On the recordJanuary 23, 2017
I would like to discuss five topics this afternoon: the President's remarks this weekend and the lack of Republican reaction to them, his Executive order on Friday about mortgage rates, the continuing nominations process here, the President's withdrawal from TPP, and the Republican alternative to the Affordable Care Act that was announced this morning. First, the need for Republicans to speak out when President Trump engages in the kind of rhetoric he engaged in this weekend. The first few days of the new administration are traditionally a time for an incoming President to call for unity and to try and bring the country together. Instead, President Trump kicked off a bizarre first weekend in office that alternated between braggadocio and furor. The President quarreled over the size of inaugural crowds, bragged about his election victory in a speech at CIA headquarters, with a wall commemorating fallen American intelligence officers behind him, and then sent his Press Secretary out to hold an emergency briefing to present ``alternative facts,'' as one of President Trump's advisers described them yesterday, about the size of the crowds again. Whatever your politics, in order to debate, argue, compromise, and get things done for the American people, we have to be able to agree on a base line of facts. Facts aren't partisan. They don't have alternatives. The alternative to fact is fiction.…
