NEW YORK CITY—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations, Banking, and Foreign Relations Committees and former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, today joined Mornings With Maria on Fox Business live in-studio to discuss President Joe Biden’s capitulation to China, every Senate Democrat blocking his amendment barring illegal aliens from being counted in the allocation of congressional seats and electoral votes, and his visit to the New York Stock Exchange.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on Chuck Schumer’s mismanagement of the Senate: “There’s tremendous amount of pressure on [Senator Chuck] Schumer to deal with this, but there are many other things that have been pressure on Chuck Schumer to deal with, and he consistently puts it off. If you look at where we wound up with the appropriations bills, right up to the final line, almost to a government shutdown. It’s just difficult for me to imagine how he prioritizes anything […] It seems that politics are the only motivation, in this regard, and power. The appropriation process has been bypassed for years. Chuck Schumer seems to want to control everything, and he maintains ball control because he maintains control over what goes on the floor. We’ll see how this bill prioritizes itself when the grand scheme of things is laid out, but I think it’s going to be basically politics at the end of the day.”
Hagerty on Biden’s phone call with Xi: “It’s interesting how this White House is handling China. China is a predator on so many fronts, Maria. They’re economic predators—they’re certainly military predators—and from a diplomatic standpoint, they’ve adopted very predatory practices as well. When I hear the White House talking, and I understand some of the conversation between President Xi and President [Joe] Biden was constructive, what they talked about with regard to TikTok, I think President Biden made clear what he’s looking for is not a ban, but he’s looking for a divestiture. I think that’s the path that again, Chuck Schumer’s going to have to figure out if he brings this bill to the floor. They also talked about the production that China’s undertaking of green energy products and flooding the market with that. This is very typical of China’s practices of coming in, picking a champion industry, subsidizing it, and flooding the market with it. What I would’ve loved to have heard more about was how President Biden is holding China accountable. I wish he would hold him accountable for purchasing energy from Russia, from Iran, which is essentially fueling the wars there […] [They] rob—you’ve talked about intellectual property theft—and replicate. They copy what we have—they try to make it better—and replace with deeply subsidized products.”
Hagerty on the concerns about Chinese EVs: “There’s a new product that’s been introduced from China. A Chinese EV car maker has put out a product looking much like a Porsche for a price point of about $30,000 […] There’s a deeper concern about the Chinese EVs as well, Maria, and that is that these EVs have a tremendous amount of information gathering equipment. And I think there’s a concern here in America that that information could be gathered and, in turn, sent back to China. I think that’s one of our gravest concerns is the national security law of China, which says that information gathered anywhere in the world, anywhere in the world, as long as it’s in the possession of a Chinese company, is subject to CCP surveillance.”
Hagerty on his trip to the southern border: “I was just down at the border about four weeks ago. I was meeting with a rancher there, and he told me that he had encountered 15 Syrian males. He said they’re all military age Syrians. They hadn’t presented themselves at the point of entry for asylum. They’d come across his ranch in a place where they could not be detected. They’re not a known gotaway; they are just a gotaway. What are they doing here? We don’t know. You think about the number of people that have actually been apprehended that are on the terrorist watch list, a number of them have been released into the country. If you arrive here from Venezuela, because they don’t have an information sharing agreement with us, the presumption is it’s okay to turn you loose in America. Meanwhile, Venezuelan crime rates are going down—I understand the jails are being emptied in Venezuela—this is deeply, deeply concerning.”
Hagerty on every Senate Democrat blocking his amendment barring illegal immigrants from being counted in the allocation of congressional seats and electoral votes: “I think it all gets back to something that I was able to get every Democrat on the record. I put forward legislation three weeks ago, suggesting that we not be allowed to count illegal migrants in the census. Because right now, these illegal migrants are used to apportion congressional seats and therefore electoral votes. If you look at the number of people that have flooded into our country just under Joe Biden, that would account for 13 congressional seats. 13 congressional seats, and therefore that many electoral votes […] Democrats win regardless because they still retain congressional power. If you look at the states that are losing population: New York, Illinois, California, where the sanctuary cities [are] located. Again, New York, Chicago, Illinois, Los Angeles, San Francisco, they just need the people there. In fact, the congressional representative from Brooklyn, the same district of James Madison High School, where they turned the kids out so they could put illegal migrants in for housing, she said it on the air. She said, ‘I need these illegal migrants for the purposes of redistricting.’ She doesn’t want to lose her district, and she’s going to repopulate her district with these people that have come here illegally […] The point here is that they are taking what had been called a conspiracy theory—and they’re confirming a fact that this is a real conspiracy—to basically inflate the votes of those people in these blue districts, and weaken and dampen the votes in places and states like mine. We don’t have that many illegal migrants. Think about it: if you have twice as many illegal migrants in your district—your voters get twice as much vote—it’s a leverage opportunity. That’s un-American.”
Hagerty on Chinese companies listed on the NYSE that don’t adhere to the same accounting rules as U.S. companies: “It’s deeply concerning to me. The United States has the most competitive, most effective capital markets in the world. It’s a true source of competitive advantage for our nation. Why in the world do we allow the Chinese companies to come here, access our capital markets, yet not play by the same set of rules that American companies have to play by?”
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