Today, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) joined Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends to discuss how Democrats’ $1.8 trillion spending bill will wreak havoc on families and small businesses while doing nothing to solve the problems hurting the American people. Whip Scalise emphasized that the omnibus spending bill will cause inflation to skyrocket because Democrats are doubling down on their reckless spending at a time when the federal government should be pursuing a fiscally responsible agenda. Additionally, Whip Scalise pointed out that Democrats’ spending bill does nothing to help secure America’s border, while sending money to foreign countries to help them protect their borders.
Highlights from the interview:
On President Biden’s border crisis:
“Look, this is something that President Biden created. We’ve been talking about this, and y’all have as well, for over a year now. This has gotten worse and worse. It’s not gotten better. The administration completely ignores it. They are misleading the public saying the border is secure – everybody knows it’s not. And it’s communities all across the border that are getting ravaged, but now it’s communities all across America.
“And again, you’ve covered the fentanyl deaths, which is another side of the open border story where you have got over 100,000 young people die last year. And President Biden doesn’t care about that because he knows the solution is closing the border, and he doesn’t want to. This is going to be a huge fight in the new Republican Congress.
“But this is something that could be and should be addressed in the government funding bill, and it’s not. In fact, this omnibus that’s coming up today actually makes it harder to secure our border. No new funding for our border patrol agents, but they actually give money to foreign countries to secure their border, and other parts of the world. This is insanity.”
On the omnibus spending bill:
“We’ve whipped against [the omnibus spending bill]. We’re reducing that number [of votes for the bill] but you know, if you look at the last [continuing resolution] just a few weeks ago, similar kind of number.
“But again, this bill is not addressing the real problems of the country. It’s making them worse. They’re increasing spending in parts of the budget they need to be decreasing. We’ve seen massive trillions of dollars of increased spending in Washington that have driven inflation. The inflation is what is crushing hardworking families right now during Christmas. That’s what we should be trying to turn around, not make worse with increased spending, which this bill does.
“[The spending bill] is expected to come [to the House Floor] this morning. We’ve been told somewhere around eleven o’clock [or] noon. But, you know, again, it’s only going to make matters worse for people that are struggling with high cost of everything – when you go to the grocery store, the gas station. This is going to make it worse for families.”
On Republican Senators voting for the spending bill:
“There’s a lot of talk about well, you know, this is the best deal they could get, and what I say is, help is on the way. In literally two weeks there will be a Republican House and the debate is going to be a lot different. The starting point for bills will be so much different in terms of what we’ll be sending over.
“We’re actually going to pass a border security package, we’re going to pass an energy security package, we’re going to be passing bills to confront the problems the country is facing instead of what you’ve seen from Speaker Pelosi and the far left, which is making matters worse. So this isn’t the time to be cutting long term deals. Hold on for a few more weeks and help is on the way. Unfortunately, that’s not been received, and that’s been a big frustration.”
On additional funding to Ukraine:
“There’s been a lot of talk about additional scrutiny on money that’s being spent everywhere, not just in Ukraine, but in every government agency. I mean, there’s trillions of dollars that have gone out the door. A lot of this money that’s going out under COVID relief, for example. Tens of billions of dollars we already know that’s fraudulent, payments going to people that are here illegally, payments going to people in other countries – we’re going to be investigating that.
“Why don’t we actually be stewards for the taxpayer money, instead of every time that somebody sees a problem, just stole trillions of dollars of money out that’s borrowed?”