WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) joined Bloomberg’s Balance of Power to discuss Democrats’ attempts to raise the debt ceiling and pass a transformational spending bill that would permanently reorient our economy toward socialism, the Federal Reserve and its personnel, and escalating tensions between Communist China and Taiwan.
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Partial Transcript
Hagerty on Democrats’ abuse of reconciliation: “I have no reason to believe it’s going to be a bit different. Mitch McConnell has been clear since July where this needs to go. There’s a process in place called reconciliation. They’ve misused reconciliation. They did it back in March to push through $1.9 trillion of spending that they called ‘pandemic relief’ spending, but mostly had nothing to do with the pandemic. They did that without a single Republican vote. They’re talking about again using that same process to spend trillions more in this so-called reshaping of America, this transformative policy that Bernie Sanders has authored. That’s what the process is being misused for. But actually reconciliation was designed for budgetary processes. And this is one of the things that reconciliation can and will have to be used to address.”
Hagerty on the Biden Admin’s numerous policy crises: “We’ve had time since July. Chuck Schumer’s known this for a long time. Again they’re, I think, trying to create yet another crisis. This administration and our colleagues on the Democrat side of the aisle love to manage from crisis to crisis to crisis. The Biden Administration, unfortunately has been creating more crises than I could have ever imagined, but they’re using this as perhaps an excuse to do away with the filibuster. I’ve heard this sort of talk. I think that would be extraordinarily detrimental to the United States Senate. But again, they’re precipitating a crisis by letting this delay. They should not be doing this.”
Hagerty on Fed Chair Jay Powell: “I think Chair Powell has done a good job of navigating a very challenging environment. If you think about it, the Democrats have made it so difficult for him to meet both of the mandates. The full employment mandate is almost impossible when the Democrats persist in subsidizing unemployment. And when you think about inflation, as I mentioned, they’ve dumped $1.9 trillion into our economy back in March. They’re talking about several trillion more. This is not a transitory thing. The inflation that we’ve seen has been precipitated by bad policy decisions. Think about what’s happened to gas prices in America here. In January, Biden basically collapsed the energy economy in America by killing the Keystone XL pipeline, forbidding drilling on public lands, and what we’ve seen is gas prices go up 40 percent to 50 percent. Every good that people have to purchase has to be transported. This is inherently inflationary, and it’s not transitory. Look at real estate prices. In my home state of Tennessee, real estate prices are up 20 percent over the last year. That rolls right into rents, that’s long-term inflationary. So we have very serious inflation concerns in the economy right now.”
Hagerty on oversight of Fed Governors: “I think that Chair Powell is actually going to be overseeing that type of view. That’s what the Inspector General is designed to do. And my expectation is that the IG will take a hard look at what’s taking place. I don’t see this as something systemic. These rules have been in place for a long time. We’ve had Fed chair after Fed chair. We’ve had governors. The way this is managed is actually at a local level. So, each of these regional Fed chairs has got a board to work with and there’s a structure in place to address it. So I expect that it will be addressed, and it should be addressed very soon.”
Hagerty on tensions between China and Taiwan: “I served as U.S. Ambassador to Japan just before I joined the United States Senate, and the situation in the South China Sea has been getting increasingly tense. China has built up now the largest Navy in the world, in terms of number. They don’t have the capability that the United States does, but they have a very concentrated posture in the Indo-Pacific region. If you look at what’s happened with Afghanistan, the collapse of Afghanistan, I think emboldens China to think that they can push America even further. And what we’ve seen is increased frequency—invading Taiwan airspace, they’ve been very aggressive in the region. And I think Taiwan has every reason to be quite concerned.”
Hagerty on U.S-Australia-UK nuclear power submarine agreement: “I was supportive of that move. I know that France was very upset about it. I think they overreacted. There might’ve been a different way to handle that diplomatically, but anything that we do to increase our ally’s strength in that region to increase our presence in the region, I think is positive. And it sends a very strong message to China.”
Hagerty on Democrats’ use of the so-called infrastructure bill to ram through Bernie Sanders’ socialist spending bill: “What my constituents don’t want is more debt on the backs of their children and grandchildren. And when they found out that this infrastructure bill wasn’t paid for as advertised, and that frankly much of it was not hard infrastructure as it had been advertised, people were quite upset. They were happy with the fact that I held that bill up. I stopped it for five days. It made me not very popular in the United States Senate, but it was something that had to happen so the American public could actually find out what was in this 2,700 page bill. And as people began to find out about it, we saw several senators move their vote over with me. I think the American public now sees what it is. And I think there’s a great deal of concern, not only about the inflation that it’s going to create and the debt that it’s going to put on our children. But the fact that it’s opening the door for this pathway to socialism that this next larger bill that they’re talking about is going to present for America.”