State of the Union Rebuttal
Since 1966, rebuttal speeches to U.S. President’s State of Union message have offered a platform for the opposite party to make their case. This year, the GOP chose rising star, Alabama Senator Katie Britt to deliver it. What happened next has the GOP’s own leadership hanging their heads and wondering what happened. Her speech was laced with enough theatrics to get her nominated for a Tony Award. This criticism comes not from the left, but from her own party. And what she lacked in sincerity, she made up for in what has been called by one journalist, an “out-and-out lie.” The story told by Senator Britt involved someone she said she met and who had told her of being sex-trafficked at the age of 12 through age 16 (when she rescued) and of being raped multiple times a day. She alluded to it happening recently, under Biden’s watch, on US soil, and as a result of Biden’s border policies. But as it turns out, that was not the case. The woman’s actual name is Karla Jacinto Romero, a 31 year-old activist who has publicly recounted her experiences at the hands of sex traffickers in her native Mexico in testimony on Capitol Hill in 2015 and to the Mexican Legislature and even the Vatican. There are pictures of the woman speaking with Senator Britt and two other U.S. Senators, Marsha Blackburn and Cindy-Hyde Smith, in January 2023. The woman’s ordeal actually occurred between 2004 and 2008, under Republican President George W. Bush’s term, not that it matters since the events took place in Mexico, NOT the U.S., and not even near our border.
In a statement to media outlets, Britt’s spokesperson Sean Ross deflected questions about the Senator taking liberties with the story and simply stated that the story was 100% correct. He further stated, “The Biden administration’s policies – the policies in this country that the president falsely claims are humane – have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border,” he said. “Along that journey, children, women and men are being subjected to gut-wrenching, heartbreaking horrors in our own backyard.” That statement seems a bit odd to me since I always believed it was the inscription at the foot of the Statue of Liberty that made people risk everything to make that “…dangerous journey to our border.” And then, to ship them back into that same “gut wrenching, heartbreaking horrors…” that the Senator talks about seems disingenuous, at best.
But perhaps it was the tweet on “X” (formerly Twitter) from gun activist Shannon Watts that summed it up more succinctly: “Sen Katie Britt says sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to a woman while encouraging Americans to vote for a convicted sexual predator.” She added that the Senator had used stories of sexual abuse in an effort to elect Donald Trump, who has been accused of rape which a judge called “substantially true”, and of assault or misconduct by more than 20 other women.
