WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) today joined Mornings with Maria to discuss Democrats’ reckless tax-and-spend spree and President Biden’s feckless foreign and economic policy.
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Partial Transcript
Hagerty on yesterday’s infrastructure vote: “There’s no text to this bill, Maria. The fact that Chuck Schumer would bring it forward just shows their urgency to shove something through. It’s amazing, and it sort of brings you back to more than a decade ago when Nancy Pelosi said, ‘you’ve got to pass the bill before you can find out what’s in it.’ We don’t need Obamacare 2.0 right now, we need to know what we’re talking about here. I certainly haven’t seen any text, and I think all of the Republicans had been united in this. We’re not going to move forward on this until we can see exactly what we’re talking about. The devil is always in the details.”
Hagerty on Democrats’ reckless tax-and-spend spree: “They call it a reconciliation, but it’s anything but what you and I would call reconciliation. This is just another reckless tax-and-spending spree. And if they want to hide this alongside a bipartisan bill, I think it really is folly. I’ve been a business person all my professional life. Sometimes what you negotiate out of a deal is even more important than what you have in the deal. But what we’ve got Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi saying, what Biden said within two hours of the White House negotiations, was they’re not going to look at the bipartisan, hard infrastructure deal until they get the deal that had everything else that we didn’t want pushed right alongside it. That’s not bipartisanship. Where’s the compromise in that?”
Hagerty on House Democrats blocking a bill to declassify intel on COVID origin: “Hundreds of lives lost here in America, millions of lives lost around the globe. The world needs to know what happened, and declassifying the intelligence around this would help the American people understand better. We want to make certain, this never happens again. You see what the Chinese Communist Party is doing. They’re obfuscating this. Go back to the origins of this, though. In the very beginning, the Chinese Communist Party silenced researchers, they destroyed samples. They did everything they could to prevent us from finding the origins. Now… a year and a half has passed, it’s going to be that much harder to get to the bottom of this. And they continue to obfuscate. We need to get to the bottom of this. I think the American public deserves to know, and I find it just baffling that the Democrats would side with the Chinese Communist Party and do this. […] What is going on here? We need to get to the bottom of it, but the Democrats should be held to account for this. I think the American people want to know, should know, and we ought to hold the Democrat party accountable [for not taking action].”
Hagerty on Biden’s feckless foreign and economic policies: “The Republican Party is fighting tooth-and-nail against these policies. But as you say, who’s winning right now? You look at what’s happened with the border crisis. The border has completely collapsed. The cartels are laughing. The cartels are winning right there. If you look at what’s happening with China. Again, the Chinese Communist Party laughing all the way to the bank. Russia, as you mentioned with Nord Stream 2, we’re giving them a gift and getting nothing in return. It began with the [New] START Treaty. Biden extended that, and got nothing in return from Russia. And then Iran: we could go on for an entire segment about the capitulation there. It is just amazing that our adversaries are winning today. Biden is basically caving at every front. Criminal elements here in America are winning. If you look at what’s happening right here, domestically. And the American taxpayer is suffering at every turn. Look at the inflation that’s happening right now. That’s a hidden tax on middle America, and all of the policies that they’re putting forward are so damaging our economy.”
Hagerty on Biden Admin’s misguided strategy of leading from behind: “I think the American public is far smarter than the mainstream media wants to make us believe. People see this, people understand that the Biden Administration has an incoherent domestic economic strategy. They put America’s interest last, they’re putting foreign interests first. We’re right back to leading from behind again. The American.”
Hagerty on the true cost of Dems’ reckless tax-and-spend spree: “If I think about what Joe Manchin is saying right now, he says he doesn’t want to increase the deficit. He wants to make sure that whatever they put through is paid for. This $3.5 trillion package, there’s no way to pay for that. And the type of pay-fors that they’re talking about are going to be devastating to the economy. They’re going to tax job creators. They’re going to kill capital formation in America. This really is the Green New Deal just disguised. Higher death taxes, they’re talking about policies that will kill fossil fuels in America, and essentially shove more American jobs off shore. It will be devastating to the economy. And if you step back and look at what Joe Manchin is saying, I think he’s going to have a very hard time squaring this $3.5 trillion package with the type of fiscal responsibility that he wants to support.”