Video: Sen. Warner on What He’s Hoping to Hear in President Biden’s State of the Union Address

See below for video and highlights from Sen. Mark Warner’s latest Q&A with Virginia media.

• According to Sen. Warner: “Obviously the news of the day is going to be the president’s State of the Union Address tonight. What I’m hoping to hear from the president is not only a reflection of some of the things that we’ve done, whether it be our record investments and infrastructure, our investments around semiconductors chips, the Inflation Reduction Act, and some of the implications of that but also more importantly how we’re both going to continue to tackle inflation – and while the numbers are coming down particularly things like the price of gasoline inflation is still hurting an awful lot of Virginia families – and I want to hear some of his ideas on how we’re going to continue the challenges around inflation obviously. I also want to continue to hear issues from national security, our competition with China and a host of other things.”
• “Virginia was the state that was 38th to sign on to the ERA…I think we ought to go ahead and extend that time so that all Virginians, all Americans women get the kind of equal rights that I think they they deserve and would be enshrined in the Constitution through the Equal Rights Amendment.”
• “I, like many, were concerned that this Chinese balloon was literally floating across the country. I pointed out that I could not imagine an American balloon being allowed to float across the mainland of China unimpeded. I have not received yet the full intelligence brief. It appears that the president did want to shoot the balloon down earlier on and there was pushback from the Department of Defense. I want to really get to the bottom of that because it seems to me at first blush, whether it was over Alaska or over parts of Montana, that it could have been some ability to take that balloon down without potential loss of life or damage on the ground. But I want to hear out from the DoD. I don’t think it’s breaking any news to say that nation states spy on each other or try to do espionage on each other on a regular basis…”
• “What almost concerns me more with TikTok is…138 million Americans are what’s called regular users… for about 90 minutes a day…and my fear is that those algorithms that are still being written in Beijing, that the Communist party…could mandate, ok you want to only show videos that reinforce good images of the Communist Party that that denigrate Taiwan and its independence. It really can become a propaganda tool that should scare the dickens out of all of us, because at the end of the day it’s being driven by the Communist Party of China.”