President Barack Obama delivers his 2015 State of the Union Address to congress.
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The President’s seventh State of the Union speech was a first for Rep. Martha McSally, R-Tucson, just weeks after she was sworn in to represent Arizona's Second Congressional District.
Her initial reaction: “Wow.”
McSally, who represents southeastern Arizona, including parts of Tucson, criticized some of the members of the audience in U.S. Capitol.
“When we’ve got almost everybody in all the branches of the government and the Joint Chiefs and the Cabinet all sitting there and they don’t think it is important and meaningful that they are there and having been elected to be there then it is probably time for them to go home,“ she said.
Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Tucson, was first elected to Congress in 2003 to represent what is now District three in southwestern Arizona. He had a less awed reaction to President Barack Obama's speech.
“I thought it was a poignant and powerful calling out of Congress,” Grijalva said.
If McSally was slightly awed by the pageantry and importance of the State of the Union, she was less impressed by the overall content of what the President laid out to Congress.
“There’s a lot of theatrics involved in these speeches as you know and there’s a lot of who’s standing and who’s clapping and all that. And there’s a lot of platitudes that get spoken,” she said.
In recent weeks, Republicans have roundly criticized the President for his executive actions on immigration. During his State of the Union, Obama mentioned immigration once - taking up four lines of his 20-plus page speech. Everyone in the country can relate to immigrants, he said.
McSally said she was surprised the president didn’t talk more about immigration.
“Fixing our broken immigration system and securing our border, these are I think common ground issues. Doing it in a way that modernizes and revamps the system so people who want to come here to work have a fast, nimble, easy way to do it that contributes to our economy,” she said.
Another of her frequently-stated priorities is "securing our border so we don’t have transnational criminal organizations coming through people’s property and putting their families at risk.”
In contrast, Grijalva again used the word “poignant” to describe the president’s comments on immigration.
“In the sense that he said think, all of you, think about the humanity of what we are dealing with here. That is something in the discussion of immigration is often forgotten, ignored,” Grijalva said.
Not everything Grijalva heard from the President sat well, however. The seventh-term Democrat said he doesn’t like that the president wants Congress to authorize the use of military force against the so-called Islamic State.
“I don’t think he should have a carte blanche, open, you can do what you want fighting ISIS. I think he has to be specific about how he is doing it. If that means boots on the ground out there than that is a whole other debate that Congress needs to have," Grijalva said.
He said he doesn’t want to give Obama the free trade authority he is asking for.
Though most Republicans were quick to criticize the president’s plans, McSally said she heard some things she liked.
“Addressing our cyber security, vulnerability. Shoot this was something I worked on when I worked for Senator Kyl in 2000 and here we are 15 years later.”
The rest of Arizona’s Congressional delegation issued written statements. Their comments broke predictably along party lines.
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