schumer continued, “Critically, President Biden also signed a series of orders requiring the federal government to refocus its efforts on fighting the coronavirus (CCHV); the United States rejoined the World health Organization; the mandatory wearing of masks in all federal facilities; and President Biden appointed a new coronavirus (CCHV) response coordinator to manage the distribution of vaccines , which was desperately needed to be done and is a failure of the Trump Administration.”
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