The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS TO CONGRESS” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S1510-S1511 on March 1, 2017.
The State Department is responsibly for international relations with a budget of more than $50 billion. Tenure at the State Dept. is increasingly tenuous and it's seen as an extension of the President's will, ambitions and flaws.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS TO CONGRESS
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, before I get into the substance of my remarks, I was listening to our Republican leader talking about compromise--not that he ever engaged in very much of it when he was leader last year--but compromise requires something to compromise over. We have nothing from the administration, nothing on infrastructure, nothing on trade, nothing even on ACA.
You want to sit down and talk? Let's see what your plans are. See if you can get your own act together before you are pointing the finger at Democrats.
The President's speech--let me say this: This President's speech was detached from this President's reality. The President, in this speech and in so many others, talks like a populist. He talks to the working people of America and promises them things. When he governs, it is nothing like that at all. He is favoring the very powerful special interests, making their lives easier, and putting more burdens on the backs of the middle class and people trying to get to the middle class.
A metaphor for this was his speech at the inauguration. He gave a speech--also aimed at the working people--and within an hour after that, he signed an Executive order that helped the banks and added about $500 to the mortgage of every new homeowner.
You can't just talk the talk, Mr. President. You have to walk the walk. On issue after issue, we haven't seen anything--or negative things for the working class.
We heard about infrastructure. A month ago, the Democrats put together an infrastructure plan of $1 trillion. It was a strong plan. It has a lot of support throughout the country.
Where is the President's infrastructure plan? We haven't heard a peep about it. Some of his White House folks leaked that we will not get to infrastructure until next year. Mentioning it in a speech--
infrastructure--is not going to employ a single new worker.
What about trade? The President talked about trade, putting America first. My views tend to be closer to President Trump's than they were to President Bush's or President Obama's on trade. Again, what we hear in the speech and what the President actually does are contradictory.
Throughout his campaign, the President took an issue near and dear to my heart and to the heart of Senator Graham of South Carolina--China manipulating its currency. He had said over and over again in the campaign: On the first day I am President, I will sign an Executive order that labels China a currency manipulator.
They are. We know they manipulate their currency, and it has cost America hundreds of thousands, if not millions of good-paying jobs and caused a load of wealth to flow from our country to theirs.
This one didn't require congressional approval. This one didn't require a single Democrat to join in. All the President had to do was sign the order. We are now 40 days into this administration. Not only has he still not signed the order, but he is saying he may back off.
Last night, the President talked about research, wiping out rare diseases. Yet with the budget they proposed, given that they want to slash domestic discretionary spending by tens of billions of dollars and exempt veterans and Homeland Security, there is no alternative to the fact that the President in his budget, at the same time he is talking about medical research, is going to slash it.
Education. He talked about the great issue of education. The same thing: His budget is going to slash education to smithereens, hurting our students, hurting our teachers, hurting our schools.
Perhaps the most hypocritical of all was draining the swamp. That was one of the President's main themes when he was President-elect: Drain the swamp. Look who is in his Cabinet. His Secretary of Treasury, his Secretary of Commerce, and his NEC adviser are from Wall Street.
Is this the same man who said that we are going to go after Wall Street if we get elected? Wall Street is running the economic show. The Cabinet is filled with bankers. The Cabinet is filled with billionaires, not people who feel for the average American. In fact, if you add up the net wealth of his Cabinet, it has more wealth than one-
third of the American people total--close to 100 million people. That is cleaning the swamp? Give me a break.
The problem with the President's speech is very simple: His actions don't match his words. His words in the campaign are not matched by his actions. His words in his inaugural speech are not matched by his actions, nor are his words in his speech last night.
It was so funny that he spoke to a bunch of cosmopolitan news anchors, and he mentioned that maybe he will change his views on immigration. The media got into a buzz about that. Then, the speech he gave was one of the most virulently anti-immigrant speeches that we have heard any President ever give. He is saying one thing, doing another.
It is not the hypocrisy that bugs us, although it is there. It is the fact that he is not helping middle-class America. It is the fact that he is not making it easier for more people to travel and get into the middle class because he seems to have governed from the hard, hard right. The hard right is very far away from where the average American is.
Mr. Mulvaney's idea of a budget--maybe 10 percent of America, mostly ideologues, would support it. It is even far away from where the average Republican is. Yesterday, when the President proposed his budget, we had one of my colleagues on the Republican side saying it is dead on arrival. We had the majority leader saying that you can't cut the State Department foreign aid in half. He is far over, and that is hurting him and hurting us, hurting the American people.
The first 40 days have been a pretty rough 40 days for President Trump. It hasn't worked out very well. Why? It is not because he hasn't given a few good speeches. It is because he is governing from the hard right. He is governing far away from what the American people want. He is governing way off to the extreme.
A speech isn't going to change that. A speech isn't going to create one job or one infrastructure plan or one trade law that makes our trade laws, which need to be changed, fairer. No, no, it takes action. Unfortunately, when the President takes action, it is quite the opposite of what he says in the speech on the issues that affect the middle-class and working-class people.
If President Trump does not change how he governs--how he governs, not what speeches he gives--in the near future, then these 40 days, which have been of tumult, of contradiction, of turning one's back on the working class, will be 6 months and then will be a year and then will be 2 years.
The problem with the Presidency does not lie in the speeches the President gives, even though I might object to a lot of the things he puts in them. It lies in how he governs, and he is not governing well. He is not governing down the middle. He is not governing in a way that lends itself to compromise. We Democrats will continue to hold the President accountable. That is our job. That is what the Constitution says we should do, and we will continue until we see the President change his course in governing. No speech is going to change that or affect that.
____________________
