WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, today joined Kudlow on Fox Business to discuss his opposition to the omnibus spending bill and Democrats’ circumvention of the regular Appropriations process to fund the government.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on his opposition to passing an omnibus bill during the lameduck session: “I think you can tell what I think about it by how I voted last week—not to use the CR to kick this into this week. I wanted to see it move into the early part of next year. Voters have spoken. We’ve elected a Republican House of Representatives. I think we should give a Republican House of Representatives a chance to push back on this. That’s not where we landed. I was in a minority of those that tried to push back against it. I’ll be in a minority again this week in voting against this omnibus. But I’ll tell you, Larry, I serve on the Appropriations Committee. We have not met once this year to discuss any of the text of this bill. We were supposed to get text already. I haven’t seen anything. Maybe we’ll get something tonight, tomorrow, I don’t know. This process is broken.”
Hagerty on Democrats circumventing the regular Appropriations process: “As a member of the Appropriations Committee—I’m very upset about the way this has proceeded, and here’s why: the Democrats have had at their disposal a tool called reconciliation. They’ve used that to pass through this massive American Rescue Plan that was nothing more than a bunch of subsidies, you know, bailouts for blue states and unions, massively inflationary at a time that we didn’t need it. And then lately this Inflation Reduction Act, which is really just the Green New Deal pasted with lipstick, that’s about $3 trillion that they’ve jammed into the economy without a single Republican vote. Certainly, that seems to be why they approve not going through regular process, not even close to any process at all. And here we are today—members of the Appropriations Committee have not met once to even see or discuss this.”
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