WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) today joined Jon Scott on The Fox Report to discuss his effort today to have the Senate process important amendments and his refusal to expedite passage of the Senate infrastructure bill, which would usher in the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion socialist debt bomb.
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Partial Transcript
Hagerty on his effort to call up amendments today: “Tennesseans didn’t elect me to be the most popular person in the United States Senate, Jon. They elected me to stand up for their interests. I’ll point this out, though. What Senator Schumer said wasn’t born out today, because I stood up and offered a full package of amendments for the body to vote on. I’m ready to vote on them right now. I think many of my colleagues are, too. The Democrats objected to that and that laid bare their true intent. What they’re trying to do is just rush this through. It was evident to me on Thursday night when I stopped this. They found out that they had a terrible budget score—over a quarter of a trillion dollars in the hole. You recall, they’ve been saying all along that this infrastructure bill was going to be quote paid for. Well, indeed, it’s not. And they didn’t miss it by a little bit. They missed it by a long shot. A quarter of a trillion dollars in the red. Other estimates could be even higher. I blocked this, this frustrated the plan to accelerate this, to pass it in the middle of the night on Thursday night. Today, I offered to have as many amendments as we want to hear. That’s not really the interest of the Democrats here. What they’re really trying to do is rush ahead and light the fuse on their $3.5 trillion socialist debt bomb.”
Hagerty on the price tag of the infrastructure bill: “What’s going to happen later on this evening is that the Senate is going to be forced to vote to waive the requirement that legislation we passed paid for itself. I think that underscores the fact this is not paid for. It’s certainly not as billed and not as advertised.”
Hagerty on this bill’s failure to focus on hard infrastructure: “I’ll also remind you, Jon, [the infrastructure bill] is twice as long as the King James Bible, to put it into perspective. We had it for about six days by Thursday. We’ve divided it up into pieces, reading through it as furiously as we can. Certainly nobody had an opportunity to go through the CBO analysis when I blocked this. We’re working through it, but the people that are rushing this through are the Democrats. There’s no reason that we can’t move this through in regular order—take our time, assess it, and understand it. Look I’m for hard infrastructure. I worked my way through college shoveling asphalt. My father and grandfather were in the road construction business. It’s in my DNA. But we want to make hard infrastructure investments that have a real return on investment for the American taxpayer. This bill doesn’t accomplish that. There’s so much more in it that has nothing to do with hard investments, hard infrastructure. And what it does, it drives us deeper and deeper in the hole, parking yet another quarter of a trillion dollars on the shoulders of our children and grandchildren.”
Hagerty on what the American public is seeing: “I think as we take more time, and I’m glad that I was able to stop this so we could take more time, and the American public can understand what’s really in this bill. And it’s comments like these, it’s the fact that you and I are having this conversation right now, that’s allowing the American public and my colleagues to better understand what’s in this bill. And I hope that that will inform their votes and their decisions as we move forward.”
Hagerty on Democrats’ $3.5 trillion tax-and-spend spree: “I think the most bitter aspect is what comes next. Because again, this is a rushed job to really try to open the door to pass this infrastructure package so that Schumer can move right into the $3.5 trillion, what I call the socialist debt bomb. That’s what [Speaker] Nancy Pelosi’s waiting for. And she’s going to be able to hold this infrastructure package hostage until she gets to the $3.5 trillion package that she wants.”
Hagerty on Democrats’ using procedural gimmicks: “I’m certainly going to vote against it. But they’re going to use a different sort of process, the same thing that they use with the $1.9 trillion so-called ‘COVID relief package’ back in March. They’ll not have a single Republican vote, but they’ve got a budgetary process. It’s a gimmick really, it’s a parliamentary gimmick. But they will impose that gimmick to try to move this thing forward. I think that that’s the path that they’re going to try to follow, the reconciliation process, as it’s called, Jon, which is anything other than what you or I might think of it as being a reconciliation. But they’re misusing this parliamentary trick to again shove through another huge package. $1.9 trillion back in March, this one is going to be more government dependency than we’d ever imagined.”