The moment at Thursday’s State of the Union address that summed up President Joe Biden’s disastrous and dangerous tenure came with the name of a Georgia college student reportedly murdered by an illegal immigrant — a name Biden characteristically butchered.
The exchange in which U.S. Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene prodded Biden to say Laken Riley’s name sunk the Democrat’s coming-out party for a cognitively challenged president who withered under the heat of his most profound policy failure.
“Say her name,” Greene demanded from the House chamber. The Georgia Republican had handed the president a “Say Her Name” pin as he entered the hall.
Biden seemed to read from the pin as he mistakenly responded, “Lincoln Riley.” Corporate media outlets have dutifully corrected his mispronunciation, one of many mixups and verbal slurs through what could prove to be Biden’s last SOTU speech.
“Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal,” he said, clearly deviating from the teleprompter script. Biden’s handlers must have swallowed their tongues as the Democrat Party figurehead used a term that is factual but forbidden by identity politics extremists. It certainly was a departure from the latest massaged descriptor for illegal immigrants Biden has been trying out: newcomers.
Biden said his “heart goes out to” Laken Riley’s parents, mourning the senseless loss of their 22-year-old daughter, a nursing student who was killed while running on campus. Police suspect her murderer is a 26-year-old man from Venezuela who is in the country illegally.
Hours before, the U.S. House passed the Laken Riley Act on a vote of 251 to 170, a mark of bipartisanship that signals just how much political trouble Democrats are in for creating the border disaster. The bill would require detention for illegal aliens who have committed non-violent crimes such as theft.
“Innocent Americans from Laken Riley in Georgia to the 14-year-old rape victim of an illegal immigrant in our home state of Louisiana,” Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said Wednesday, according to The Hill. “They’ve all been victimized by those whom the Biden administration has released into our country. He is releasing them into your state.”
Democrats called the legislation a “political stunt.”
“Unfortunately, instead of coming together to express our sorrow for Laken’s tragic loss, the majority appears to be exploiting her death for yet another partisan, political stunt,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said during legislative debate Thursday. It’s an interesting position for Nadler and his fellow leftists to take, considering they have used just about every mass shooting to gin up anti-gun owner legislation targeting Republicans.
U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican, called for Biden to say Riley’s name during his address, just like Democrats have repeatedly demanded Republicans say the names of reported victims of police brutality. Biden did indeed utter the name of the young woman who is becoming, for better or worse, the face of the foreign invasion flooding cities, strapping resources, poisoning young people with fentanyl, and, in some cases, leading to the violent murder of Americans.
Polling shows the issue also is a massive political headache for an incumbent president who already has an uphill climb to hold on to the White House. According to a recent Gallup poll, illegal immigration is the no. 1 concern of American voters and Biden’s No. 1 political vulnerability.
Biden Policy Priority: Blame Republicans
Finally forced to deal with the mess Democrats created in their three-plus years holding the White House, Biden blamed Republicans. He blamed his “predecessor” and presumed challenger in November, though he wouldn’t call former President Donald Trump by name. His predecessor is poisoning the political well, Biden insists, encouraging congressional Republicans to suffocate the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act.
The illegal amnesty measure, puppeted in large part by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., died under its own morbidly obese weight. As my Federalist colleague Kylee Griswold wrote, the bill “would allow nearly 2 million illegal aliens into the country in one year — as long as the numbers stay below 5,000 entries per day for seven consecutive days, or below 8,500 border encounters in a single day — before triggering ‘emergency authority” for the Department of Homeland Security and closing the border. Even then there are exceptions.”
“It will give me and any new president temporary authority to shut down the border when the number of migrants at the border is overwhelming,” Biden shouted.
Really? The number of illegal immigrants at the border has been “overwhelming” since the day Biden took office. With the stroke of his pen on his first day, Biden reversed border security measures his “predecessor” put in place.
Here’s a fact the Democrat didn’t bring up in his campaign speech. As Merrill Mathews wrote in late January for The Hill, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has nearly doubled since Biden took office. In 2020, the estimates showed there were about 10.2 illegal immigrants in the country. As of January, there were nearly 20 million, about the population of New York, Matthews noted.
Biden pushed a provision in the bill he insists would drop illegal immigrant processing times from years to weeks. Gallingly, that’s an issue his critics have been talking about for years.
“People pay smugglers [$8,000] to get them across the borders because they know if they get by and let into the country, it’s six to eight years before they have a hearing,” he said. “And it’s worth taking the chance with the $8,000. But if it’s only six months, six weeks, the idea is highly unlikely that people will pay that much money and come all the way knowing that they’ll be kicked out quickly.”
It was about as absurd a statement as has ever been uttered from a president who has constantly struggled with the truth. Illegal foreign citizens by the droves are coming here because Biden and his administration have told them to come. They restored catch and release, undercut remain in Mexico, stopped construction of border barriers, and have illegally allowed millions of foreign citizens to falsely seek asylum for economic reasons.
When Republicans challenged his disingenuous assertions from their seats, the addled president demanded they read the bill.
“I know you know how to read,” he sneered, with his throng of leftist allies laughing and applauding their fresh, new 81-year-old candidate’s vigor.
As he struggled and garbled his way through swaths of his speech, the question could rightly be turned on the president. But it was Biden’s mangling of the name of the young woman who appears to be a victim of his open border policies that will be remembered long after his campaign speech from the hall of the House.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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