WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, today joined Cavuto: Coast to Coast on Fox Business to discuss the broken appropriations process Senate Democrats are weaponizing against Republicans and President Biden finally pretending to care about the border crisis his policies created.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on Schumer calling Republicans ‘chaos agents’: “I think it’s absolutely ludicrous that [Senator] Chuck Schumer calls Republicans ‘chaos agents,’ when he himself is Captain Chaos. If you think about it, we passed all 12 appropriations bills out of the Senate Appropriations Committee back in July of last year. To date, Chuck Schumer’s only brought three of those to the floor. He’s the one that’s practicing this sort of pinball strategy, bouncing from one crisis to the next. He’s the captain of chaos, and I think it’s actually quite ludicrous that he would be suggesting that this is the Republicans’ fault.”
Hagerty on Schumer’s refusal to bring up appropriations bills: “I think everybody here is trying to find a path forward; it may involve some type of short-term Continuing Resolution. We’ve got the ability to get this done. Again, we’ve moved the appropriations bills through the Senate Appropriations Committee; it’s just a matter of Chuck Schumer sitting on them. They’re not perfect, but they’re certainly the most conservative product we can get out of the Senate. We need to get to work with the House [of Representatives], roll our sleeves up, and get this done. It may take a little more time; I don’t know whether that’s going to mean that we have a partial shutdown here this weekend or whether we find some means to continue this for a few weeks to get it going. But that, I think, is the focus for the White House, certainly it should be the conversations that are taking place at the White House right now if they’re going to be responsible at all about managing this.”
Hagerty on his trip to the southern border to see the crisis firsthand: “This visit that I took last week is absolutely the worst that I’ve seen; it is utter mayhem down there. I spent time with Sheriff [Brad] Coe from Kinney County. He said, ‘Look, what we’re seeing here at the border today, the rest of America, the rest of the country, is going to see tomorrow.’ And we’ve seen problem after problem crop up in city after city across America. We’re seeing it in Georgia, we’ve seen it in New York, these are deep, deep problems that are being facilitated by the open-border policies with the Biden Administration. You know I spoke with a rancher there that showed me his ranch lines. He’s got 1500 acres. He’s got a large ranch, 1500 acres between the Rio Grande River and the Union Pacific Rail line that these illegal migrants are using to come into the interior of the country. He found 15 Syrians on his property just the other day. They didn’t present themselves at the border for asylum to get the white glove treatment from the Biden Administration. They’d come another way. Ask yourselves, what is it that they’re here to do? He told me that his wife woke him up one morning early. She could hear noise in the kitchen of their house; this is their home. This is a fifth generation rancher in Texas. He walks out, there are 20, as he said, military age adult males in his kitchen, eating out of his refrigerator. When he told them to leave, they told him that they were out of beer; he needed to go get them some more. This is an American that we’re talking about having to live like this. They’ve warned him that his 18-year-old daughter and his son, who’s 10 or 12 years old, need to either be armed when they go out on the property or have somebody that is armed when they’re with them. Americans should not be subjected to this, yet every day the Biden Administration is doing just that. I went to Eagle Pass to see what was happening at Shelby Park, where Texas Governor Greg Abbott is actually taking control back of that area. It’s a small area, but he’s demonstrated that once you start enforcing the law, the illegal migration stops. The problem is you got to stop it across the entirety of the border. Tennessee sent national [Guardsmen]—down [there] this weekend—we’re going to demonstrate it time and time again until the Biden Administration wakes up and realizes that if you enforce the law, you can stop this mayhem.”
Hagerty on Biden making a baseless claim that he cares about the border crisis he created: “Another rich Orwellian process here. You’ve got a Biden Administration who precipitated the problem in 2021, yet said there’s no problem in 2022. [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas says the border is secure. [In] 2023, the Biden [Administration] says no problem at the southern border. Now we’re in an election year—suddenly there’s a problem—and now let’s create some legislation that doesn’t work, and then blame it on the Republicans if it fails to pass in an immediate vote with no time. So, this is really, really rich; the fact that he’s doing this just underscores the political naivete of the Biden White House and the fact that they think they can show up at this point in time after he’s precipitated this sort of crisis and blame it on the other side is absolutely preposterous.”
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