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    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    Lee, Cruz Challenge Old Guard Republicans on the Debt Ceiling

    Lee, Cruz Challenge Old Guard Republicans on the Debt Ceiling

    Sat, 05/25/2013 - 12:10pm | posted by Jason Pye
    While Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has become a tool for his Democratic colleagues to move the budget into conference committee, Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) continue to express there concerns that these negotiations will be used for a stealth debt ceiling increase.
    The issue at hand is that that a conference report could be passed by a majority of the chamber, bypassing a filibuster, as per Senate rules. Sneaking through a debt limit hike, as part of a budget agreement that only requires a majority, is objectionable to these members. And they’re right.
    During a speech from the floor on Thursday, Lee explained why he and several other fiscal conservatives in the Senate want assurances from leaders that a debt ceiling hike won’t be part of the conference report on the budget.
    “For sixty-one days, several of my colleagues and I have objected to the majority’s request for unanimous consent to circumvent regular order to go to conference with the House on the budget,” said Lee. “They want permission to skip a few steps in the process, and jump straight to the closed-door back-room meetings.”
    “There, senior negotiators of the House and Senate will be free to wait until a convenient, artificial deadline and ram through their compromise – un-amended, un-debated and mostly un-read,” he continued. “And with the country backed up against another economic ‘cliff’ crisis, we are concerned they will exploit that opportunity to sneak a debt-limit increase into the budget.”
    “We think that’s inappropriate,” he added.
    Lee noted that several of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle have told those who object to going into conference that this is the way Washington works. “We know this,” he said in response to this line. “That’s why we’re objecting. In case nobody has noticed, the way Washington works…stinks.”
    “We were not sent here to affirm ‘the way the Senate worked’ as Congress racked up trillions in debt, inflated a housing bubble, doled out favors to special interests, squeezed the middle class and trapped the poor in poverty,” Lee explained. “We were sent here to change all that. We are fully aware that “Washington” and the establishments of both parties don’t like what we’re doing – but as computer programmers say, “that’s a feature, not a bug.’”
    Lee noted that the Tea Party and Occupy movements, for all of their differences, have a “shared perception that our economy, our politics, and our society seem rigged.” He attributed this to the elites on Wall Street, K Street, and in Washington who play by a different set of rules than the rest of the country.
    “It’s because they are mostly right. This is our true inequality crisis: not between rich and poor, but between Washington and everyone else,” Lee told his colleagues. “The national debt, and its statutory limit, is a hidden part of this inequality crisis.”
    “After all, what is new debt but a tax increase on future Americans? On those who cannot yet vote. On those who have not yet been born. Raising the debt limit thus results in a form of taxation without representation,” he added. “That’s why the American people resent it.”
    Cruz also fired back at the critics who want to move to conference without any guarantee that a debt limit increase will not be included in any budget agreement. While McCain says a debt limit increase couldn’t be done in a conference report, Cruz explained that it has been done before — in 1987 and 1990 — and was attempted in 1995 and 2004, though those efforts were unsuccessful.
    Cruz focused on the 50-vote threshold to raise the debt ceiling, which again is the only point of contention in moving forward to conference on the budget.
    “We could go to conference right now today if the Democrats would simply say, ‘We won’t raise the debt ceiling with just using 50 votes. We will debate it on the floor with a 60-vote threshold and actually be forced to find some bipartisan agreement,’” Cruz explained. “But that’s not what the majority wants to do.”
    Cruz also directly challenged McCain on his assertion that only a minority of Republicans oppose raising the debt limit in a budget agreement.
    “[McCain] has repeatedly suggested on the floor of the Senate that it, in fact, it may be a small minority — that the overwhelming majority of Republicans, [McCain] said, stand with Harry Reid in wanting to be able to raise the debt ceiling on 50 votes,” Cruz noted. “Let me suggest to [McCain] that, in saying that, he is impugning all 45 Republicans in this body.”
    “But it has been suggested that those of us who are fighting to defend liberty, fighting to turn around the out of control spending and out of control debt in this country, fighting to defend the Constitution; it has been suggested that we are ‘wacko birds,’” he continued. “Well, if that is the case, I will suggest to my friend from Arizona, there may be more wacko birds in the Senate than is suspected.”
    Cruz encouraged McCain to circulate a statement among the Republican caucus in support of giving “Harry Reid and the Democrats the ability to raise the debt ceiling with 50 votes instead of 60.”
    “I believe he will find that his representation to this body that it is only a minority of Republicans that oppose that is not accurate,” he said.
    While Cruz and Lee are fighting for fiscal responsibility in Washington, this issue, as well as the focus on civil liberties during the filibuster in March, highlights the differences between old guard Republicans, who are willing to rollover whenever Reid asks, and the new guard, who wants to return some sense of sanity in Washington.


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    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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