From the very beginning, President Biden was focused on the wrong issues.

He opened up his speech calling for Congress to pass a "bipartisan national security bill" — but not for America's national security. Instead, he wants to send billions more taxpayer dollars to Ukraine to support its fight against Russia.

In fact, America's national security barely came up at all. He spent more time talking about junk food and "junk fees" than about our military.

Here's one example:

President Biden tried to take a victory lap on the economy, but his talking points fell flat. His claims hinge on the idea that the economy he inherited from President Trump was "on the brink," but if you asked real Americans, that would be news to them. 

They remember when President Trump was in office, prices were low, and the economy was booming. Now, they have President Biden, high prices, and an economy that's still reeling from reckless spending.

Inflation isn't increasing as much as it was earlier in his presidency, but it's still going up. And according to top economists, there's little chance prices return to pre-Biden levels anytime soon.

Americans still face hard choices, deciding whether to pay bills, buy groceries, or put gas in their tank.

Instead of cutting back on reckless spending, President Biden's solution is to raise taxes. He claims that his policies won't harm normal Americans:

The president talked about almost everything else before mentioning the crisis at our southern border for the first time. When he did, he attempted to blame Republicans for his own inaction.

President Biden claimed that he needed Congress to grant him additional authority to secure the border, but he ignored the 94 executive actions he took to undo Trump-era border policies in just his first 100 days in office. Each and every one of those could be reinstated by just a stroke of his pen.

He tried to sell the American people on the disastrous Ukraine-border deal Republicans blocked last month — a bill that would have allocated three times as much money to Ukraine as it did to "border security" and gave money to organizations that support Hamas terrorists.

President Biden's border talking points ignored the ONLY real border package to pass either side of Congress — House Republicans' Secure the Border Act (H.R. 2).

Unlike the deal President Biden is selling, our package would fund border wall construction and increase the number of real border patrol agents, not migrant processors.

The House's border legislation would go a long way to preventing tragedies like the murder of Laken Riley, a young nursing student. While on a morning run on the campus of the University of Georgia, Laken was kidnapped killed by an illegal immigrant with a criminal record and an active deportation order.

Like many of my colleagues, I wore her picture on my lapel to last night's speech as a reminder of the stakes of this border crisis. Last night, the president finally said something about her death... almost:

But with respect to my colleague from Illinois, that might be the most honest thing that President Biden said all night. 

Unfortunately, he immediately returned to his anti-border security talking points, indirectly blaming Laken's death on wait periods for migrant processing. It was just as crazy as it sounds.

Let me be clear: processing illegal immigrants faster won't make Americans safer.

What will is securing the border and detaining illegal immigrants when we catch them committing other crimes. That's why the House voted to pass a bill named after Laken. The Laken Riley Act would require illegal immigrants charged with theft to be detained rather than released.

That seems like common sense — if you commit another crime after illegally entering the country, you shouldn't be allowed to go free — but unfortunately, less than 20% of House Democrats agreed.