WASHINTON – United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, today called out his Democrat colleagues for using a so-called hearing on getting shots in people’s arms and reopening schools as a desperate attempt to take credit for the ongoing economic recovery and to continue to sale the American public on their $1.9 trillion partisan spending spree that passed the Senate with the thinnest of margins. Hagerty believes the committee should be conducting oversight on the $4 trillion already passed on a bipartisan basis, rather than using the committee to sell their bad policies.
*Click the photo above or here to watch*
Transcript Below:
Hagerty: “I must say this, I’m quite shocked at the conduct of this hearing today. We’re not talking about getting shots in arms. We’re not talking about the pandemic. This is a sales pitch for a $1.9 trillion, wholly partisan package that has very little to do with dealing with the pandemic and very little to do with getting our economy going again. In fact, it puts in place all sorts of bad incentives. You know, we even talked about this during the course of the debate. It sends stimulus checks to illegal immigrants. What sort of incentive is that creating when we’ve got a crisis at our border? It sends stimulus checks to inmates. What possible impact could that have on our economy to send a stimulus check to an inmate who is being cared for completely by the taxpayer and will not be in a position to do anything with that in terms of generating economic activity in our society? This package is being sold to the American public for something that it’s not. This isn’t about the pandemic, that’s why we’re not even talking about it in this hearing today. We should be conducting oversight on the $4 trillion that actually was passed on a bipartisan basis. There’s a trillion dollars left there yet to be spent. We need to be getting kids back into school, as Mr. Cooper said. We need to be getting shots in arms, as what this hearing was falsely billed as. We need to be focused on the pandemic and recovering our economy. We’re on the path to recovery now. And what we’ve got right now is a $1.9 trillion freefall spending spree that has loads of partisan wish list activity in it, lots of socialist programs in it, and bailouts for mismanaged states. We should be talking about the pandemic, we should be doing oversight to get our economy going, not spending our time selling a package that was passed by the thinnest of margins in the Senate.”