Archive: News

After President Donald Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday, elected leaders were quick to respond.  Here is a collection of statements made by Governor Andrew Cuomo, Senators Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand, and Congressman Tom Reed after the President delivered his address.

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo

Last night, in his State of the Union address, President Trump attacked New York's Reproductive Health Act, spreading falsehoods about the abortion law to inflame his base, and announcing his intention to roll back the reproductive protections that have been in place for 46 years since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

We will not allow political pandering and fearmongering to stand — especially not when so much is at stake.

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Trump attacked the law that New York passed last month codifying a woman's right to an abortion, and he proposed federal legislation to roll back the protections provided by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The president's diatribe was part of the far-right's escalation of its assault on a woman's constitutional rights.

It's worth recalling that in 1999, long before he ran for president, Mr. Trump described himself as "very pro-choice." Today he claims to be anti-choice, and he shamelessly courts the religious right to win votes.

Too much of today's political discourse is extreme. But emotions run especially high when politics and religion intersect — as in the debate about a woman's right to choose. As a Roman Catholic, I am intimately familiar with the strongly held views of the church. Still, I do not believe that religious values should drive political positions.

I just signed the Reproductive Health Act into law to protect against the Republicans' efforts to pack the Supreme Court with extreme conservatives to overturn the constitutional protections recognized in Roe v. Wade.

Congressman Tom Reed

With a soaring economy and a restored leadership around the globe, President Trump highlighted the once in a generation opportunity our country holds to work together to pass laws that help people.

Many of the priorities the President laid out, such as rebuilding our infrastructure, lowering the cost of healthcare and prescription drugs, and ensuring our country embraces a safe, fair and legal immigration system, are issues the Problem Solvers Caucus made a top priority as well this Congress, and we look forward to working together.

Now extremists on both sides of the aisle have a choice to make: Will they adopt a willingness to compromise and ensure a legacy of greatness for our children and grandchildren, or instead, choose to play 'gotcha politics,' and guarantee the American people lose out on future opportunities? We sincerely hope they choose to put the American people first.

Senator Chuck Schumer

President Trump had the opportunity to bring our parties together and offer the congress and the country a new vision for the next two years of divided government. President Trump squandered the opportunity -- squandered the opportunity with a forgettable and at often times incoherent speech.

At times he called for unity without specifics, at other times he served up divisive campaign rhetoric that he has used to frequently in the past.

The president's speech was like a 90-minute performance of dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde, calling for comity but lacing it throughout with invective. Unfortunately, President Trump seemed more excited and placed more emphasis on the Mr. Hyde parts of the speech than on the Dr. Jekyll.

Listen to a few of the contradictions in this speech, there were so many. Can't mention all of them. President Trump says he believes inie legal immigration but not illegal immigration. But every bill he has pushed on immigration has cut legal immigration as well as illegal immigration including the proposal he sent over now in the debates where he he changes asylum process dramatically.

President Trump said he would only work with us in congress if we abandoned our oversight duties. Back to his old tricks. Hostage-taking. I'm not going to advance the causes of the american people if congress investigates me.

Now, congress is supposed to do oversight of the executive branch. It's one of the things the founding fathers put in the constitution. They were wary of overweaning executive power. They wanted congress to be a check. What is President Trump afraid of?

If he weren't afraid of these investigations, if he weren't afraid of something thatra might be there that he did that was wrong, he'd shrug his shoulders and say let 'em go forward. But instead he threatens, he threatens the american people. Unless these investigations stop, I'm not going to move forward on anything.

How about this one, this one made everybody's eyes roll even on the republican side. He said if he weren't elected president, we'd be in a war with North Korea. What hyperbole. Not just hyperbole, what untruth. What selective memory.

President Trump began his time in office by precipitously ramping up tensions with north korea. Under President Obama they were muchn lower than they were with hpresident trump. And maybe the most blatant contradiction of all, which makes you just lose respect for the integrity and honesty of the President, President Trump spoke about the need to defend protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions while at the very same time his administration is waging a lawsuit that would eviscerate protections for pre-existing conditions.

How can the president have the nerve to get up on the podium last night and say he wants to preserve pre-existing conditions and wage a lawsuit, support a lawsuit that tries to unto them? It's shocking hypocrisy. That one maybe most of all for a speech that had many.

And, of course, there were a whole lot of omissions in the speech that many americans felt should have been placed in. Let me give you an example.

The President did talk about a few potentials for bipartisan compromise. We democrats would love to compromise with the President and come up with some things that would advance the causes of working families in America.

He mentioned infrastructure and prescription drugs. But instead of offering substantive ideas and spending some time on these issues, he delivered a couple of lines about each and then moved on. It seemed perfunctory. There was no real sinew, no way to figure out is there a way we can come together and get something done, because he really didn't seem interested.

Now, he talked about the future of America and didn't even mention climate change. How could you do that? Every scientist has stated who has studied it knows that in the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years climate change is going to evoke huge changes in our country and in our world. If you believe in the future and you want to have a good future for our children and grandchildren -- which we all do -- you can't ignore climate change. You may have different views on it, but you can't ignore it.

He also talked a great deal about the safety of the American people but not one mention about gun safety. Not one. Again, maybe not to President Trump, maybe not to his hard core supporters, but to the rest of America to the talk about need for security and safety for Americans and not talk about gun safety misses the mark badly.

And then he rattled off economic statistics, how great everything is. But completely ignored the difficult economic realities of working Americans. Why do so many Americans not have faith in the future? Why do so many Americans worry that their children won't have as good a life economically as they do?

Because so much of what the President has done economically has benefited the top 10%. Those improve the overall statistics, but they don't improve't the lives of the average middle class person.

Take the tax cut. Huge tax cut geared to the wealthy and the powerful corporations. And the President said each worker will get about $4,000 increase. Didn't happen. Wages are going up at a small amount. They're still way behind where they were in the past.

A what did these companies do with all this huge tax break? A trillion dollars in buybacks. Buybacks which benefit the corporatebu CEOs, which benefit the shareholders but do nothing for the workers, since so many of them don't own stock.

In fact, the stock market has become more skewed. About 85% of the value of the shares is held by the top 10% of America. And then, of course, on the wall he demanded Congress fund his wall but showed no signs of remorse over the pointless Trump government shutdown that he precipitated. He didn't mention theid pain he caused to 800,000 federal workers even though many of them were in the galleries listening.

I brought as a guest a man named, a man named Roman Byrne. He works in the trade con, our control tower in New York. Just had two twins, has two other kids. I saw the nice pictures. He came with his wife. She quit her job when the twins came along. And when he lost his salary at a tense job like that where you have to be on all the time -- I've been up there. It's dark, you see little dots and can't have them get too near each other, because that's a safety issue for the people on the planes.

And here he was worried about paying the bills and providing for his children. Well, no mention of people like that. No. Just about his wall. Didn't work for the President, we know that. Our Republican colleagues, leader McConnell, knows that. I think even in his situation where he's often in a bubble and often only aimed at the narrow band of his supporters, but he touched a hot stove, and I don't think he wants to do it again, but there was no mention. He should have used the speech to say we're not going to have another governmenter shutdown.

No word. No plan to tackle our opioid problem. No plan to increase wages for the middle class. No plan to increase manufacturing jobs. So anyone who hoped that the President would change course and offer some new bipartisan ideas where we could, with some meat on the bone, where we could discuss it andul begin to move forward to help the American people, anyone who hoped the president would do that, sore hi disappointed -- sorely disappointed.

As I said, his real excitement came in the most divisive a parts of the speech, on immigration and abortion. Now, so let's contrast his speech to Stacey Abrams. The contrast between the President's speech and Stacy Abram's speech was stunning. The president was political, divisive, calculatinge and at times even nasty. Ms. Abrams was compelling, warm, uplifting, showing real compassion for the plights of our average families. But also filled with hope and inspired by the promise of an american dream. An uplifting speech.

Ms. Abrams' speech represented the kind of unifying vision understanding our challenges but also having some confidence in our ability to solve them that the President failed to deliver. In short, Stacey Abrams last night gave President Trump a lesson in how to lead.

Javier Becerra, speaking from the high school he graduated from in Sacramento, McClatchy high school, also gave a wonderful response in spanish. Now, we all knew that the president would say the state of our union was strong. But the C people know the unfortunate truth.

On the economy, on health care, on governance, on foreign policy... it's abundantly clear that the Trump administration has been getting failing grades from the american people. The state of the economy, state of the Trump economy, failing the middle class. Wealthy shareholders and corporate executives cash in from the Trump tax bill. American workers are left behind. The state of the Trump health care system, failing american families. Coverage is getting more expensive, and the amount of coverage is declining. This is the first year, due to tthe sabotage that this administration has done to our health care system, that fewer americans have health care than they did last year. First time. First time. In a while.

The state of the Trump administration, chaos. President Trump has had the most cabinet turnover in more than a century. He's failed to nominate anyone toe a fifth of our government's top positions. This has nothing to do with the senate. For a fifth of the positions, there's no nomination. This is two years into this presidency.

The senate had nothing to do with all the cabinet members who quit t or resigned under a cloud. Nothing to do with that either. President Trump likes to blame somebody else for the problems he creates. That's one of his MOs.

The state of President Trump's foreign policy, inside out. Inside out. Our longstanding allies, countries of NATO, have been alienated. Our adversaries -- Russia, China, North Korea -- have been emboldened because president trumpen doesn't stand up to them. Trump doesn't stand up to them. During the national security section of the President's speech last night, the first item he mentioned wasn't Russia's malign activities, North Korea's nuclear program or even the crisis in Venezuela. It wasn criticism for our nato allies.

That says it all. So the President's State Of The Union last night did something rare for a State Of The Union address. It revealed just how much repair the state of our union requires. Just how much work we still have to do to aid working americans left behind by an economy that only seems to work for the wealthy and well-connected, to provide american families everywhere with a affordable health care, to bring stability and accountability to a government too short on both, a government that seems to have made the swamp deeper and more odorous andr to further isolate our enemies and to give comfort to our allies abroad. Let us hope and pray that the country can heal, but President Trump did nothing to move that forward last night.

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand

President Trump has had years to bring this country together, but instead he has chosen to divide the country across every single line he can imagine. If President Trump wants to convince the country that he actually cares about bringing us together, then he can start by no longer using government workers as political pawns, reuniting the families that his Administration ripped apart at the border, and stopping with political wedge issues like telling women they can’t make their own health decisions in consultation with their doctor.”

v15i5