'It's A Fraud': Merkley Torches GOP Reconciliation, Accuses Them Of Being 'Deliberately Deceptive'

yesterday

During a Senate Democrats press briefing on Thursday, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) spoke about the Republicans' budget reconciliation.

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00:00If Republicans are able to succeed at using current policy baseline in this bill for reconciliation,

00:07what kind of a precedent would that set and what might future majorities be able to do?

00:10Look, first I'm going to call on Jeff, our expert on this, but first let me say this.

00:14The American people are not interested in the arcane aspects of reconciliation policy.

00:19They want to know how it affects them.

00:22What they're doing is a $37 trillion increase in the deficit.

00:28And why is it done? So they can cut taxes on billionaires.

00:34So that's the bottom line here, what it's doing.

00:37And not just what it's doing to America today,

00:40what it's doing to our children and our grandchildren in terms of this enormous, enormous debt

00:46that is going to be on their shoulders.

00:48And we all know sooner or later you pay the price for debt,

00:52and it will happen sooner than people think with the enormity of what they're doing.

00:58Sure. Absolutely.

01:00I want to emphasize again that one of the pillars in 1974,

01:05so now over half a century, has been collectively we need to have integrity

01:11in the estimate of what any tax provision or policy provision would inflict in terms of cost or revenue.

01:18And thus we will depend on CBO.

01:21That's extremely important.

01:24Well, you know, we'll just create phony numbers to create a phony estimate

01:28and say all of these tax provisions that will increase and create $37 trillion of debt

01:33already existed far into the future, but they don't exist far in the future.

01:36That's why it's a fraud. That's why it's phony.

01:40That's why it's a deliberate deception to pretend to the American people

01:43they're not adding massively to the debt.

01:45So they thought, well, maybe we'll just put a clause into the budget resolution

01:50that says we'll use this fraudulent system,

01:53and then it became so clear that it was so out of sync with our precedents

01:58that they even withdrew it.

02:00Now, essentially, this conversation about integrity goes forward not on the budget resolution,

02:06but on the reconciliation bill.

02:09So we'd be well prepared to say it was fraud on the budget resolution.

02:13It's also fraud on the reconciliation bill.

02:18Can I just add a bit of context here?

02:21You know, what I'm hearing from people in Connecticut is not reconciliation.

02:26It's not CBO. It's prices of gasoline and groceries.

02:32It's what will happen to my children's education.

02:36So I think that Senator Schumer and Senator Wyden make exactly the right point.

02:42I'm going to reach American people at their pocketbooks, in their everyday lives,

02:48not with the kind of inside-the-Beltway stuff that most people are focusing on here.

02:54Thanks, everybody.

'It's A Fraud': Merkley Torches GOP Reconciliation, Accuses Them Of Being 'Deliberately Deceptive'

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