WASHINGTON – United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) joined Fox News at Night with Shannon Bream to talk COVID relief.
Hagerty on what he wants the Senate to do: “[Today] we saw Chuck Schumer lose complete control. Right out of the [starting] blocks, Bernie Sanders raised an amendment and put this into the ditch. What I want to do is what should have been done at the very beginning: we should put this into the committees where it belongs, so they can work through this on a bipartisan basis, make certain that we spend the money that has already been allocated before we spend a single new dollar, and make certain that this package is actually oriented toward pandemic relief. After going through and reading the bill yesterday, and there were a lot of complaints from the Democrats about doing that, but Senator [Ron] Johnson forced a reading of the bill— now the American public knows what this really is. It’s not a pandemic relief bill. This is a no-holds-barred pork-barrel spending bill. There’s more pork in this than all the BBQ joints in Tennessee combined.”
Hagerty on what’s in the COVID package: “[This is] one of the largest packages that’s ever come through this Congress. And for [Democrats] not to debate it, for them not to even want us to read the bill, I think tells us a lot, Shannon. There’s so much more in this than the things that identified by Chuck Schumer. Indeed, less than 10% of this actually addresses the pandemic. Over 90% of this is basically a Democrat wish list that they’re trying to jam through with a parliamentary trick. And again, bypass the normal committee process. That’s why I’ve put this motion in place to, to move it back into committee, get our arms back around this, and bring some control to the situation.”
Hagerty on bipartisanship: “I can’t imagine any of my Republican colleagues… joining the Democrats to vote for this. I think they’ll join me to vote against it. But you saw a bipartisanship today with Bernie Sanders amendment on the minimum wage. Eight Democrats came over and sided with the Republicans, again, to push back against that. So the only bipartisanship seeing so far is on our side.”
Hagerty on tonight’s votes: “I think it’s going to be another all-nighter. We’ve got a lot of amendments in place, and you saw Leader McConnell go through the math on this. We go through the same number of amendments we did the last time we had one of these processes. It could take over 400 hours, certainly if you used the benchmark of this latest amendment that they kept open for over 12 hours for one amendment. So this is going to be a long night. I think it will go well into tomorrow, maybe through the entire weekend, but we’re going to stand here and fight.”