Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., on Sunday argued voting “no” on a debt ceiling increase will force Democrats to pass the measure on their own and highlight to Americans a “spending spree” the nation cannot afford.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Toomey said Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., will have to lead his party to go it alone on the debt ceiling raise to pay for money the nation has already spent.
“What’s going to happen is after Republicans vote ‘no,’ Chuck Schumer will do what he could have done months ago, weeks ago, what he could do tomorrow — amend the budget resolution so Democrats can pass the debt ceiling by themselves and that’s what should happen,” Toomey said.
“They are in the midst of an absolutely unprecedented, very damaging spending spree on a scale that we have never seen and they want us to come along and authorize the borrowing to help pay for it, when we are totally opposed to what they’re doing,” Toomey argued.
“They don’t need a single Republican vote. Republicans can’t stop it. It’s not subject to a filibuster, and if they want to do this, they can go ahead and bring the attention to the American people to the increase in debt that we’re going to need to pay for this spending spree. That’s the reality. That’s the way it’s going to happen.”
According to Toomey, Democrats want to “dramatically increase the amount of money that will need to be borrowed because they want to engage in all this spending and they want the authority to borrow it now. I don’t agree with that spending.”
Toomey said he and other GOP senators would support a clean government funding bill separate from the debt ceiling legislation.
“I think Republicans will offer a clean continuing resolution that funds the government,” he said.
“The gist of your question about whether Republicans would support a clean continuation of funding, the answer is there would be a lot of Republican votes for that,” he asserted.
Toomey added that creating debt for tax cuts approved during the Trump administration was a different issue.
That measure, he said, “created the strongest economy of my life time.”
“That’s just an indisputable fact,” he said, ticking off “strong economic growth in 2019, record low unemployment rates in 2019, all-time record low for many subsets of Americans… and wage growth that was accelerating fastest for low income workers.”
“That kind of economic growth generates more tax revenue,” Toomey said. “We were seeing the complete success of the tax reform. It’s indisputable we had the best economy of my life time and now the Democrats want to undo the very tax regime that helped enable that tremendous economic growth.”
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