In the News

By Debra McCown
January 26, 2012
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The Republican congressmen who represent Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee pointed out what they saw as discrepancies between speech and reality in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night.

U.S. Reps. Phil Roe, who represents the 1^st District in Tennessee, and Morgan Griffith, of the 9^th District in Virginia, said the president’s words contradicted his actions.

“There are some things I agreed with in his speech, but I want to see action and not just words,” Griffith said Wednesday.

Among the things in Obama’s speech that Griffith said he supports: an all-of-the-above energy policy that includes offshore oil drilling and improvements to the rules for how the federal government operates.

But, Griffith said, the administration recently rejected a major oil pipeline project that could have created jobs and has added to the regulations burdening business owners.

In pointing out another set of differences between words and action, Roe called up a February 2009 speech in which Obama promised to tackle federal spending and cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term in office.

“The reality is that under President Obama’s watch, the government has accumulated the three largest annual budget deficits in our nation’s history,” Roe said in a written statement. “Over $4.6 trillion has been added to the national debt since Obama took office, which is the most rapid increase of any president. We must get serious about enacting spending cuts that put us on a sustainable fiscal path.”