WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) joined Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria to discuss how President Biden and Congressional Democrats’ $3.5 trillion tax-and-spending spree will fuel inflation, send jobs overseas, and bankrupt future generations of Americans. In addition, Whip Scalise called on Governor Andrew Cuomo to release the data about COVID deaths in nursing homes and long-term care facilities before he leaves office. Whip Scalise also called on Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul to be transparent about Governor Cuomo’s deadly mandate that nursing homes accept COVID-positive patients, which led to the untimely deaths of thousands of seniors, if Governor Cuomo refuses to make this information public.
“But clearly, if you look [at] the infrastructure bill that’s going to come over, the $1.2 trillion bill, has a lot of momentum behind it coming out of the Senate. But now we’re starting to see the details, and there are a lot of things in there that people are not going to like. Not the least of which is the ability for the Secretary of Transportation to start the process of imposing a per-mile car tax on every person who drives a car in America. They also have hundreds of billions of dollars of slush funds.
“The big problem here, Maria, that they’re going to have is that it is directly linked to that tax-and-spend bill, the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill, that is now moving as well. Nancy Pelosi has made it clear. The two bills are linked together. Reconciliation in her mind has to pass before she even brings up the infrastructure bill. So the two are one and the same, which means over $5 trillion of new spending with taxes to go with it, that would kill middle-class jobs. Joe Biden can talk all he wants about people making less than $400,000 a year. Does anybody in America think that a bill written by Bernie Sanders is going to leave your pocketbook alone? Of course, every family is going to feel the impact of it, starting with the car tax.
“But think about the inflation, and Maria, you’ve talked about this a lot. All of the inflation that we’re seeing today with a trillion and a half dollars spent in the COVID relief that had nothing to do with COVID relief – imagine if you throw another $5 trillion of borrowed money that somebody is going to have to pay for. This bill doesn’t pay for all of that. It just spends a whole lot of money on things they’re calling infrastructure that have nothing to do with infrastructure. So, a lot of Green New Deal garbage in there, over a hundred billion dollars in this linked package goes to people here illegally for amnesty. That’s in the bill! I don’t hear anybody talking about that. They talk about roads and bridges, and they’re hiding behind that. But the bill actually has over a hundred billion dollars for things like amnesty. I wonder why they don’t want to mention that, too, when the two bills are directly linked together. President Biden said it, Nancy Pelosi said it, Chuck Schumer said it.”
On Democrats prioritizing their far-left wish list:
“The agreement that should have been made from day one, when President Biden initially had agreed on a bipartisan deal on infrastructure and in less than an hour later, pulled the wool from under those Republican and Democrat Senators by agreeing with Pelosi and Schumer’s demand that it be tied directly to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that raises taxes. They should have said, ‘That bill has to be off the table. The two cannot be tied together if we’re going to do this.’ And they didn’t make that demand clearly because right behind the infrastructure bill, they brought this, and every Democrat Senator has acknowledged that the two are directly linked together. So you can’t talk about one without talking about the other because they’re linked. And so, that’s the problem. It’s horrible policy. It’s saddled debt that will add to inflation. It’s already out of control – what families are paying for at the pump at the grocery store. Good luck if you want to buy an appliance, you’re paying more, and you’re waiting six months.”
On the need for Governor Cuomo to release the data about nursing home deaths before he leaves office:
“Well Maria, it’s a long past due that he resigned. But, you know, they talk about sexual harassment problems that are very real. He continues to deny that. What he also did that they don’t talk about is he gave an order that led to the deaths of thousands of seniors in nursing homes in New York State. An order that shouldn’t have been given. It went against all the science, all the CDC guidelines, and then four other states picked it up and did the same thing and killed seniors and their states. Yet, Governor Cuomo has been covering up the data, [he] won’t release it, [he] talks about transparency all day long and then hides the data that these families had demanded. I’ve been talking to a lot of the families. Obviously, with Janice Dean, she’s been very out front and vocal. I spoke with her yesterday, but so many other families [are still] waiting for this data that he’s [been] hiding.
“It’s time to release it. Give these families some closure. And so, I called on him to release that data before he walks out the door. And if he doesn’t, I’ve called on current Lieutenant Governor, future Governor Hochul, to release that data on day one because she doesn’t want to be part of a coverup. I’m sure she’s going to want to clean house from Cuomo. One of the things to clean house on is this cover-up of the thousands of deaths. Why he won’t release the data to the public, I don’t know. But those families have been demanding answers, and they deserve answers. And so, I’m not going to stop fighting to get that information made public.”