WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks on the Senate floor regarding the debt ceiling:
“In just a few days, our colleagues will start ramming through yet another reckless taxing and spending spree. Trillions more in inflationary spending when families just want good jobs and stable prices.
“But there’s something funny happening.
“Even as Democrats crow about how all this spending is so good and so needed, they’re petrified to vote for the credit limit increase that would make it possible!
“Democrats are about to tell Republicans to go take a hike and start teeing up trillions more dollars in borrowing and spending without a single Republican vote.
“But at the same time they’re extolling the virtues of their latest socialist shopping list, they are afraid to up the limit on their credit card!
“They want Republicans to give them political cover for the partisan debt bomb that they’ll go right on to detonate with zero input from us.
“My colleagues are so mixed-up on this, it’s almost comical.
“The sums that we borrowed and spent through 2020, through the last Administration, through the actual economic emergency, were largely covered by the previous debt suspension that just expired.
“Democrats want a new debt limit increase for the new borrowing and new spending that they have willfully piled up since they took power. About two trillion back in March. Trillions more sometime soon.
“They want to unleash another reckless taxing and spending spree with zero Republican inputs… oh, but when the bill comes, they say it’s time to split the check!
“Initiating another budget reconciliation process in a 50-50 Senate is as willfully partisan, as go-it-alone, as it gets.
“Especially in a Senate that keeps proving we can do bipartisan work.
“If our colleagues want to ram through yet another reckless taxing and spending spree without our input, if they want all this spending and debt to be their signature legacy, they should leap at the chance to own every bit of it.
“Let me make something perfectly clear: if they don’t need or want our input, they won’t get our help. They won’t get our help with the debt limit increase that these reckless plans will require.
“I could not be more clear. They have the ability. They control the White House, they control the House, they control the Senate. They can raise the debt ceiling, and if it’s raised, they will do it.”