By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
ST. JOSEPH, Mo. — Eastern Kansas Congressman Jake LaTurner says President Biden failed to adequately address the most pressing problem facing the country during his State of the Union address.
“I thought the president missed a big opportunity to talk about what Americans are really struggling with right now, which is inflation,” LaTurner tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post.
The first-term Republican lays the blame for inflation at the feet of Biden and Democrats and faults the president for the solutions he outlined in his speech to a joint session of Congress.
“I don’t think that he in any meaningful way addressed that problem, because what’s been causing that is the out-of-control government spending at the federal level,” LaTurner says.
Turner says the administration is still pushing for more spending on social programs, which Turner argues will only worsen the problem.
LaTurner faults the Biden Administration for not imposing stiffer sanctions against Russia and Vladimir Putin for the invasion of Ukraine. LaTurner calls President Biden’s approach “Swiss cheese sanctions.” LaTurner says the United States needs to confront Russia in two different manners.
“We need to provide the Ukrainians with lethal weapons to defend their country and to fight back against Putin and his gang of thugs,” according to Putin. “Secondly, we have to punish Vladimir Putin and the way to do that is by stop buying natural gas from him and stop buying oil from him.”
LaTurner says though Republicans and Democrats stand together on the issue, they differ on how exactly to punish Russia and back Ukraine.
“From my point of view, we need to provide lethal weapons to the Ukrainians,” LaTurner says. “We should have been doing it for months. The president turned them down when they asked for it in the past. We should have been doing it all along, but we need to do it now. And we need to get it to them immediately. This is an imminent threat. They are not going to have much time left.”
LaTurner says the United States must lead the West in imposing even tougher financial sanctions than now in place, such as cutting off all Russian banks from the international financial system.
LaTurner adds that in the long run, the United States must revert back to producing its own energy, not relying on Russia or others for the nation’s energy needs.