Florida lawmakers all stand for Ukraine but then divide sharply on Biden’s speech
Florida lawmakers from both parties stood to show solidarity with Ukraine as President Joe Biden devoted the beginning of his State of the Union speech to discussing that nation’s resistance against Russian invasion.
But after the speech and their brief display of unity, lawmakers divided along party lines on whether Biden’s response to the Ukrainian crisis has been strong enough and contrasted sharply on whether Biden’s speech offered satisfactory solutions to inflation, the ongoing pandemic and other domestic hardships.
“It seems to be a president who is kind of stuck on his kind of disastrous policies. It was, I think, really disappointing,” said U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Republican and the senior member of the Florida delegation, after the speech.
Biden announced during the speech that his administration will restrict Russian aircraft from U.S. airspace, a move already undertaken by Canada and the European Union. Miami is one of four destinations in the U.S. to which Russian airline Aeroflot offers direct flights from Moscow along with New York, Los Angeles and Washington. Those flights will be barred under Biden’s order.
U.S. Rep. Carlos Gimenez, a Miami-Dade County Republican, had drafted legislation he planned to introduce this week that would have enacted the same restriction. After Biden’s announcement, Gimenez said he would be amending his bill to prevent the president from lifting the ban without Congressional approval, but said the president’s step was “better late than never.”
“We should’ve been giving aid, lethal aid, military aid to Ukrainians before now, and which they were asking for before now,” Gimenez said after the speech while holding a small Ukrainian flag.
Biden’s statements on Russia were equally rebuffed by U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a freshman Republican from Miami, who said his announcements on Russia were too weak and said that the administration needs to block the purchase of Russian oil in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
“We’re still paying for oil. We’re paying for the war, the invasion of a sovereign country,” she said.
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Among the other domestic policy issues in his speech, Salazar said Biden did not offer specific solutions to issues like inflation.
“I think that he mentioned some of the problems that Americans are living and suffering but he failed to mention how his administration is going to solve those problems,” Salazar told the Herald.
Democrats praise rescue plan
Florida Democrats, meanwhile, took Biden’s speech as an opportunity to tout the federal funding from the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan Infrastructure bill, while slamming Gov. Ron DeSantis — a potential 2024 presidential candidate who tweeted during the speech a logo of an alligator with the words “Let Us Alone.”
“The American Rescue Plan was so powerful and so transformative in helping Florida recover, that the governor decided to crisscross the state touting programs that the American Rescue Plan paid for, forgetting to give credit where credit is due,” said U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson during a call on Tuesday ahead of the speech.
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a South Florida Democrat, said Biden’s speech “was threaded with, with the moral authority that the United States has been known for,” both as he talked about the crisis in Ukraine and the challenges that Americans have faced during the past two years with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think he offered a path forward. I think he showed us how he led the way out, where at the beginning of his presidency and before we were in a dark, dank place that the previous administration was holding us there,” said Wasserman Schultz, a former Democratic National Committee chair. “And that thanks to his policies, thanks to the American Rescue Plan and the investments that that made, it helps pull people out of that dark place and help make sure that they get back on their feet.”
U.S. Rep. Val Demings, an Orlando Democrat who is running for Senate against Sen. Marco Rubio, tweeted after the speech, “The answer is not to defund the police, it’s to fund the police,” a reference to Biden’s same words during his speech. Demings has sought to play up her background as a former police chief and distance herself from the movement to defund police departments as she campaigns against Rubio.
While Rubio did not attend the State of the Union as a boycott of the event’s COVID testing requirements, he live tweeted through the speech.
“Biden’s plan to reduce inflation and the national debt is for government to borrow and spend $2 trillion,” he said in one tweet. “What part of the speech will Biden announce we are going to replace #oil from #Russia with oil from America?” he said in another.
This story was originally published March 2, 2022 at 12:12 AM with the headline "Florida lawmakers all stand for Ukraine but then divide sharply on Biden’s speech."
