Biden Administration
Floor Speech
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Mr. TUBERVILLE. Madam President, President Biden promised unity to bring the country together during his inaugural address. I was there with my 26-year-old son Tucker. We listened together and hoped that President Biden would live up to his words. I assumed that when he said he would be a President for all Americans, it also included the 75 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump.
I was ready, and I still am, to work with President Biden in good faith to find commonsense solutions to problems facing the country and to ensure the voices of Alabamians are heard. But, so far, the President has neither united nor reached across the aisle. His actions have shown that he is fine to play along with the divisive tactics of the progressive left, rather than unite a large and diverse country.
President Biden is acting like he is the President of New York and California, not the United States of America. The progressives can barely contain their excitement. The President received glowing reviews from leading progressive Members of Congress, saying the President has ``exceeded expectations.''
The left have been waiting a long time for an administration to implement their vision. They need to use a Trojan horse to put that vision into practice because it is remarkably unpopular with a majority of the American people.
Their vision is unpopular because it centers around a core belief of imposing their vision on everyone. But to achieve this, that means taking away your freedom--freedom to think differently, freedom to worship differently, freedom for you and your family to live differently, freedom to spend your hard-earned money the way you want to spend it.
Taking away those freedoms--freedoms that are the foundation of America--is not progress. It is called socialism.
When progressives talk about equity, they mean equal outcomes, not opportunities. They want a government that is so powerful it owns everything and chooses how wealth is distributed to ensure equal outcomes. That, in essence, is socialism, and the folks promoting this vision are channeling the same energy as the Marxists and communists of the 20th century.
Well, so far, President Biden has been a more willing partner to champion the progressive vision and export it from New York and California to every corner of the entire country. Just look at what has happened lately. One of President Biden's first moves was to signal to the world that America's borders are open. The result? Absolute chaos. And the administration shows little interest in fixing it. We cannot have a country without borders. That is common sense.
Democrats were so eager to undo all the work President Trump did at the border just because President Trump did it, not because there was merit in rolling back these policies. Because of this insane, open-door policy, the American taxpayer--not the Biden administration but the American taxpayer--is footing a $60 million bill a week--$60 million a week--to cover the cost of housing unaccompanied minors at the border-- 60 million.
In the same rush, Democrats are working to undermine the integrity of the election process through H.R. 1 and S. 1, the Federal Government takeover of our elections.
They are working to force millions of workers to join unions. They all want to strip States of their right-to-work laws, called the PRO Act.
Democrats are using things Americans desperately need, like traditional infrastructure, as a smokescreen for things Americans desperately don't want, like the fantasy Green New Deal.
And now Democrats in both Chambers have introduced legislation to expand the Supreme Court. And because they don't have the votes to ram this through the Senate--such an extreme agenda--many Democrats want to eliminate the filibuster, despite the fact that many wrote a letter asking to keep the filibuster just a few years ago, when they were in the minority.
The bottom line is that the Democrats want to change the rules so they can get their way, because they are to the point where they want to transform our country, so said some of our leaders.
As concerning as each of these actions have been, even more alarming are the progressives' efforts to indoctrinate our children by favoring fringe theories over actual learning. For example, the California Department of Education is considering using a curriculum that says: ``The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false.'' Their goal is to ``dismantle racism in mathematics.''
Apparently, two plus two does not equal four anymore because it is not politically correct. And just last year, the United States ranked 37th in the world in math--what a disaster.
But here is the worst of all. The U.S. Department of Education recently introduced a rule that would direct millions--millions--of taxpayer dollars to schools that promised teaching critical race theory and the 1619 Project for American history and civics.
Put aside for a minute that these theories have been routinely debunked by historians and actively seek to divide Americans on strict racial lines. Critical race theory's central belief is that the law and legal institutions of the United States are inherently racist--so racist, they believe, that these institutions cannot be redeemed and must be completely replaced. The goal should be to have better laws and better application of those laws, not to tear them down.
For pushing this, it is not about uniting our country, it is about fanning the flames of the unfortunate human tendency to divide and separate into different tribes instead of uniting us around a set of common morals.
Shouldn't we be fighting that impulse to divide into groups against each other? I think we need to do more uniting, and that should start in our schools, which is why I cannot believe that the U.S. Government is spending taxpayer dollars to teach our kids to dislike our country. How low have we sunk? These ideas are designed to drive a wedge between Americans based solely on their skin color. They openly reject the goal of the United States of liberty and justice for all.
Our schools should be places that encourage the open debate of ideas and teach important morals to our young people so that they know right from wrong. That is why I joined Leader McConnell and 38 of my Republican colleagues to send a letter to Education Secretary Cordona, urging him to withdraw these divisive grant programs. Part of our letter reads:
Families did not ask for this divisive nonsense. Voters did not vote for it. Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil.
Secretary Cordona should redirect these grant dollars to American history programs that teach the ideals and morals that have made the United States the greatest force for good in human history.
I spent my career in education--40 years. I have seen firsthand how a quality education can put a kid on the path to success in our great country, regardless of their race, religion, or economic background. When done right, education is the key to freedom. But the education we see in many schools today is just cementing existing inequality rather than giving kids the chance to escape it.
We have got a clear trend here: undermine border security, undermine the election system, undermine the Supreme Court, undermine the Senate, undermine our education system, undermine our country. If your goal is to deconstruct and completely reshape a country, these are the steps that you would take.
Our country is not perfect. There is a lot we have got to work on. But here in the United States of America, citizens have freedom and opportunities, and that is what we need to be focused on, not giving handouts, not dismantling our institutions but creating opportunity.
We have the ability to make it better. We have the rules to do so. Those rules are in place so that all of us can respect, if not always agree with, the changes that are made to make this country better. That is called democracy. But changing the rules to force one's vision on everyone isn't democracy; it is tyranny. My Republican colleagues and I will continue to stand against that. That is what America was founded on, after all, and it is what America needs now.
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