Dem
51
GOP
49
By now you have probably seen at least half a dozen pieces noting that the SOTU rebuttal given by Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) was a disaster. For a United States senator to make a major speech in her kitchen is degrading to her office and her gender, and her theatrics were just horrible. She is not a good actress. Many pundits said with that speech, she blew her chance at becoming Donald Trump's running mate.
But maybe not. The Washington Post fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, went over her speech with a microscope, as he is wont to do. The main point Britt made was extremely misleading and based on a lie. Maybe she was actually auditioning for that bucket of warm liquid after all, and knew the way to Trump's heart was to tell an enormous lie with a straight face. Here is what she said:
We know that President Biden didn't just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That's where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn't be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden's border policies are a disgrace.
That paragraph outright claims, or strongly implies, these things:
Now for the reality. The woman in question is Karla Romero, and her mother kicked her out of the house when she was 12. She was picked up by a pimp and made to work in a brothel in Mexico, during the George W. Bush administration. There were no drug cartels involved. The men who abused her were foreign men who came to Mexico looking for a minor. Needless to say, Joe Biden's border policies did not play a role in foreign men (probably mostly American) traveling to Mexico to visit a brothel during the Bush administration.
Organizations that support victims say that there are relatively few cases of kidnappers taking victims across international borders. That is probably because the danger of the victim making a fuss in order to attract the attention of the border patrol or other law enforcement is too great. If the victim tells the police the whole story, the kidnapper is in very, very, very deep doodoo. It is a better business for coyotes to help people who want to be smuggled and know they need to keep a very low profile to avoid attracting any attention.
Kessler concludes that while Romero's story is tragic, Britt's claims were near-universally false. The current border policies have been in place for years and haven't changed because Republicans in Congress refuse to support any of the bipartisan border bills drawn up in both chambers. So Britt's rant was awarded four Pinocchios.
Saturday Night Live took a pot shot at Britt, dealing with both her presentation and the big lie in it. Here is Scarlett Johansson playing Britt in the SNL cold open:
Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy (R-TX) tried to deflect the blame for the fiasco by saying that the Republican Party had "thrown [Britt] to the wolves." According to Roy, Party leaders set her up to fail since she had never even given a speech on the Senate floor, let alone a major address on national television. Poor helpless Katie couldn't have said "no" and couldn't possibly have checked to see if the story she was going to tell was true. Worse yet, her disaster distracted everyone from the policy issues the Republicans care about.
Yesterday, Britt tried to backtrack. Watch her try to wiggle out of being caught lying and then being roasted on SNL for it. She's definitely not ready for prime time yet. (V)