Senate Republicans are standing behind the House-passed debt limit bill, which means House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will "arrive in a position of negotiating power" when he meets with President Joe Biden this week, Sen. Mike Lee said Sunday.
"We’ve got not only the Republican conference in the Senate backing what the Republicans in the House passed the week before last, but we’ve also got a solid bloc of Republicans," the Utah Republican told Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures." "[We have] more than enough to block any sort of so-called ‘clean’ debt ceiling bill from going forward, anything that raises the debt ceiling without substantive spending and budgetary reforms."
Lee told show host Maria Bartiromo that 43 Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have signed a letter opposing a clean debt ceiling increase, and that two Republicans supported the letter but "for strategic reasons" opted not to sign it.
Those numbers are enough to block the Democrats' legislation on the debt ceiling, he added.
"Whenever you’ve got 41 senators who are unwilling to bring debate to a close on any legislation, it cannot pass," Lee said. "We’ve now got more than enough to stop exactly the kind of legislation that Joe Biden wants."
The legislation passed in the GOP-led House on April 24 allows the national debt ceiling to be raised but calls for stops on future federal spending, including cuts to specific programs.
Biden and Democrats say they are open to negotiations but insist the debt ceiling be treated separately from the budget.
Lee also said Sunday that it is "essential that the REINS Act, legislation that reins in overreach from the executive branch, remains in the debt limit bill.
"It puts Congress back in charge of making law," said Lee. "For decades, you've had Congress outsourcing authority to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. Those bureaucrats have in turn adopted major rules, massive regulations that have hundreds of billions of dollars of economic impact on the American economy, costing hard-working Americans more for everything they buy. And all of this comes about as a result of things that Congress never gets to weigh in on."
He said he doesn't know what the timing will be on the bill, but "we should act on it very quickly…I would love it if we got it done this week."
But still, the bill needs to include reforms like the REINS Act "because this will bring about exactly the kind of change we need in order to crawl out of this massive, burdensome debt that we're facing."
The House passed REINS as part of its package, "showing that they're willing to attack this not only from the spending side, or but also from the economic growth side."
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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