Cornyn on the President’s State of the Union Address

I said the following on a call with Texas reporters yesterday previewing the President’s State of the Union Address:

Tonight, obviously, is the State of the Union message, and I’m looking forward to hearing the President’s message. My hope is he uses the occasion to talk about the future.

Frankly, the President’s got a good record to run on: historic low unemployment, the economy’s booming, people have more in their retirement accounts, and we passed a historic U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement.

We’ve also confirmed a lot of judges. The White House has just sent over the nomination of the 21^st federal judge in Texas.

It’s important to look back at what we’ve been able to do to help encourage this booming economy, and one of the things that we did was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and I think that’s helped contribute to more than 440,000 jobs in Texas alone.

I can’t overlook the importance of criminal justice reform, which has, of course, Texas roots. This is something that was tried in Texas that worked well that we scaled up to the national level.

And then, of course, we have to recall Hurricane Harvey and the work that a number of us did, working together in the entire Texas delegation to get the financial resources that the state needed and that Texans needed to rebuild.

But now that’s what we have done. What can we do, even in an election year? Well, I hope the President will talk about that.

I hope he’ll talk about the highway infrastructure bill that has passed out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee unanimously.

And then finally, the thing that we’ve been trying to get done, which is to lower out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs, for which there is, again, broad bipartisan support.

Nancy Pelosi says she wants to do this, the President says he wants to do this, I want to do this, so hopefully we can get that done and benefit consumers.

So this is, I think, going to be a big night for the President, obviously.

The Texans I’ve talked to feel like we’ve been bogged down in this non-productive impeachment, and really what they want to do is see us getting back to work and getting things done for them. And so I hope that’s what the President will talk about tonight.