WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) today joined John Roberts on America Reports to discuss Dr. Saule Omarova’s, President Joe Biden’s nominee to be Comptroller of the Currency, testimony before the Senate Banking Committee.
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Partial Transcript
Hagerty on Omarova’s struggle to acknowledge high gas prices are bad for America: “My concerns are much more current than her past may have been growing up in Soviet Russia, being schooled in Moscow. That’s not my concern nearly as much as it’s her response to my questions today. When I queried her on whether she thinks rising gas prices in America are bad for Americans, she had a very difficult time answering that question, John. She just needs to come to Tennessee. You ask a single mother in Memphis who’s filling up her gas tank whether it’s harmful to have gas up $1.00, $1.50 a gallon. This is part-and-parcel of the Biden strategy to raise gas prices here in America. They’re using this as a justification to basically make, what would not otherwise survive market-based competition, these Green Energy investments to increase the price of gas artificially, to disrupt the economy, and distort the economy so that they can get better cost justification for their Green New Deal investments. And she could use the office of the Comptroller of the Currency to make this far worse.”
Hagerty on Omarova’s threat to starve out companies Democrats disagree with politically: “This is a movie we’ve already seen before. Just go back to the Obama-Biden Administration: Operation Choke Point. What we’re seeing is an opportunity for them to deploy exactly the same strategy. Remember in the Obama-Biden Administration, they used Operation Choke Point to starve out industries that were politically out of favor with the Democrats. Think about the gun industry. Today, it’s the oil and gas industry—coal. That’s what they’re talking about starving out. That’s what she’s talking about starving out. And she would be responsible, as Comptroller of the Currency, for an army of 2,400 bank examiners. All of them under her control with a billion dollar war chest who could go into banks, put pressure on them to stop lending to any industry that they determined are out of favor.”
Hagerty on calling for Democrat colleagues to stop Biden’s radical nominee: “I heard Senator [Jon] Tester’s comments. I hope Senator Tester will pick up the phone, call the White House, and tell them that he’s had enough with this sort of radical nominee—somebody that’s just not appropriate for a position of this level of authority. I’m certain he’s hearing from bankers in his home state, from businesses, certainly from businesses that are going to be targeted and put out of business, like the oil and gas industry in his state.”