Republicans and Americans were "fleeced" with the bill to suspend the nation's $31.4 trillion debt ceiling, Rep. Nancy Mace, one of the 71 Republicans voting against the measure, said on Newsmax on Thursday.
"Democrats were walking out of the chamber last night bragging about how Republicans got rolled," the South Carolina Republican said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America," adding that the bill set "no limit or no cap to the debt ceiling in this bill, but it also puts into law record-high spending set during the COVID emergency."
This means that the "record-high level of spending" has been "set into law as the baseline for all future government spending," Mace said. "We expanded the welfare state. We're going to put more people on government welfare because of this bill."
The Republican-controlled House Wednesday voted 314-117 to send the legislation, reached as a compromise between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, to the Senate.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen gave a deadline of Monday that she said must be reached to avoid a government default. Her initial deadline would have been on Thursday.
"I'm not going to spoon-feed lies to the American people about what this bill does and doesn't do," Mace said Thursday. "The supporters of the bill were bragging that this cut $2.1 trillion of the deficit over the next 10 years. This was a two-year bill, not a 10-year bill. The Congressional Budget Office said it was only $1.5 trillion in saving to the deficit."
However, Mace said, "we're going to add $17.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years," with $4 trillion in the next two years.
"So when you talk about the amounts of money that were not cut, it's untenable," she said. "The vast majority of people in this country, whether they're Republican, Democrat, or independent, wanted to see real spending cuts in order to raise the debt ceiling. That bill did not do that at all."
Mace said that she has been told that Republicans have to "hope and pray" that their party stays in power in 2024 to keep cuts coming, but that wasn't what she wanted to hear.
"[This is] why it's so important if we're going to make cuts that we put it in writing, we put it in a bill, and we sign it into law," said Mace. "I can't remember the last time Congress made a promise that it could keep for the next 10 years. We don't know who is going to be in the majority in '24-'25. We don't know who's going be president. We don't know if we will have control of the Senate or not."
The Senate, meanwhile, "can just dump it. They can just set it on fire, flush it down the toilet, and do whatever they want. There's nothing in writing here that does what the American people were told it does with regard to savings and cuts. It's just ridiculous."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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