Rep. Brian Mast, after speaking with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy over the debt ceiling deal reached with President Joe Biden, said there are still many questions to consider before a vote is reached, including if the compromises were worth making rather than defaulting.
"Is stopping hiring more IRS workers for one year versus an eternity worth it?" the Florida Republican said on Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures." "Is capping spending worth it to not default? This is a pretty big one, and I didn't hear you mention it on your open, having the administrative pay-go basically where the administration, if they wanted to have one new dollar in spending, they would have to cut one dollar in spending from somewhere else. Is that worth not defaulting?"
The deal also allows the Senate to continue to refuse to take up the House bill that has already been sent to them, said Mast, adding that the Senate is "derelict" for not having taken up that bill already.
"At least a month ago we passed a bill, sent it to the Senate, and said, hey, if you want to the avoid defaulting on the department, raise the debt limit, here it is," he said. "They didn't debate it, they didn't take it up, they didn't say these are the things we disagree with, they didn't try to get it through cloture, they didn't do a thing with it."
And the Senate's failure, he said, is "a disgrace to the body as a whole. They should be taking that up."
Meanwhile, the deal is already being highly discussed, but "nobody should be saying a word about it until they actually put pen to paper," said Mast.
"We're in a situation already where you have some members on the GOP that have come out and said no matter what, I'm not voting to the raise the limit, at least one or two said no matter what, they're not voting to raise the debt limit," said Mast.
But there are "probably at least 8-10 other members on Twitter saying 'hey, the deal as it stands, I would be a no," he continued. "You would be much better off to have everybody waiting for the details of the bill, debating it behind closed doors, and then going out there and giving an honest opinion. Instead, you're getting people trapped in the positions they're not going to be able to back off from, and I think that's dangerous."
Meanwhile, the deal calls for increases in spending for the Department of Defense and veterans, coming after the administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs "flat-out lied to the American people about what we sent to the Senate a month, ago saying that it was going to the cut veterans' benefits," said Mast. "They literally lied to the American people. The secretary of the VA lied to the American people, to their face, to veterans, and you see those things in there, I think, in response to that."
Mast, a U.S. Army veteran who lost his legs in Afghanistan while he was a bomb disposal expert, also on Sunday commented on the Memorial Day holiday, and told the program that he will be thinking about people who were close to him in the service, as well as the Gold Star families.
"There's a lot to think about on Memorial Day that that makes you proud for our country that we have people that will sacrifice for this place that they believe in," he said. "It makes you proud that they have families that will continue to live [through] the legacy of the person that they lost…the day makes me proud. It makes me sad and it makes me proud."