NASHVILLE, TN—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, today joined Varney & Company on Fox Business to discuss Democrats’ refusal to include funding to fix the southern border crisis in the recent Omnibus bill.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on how the Omnibus fails to preserve Title 42: “That’s one of the reasons I voted against [the Omnibus]. I’ve actually been to the floor of the United States Senate three times now, trying to fix and extend Title 42. The reason Title 42 was put in place and has been implemented was because of the Coronavirus pandemic. A district judge has ruled that the pandemic is over—I actually agree with that—but we have a much greater health crisis at our southern border, and that’s the fentanyl that’s coming across and killing Americans. In fact, the number one killer of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 45 is drug overdose, and that’s death from fentanyl—mostly coming across that southern border. The Democrats have defeated it every time. We almost had it fixed during the course of this Omnibus spending package negotiation. [Senator] Chuck Schumer shut down all negotiations, though. It would’ve passed. It would’ve actually passed because there’s actually bipartisan support for addressing Title 42. But Schumer shut it down. It would’ve so offended his radical left that want to see chaos at the border. They came up with a procedural trick. They used that trick to allow those Democrats that wanted to vote as if they support Title 42 to do so, but they designed it to fail. It did fail. It collapsed. The Omnibus bill passed, again, without my support for that and for many other reasons.”
Hagerty on how the Omnibus spending bill expressly prevents funds from being used to secure the border: “Now we have, again, chaos at our southern border. They actually, if you can believe this, they actually bumped up close to $2 billion, the funding for Customs and Border [Protection]. That way, Democrats can say they’ve increased funding for Customs and Border [Protection], but they expressly, on page 753 of a 4,000-page bill, by the way, say that those funds cannot be used to protect the border, to secure the border or any sort of law enforcement. Those funds are to be used to accelerate processing of people into our country and to transport those people to states like Tennessee.”
Hagerty on the news that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be sending single adult male migrants to Tennessee: “They notified our Governor just days ago that they’re going to start shipping people here. We’ll see if they get upset [and if] the media covers it the way they did Martha’s Vineyard.”
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