GOP: Britt’s botched Biden rebuttal
When Republicans chose Alabama Sen. Katie Britt to deliver the rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union address, they hoped to spotlight a GOP rising star, said Nikki McCann Ramirez and Asawin Suebsaeng in Rolling Stone. Instead, Britt became a national laughingstock after delivering “the most bizarre State of the Union rebuttal in recent memory.” Seated at her kitchen table, she gave an “absurdly overdramatic” response in a whispery voice, veering from folksiness to wide-eyed fear to horrified indignation. Britt’s performance was panned not only by Democrats but also by chagrined Republicans—whose embarrassment only grew when it was revealed Britt had falsely tried to blame a horrific tale of sexual trafficking on Biden’s border policies. As Britt flashed smiles while dramatically enunciating every word, said Jennifer Brooks in the Minneapolis StarTribune, “a baffled nation” puzzled over what it was seeing. Why was a U.S. senator speaking in a stage whisper from a kitchen table? “Was it a new season of The Handmaid’s Tale?”
Britt’s facts were even “less defensible” than her delivery, said Aaron Blake in The Washington Post. After the speech, journalists revealed that Britt had distorted the story of a Mexican sextrafficking victim. Britt implied the woman, Karla Jacinto Romero, was forced into prostitution in childhood by drug cartels after she was smuggled across the border during the Biden presidency. But Romero, now an activist, testified before Congress that it was a pimp who made her a sex slave in Mexico at age 12 between 2004 and 2008—not in the U.S., and long before Biden became president. A defiant Britt said she was just calling attention to a humanitarian issue, but Romero herself denounced Britt for exploiting her story for partisan politics.
The speech’s subtext was “chilling,” said Andrea Grimes in MSNBC.com. It was no accident that the young, telegenic Britt was placed in a strangely pristine kitchen, with no kids’ messes or counters strewn with mail and mugs. Republicans are clearly “scrambling to make the confines of traditional womanhood” look appealing, while hoping women will not notice that they’re defunding public schools and “threatening women’s lives and fertility by banning abortion.” As for sexual abuse, didn’t two juries just find the GOP’s presumptive presidential candidate liable for $83 million for sexually assaulting and slandering writer E. Jean Carroll? Perhaps women won’t notice that either.