NASHVILLE, TN—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations and Foreign Relations Committees, joined Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street on Fox Business to discuss last week’s debate amongst House Republicans for the Speaker vote and Biden’s trip to the southern border and his Administration’s disastrous new immigration proposal.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on the transparent process of electing the new House Speaker: “My take is very simple. This has been a very transparent process in the House [of Representatives]. I support all of my House of Representatives colleagues in the Republican Conference, and I have every confidence that this is going to turn out to be very therapeutic at the end. It’s a process. And what’s wrong with a lot of the things that we’re talking about? We’re talking about more time to actually read the bills rather than having to pass it to find out what’s in it. We’re talking about going back to regular order and having committees function as they should. Again, I think this is going to wind up, in the long run, to have been a therapeutic process. It is really interesting to me to see the way the media is covering this, talking about radicalism and fringe and extreme in terms of the way this process has unfolded. Look at the Senate. What do you think happened in the last Senate? When [Senator] Chuck Schumer took control again just two years ago, there were serious negotiations that took place. It just didn’t happen, in the open, in a transparent manner [as it happened in the House]. How do you think we wound up in a situation with [Senator] Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, as head of the Senate Budget Committee? Tell me there wasn’t a lot of negotiation that took place when we wound up with that result. Again, what the American public is seeing here, on the Republican side, is a more transparent process. Again, I think it’s going to be therapeutic and strengthen us in the end.”
Hagerty on the Biden Administration’s attempt to eliminate bad optics surrounding their self-inflicted border crisis: “The omnibus bill actually prohibited any enforcement or any actual border security. It was only organized toward processing people more rapidly. Again, this is a ruse. What [President] Joe Biden has said for the past two years about the crisis, again, that he precipitated, if you think about this, when President [Donald] Trump was in office, the Migrant Protection Protocols were working. We had the most secure southern border that we’ve seen. We were in the process of fully securing it. Biden comes in and wastes millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars, leaves the border unattended, just drops all the construction on the border wall, and creates massive chaos at the southern border. It’s interesting, you know, we’ve let over five million people into the country illegally— at least that’s what we know about— under Joe Biden’s watch. And for two years, Joe Biden has said there is no crisis at the southern border. Now, conveniently after the midterm elections, CNN and other newscast organizations are actually looking at the border, talking about the crisis there. What he’s got is a media and an optics problem. That’s what yesterday was designed to deal with. This is a media and optics problem for them. This is actually, from my viewpoint, a national security problem. But from Joe Biden’s viewpoint, to use his own words, it’s a political problem. That’s what he’s trying to address. What he’s actually going to do, and if you dig deep into what he’s saying, this is just a process to accelerate the processing of people, make it more efficient, perhaps, at the border, because he wants to do away with those embarrassing images of people coming across the river. That’s what this is all about.”
Hagerty on the Biden Administration’s new plan to accelerate illegal immigration: “[It was] obvious from [the White House’s announcement] yesterday. Basically, what they talked about with their new app to help people schedule their illegal entry into the country. You can imagine what the White House press office is going to be saying: ‘if you want a ticket to enter the United States illegally, we’ve got an app for that.’ This is what Joe Biden’s policy boils down to. This is about accelerating people [into the United States]. There are zero deterrents here. It’s actually going to increase the coyote’s ability to market access to America. We’re going to see more illegal immigration as a result of this. He’s going to make the chaos even worse. What he’s trying to do is address the optics of all of this.”
Hagerty on Democrats’ eventual plan to grant amnesty to all illegal immigrants: “Let me tell you what this really is. It’s a pretext for what’s to come. What you’re going to begin to hear from Biden, the Democrats, and even in the media is [a] term called ‘comprehensive immigration reform’. Comprehensive immigration reform is the Democrats’ code word for basically mass amnesty. It’s their code word for a pathway to citizenship. It’s their code word to transform America. It’s not going to work. It’s going to actually accelerate [and] make the crisis even greater. Look at my home state of Tennessee. Deaths by fentanyl [are] accelerating each month over the month before it. They’ve created mass chaos, mass havoc. This isn’t going to trouble Joe Biden’s voters, his donors up in Martha’s Vineyard. This is hurting people in Tennessee, and he is going to hurt more and more migrants as well because these coyotes are going to market these new messages and try to get these vulnerable people to give them their life savings [and] put their children and their loved ones on a dangerous journey. And we’re going to see more and more carnage of that border and more and more deaths here in America from drug overdoses as a result.”
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