Raskin Torches House Republicans Holding Debt Ceiling Hostage: ‘They Raised the Debt Limit Three Times Under Donald Trump!’

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) railed against Republicans’ “silly little symbolic messaging” bill on the House floor on Tuesday while accusing his GOP colleagues of being hypocritical when it comes to the nation’s debt limit.

If implemented, the Republican-backed REIN Act will require the Office of Management and Budget to examine the inflationary impact of executive orders that are projected to have a budgetary effect of at least $1 billion.

The Maryland Democrat rattled off several favorable prevailing economic statistics under President Joe Biden, and also hit Republicans for their refusal to raise the debt ceiling without exacting spending cuts from the White House.

The debt limit, which has been raised several times by Congress as a matter of routine, was reached in January. The Treasury Department is undertaking “extraordinary measures” to ensure the U.S. does not default on its debt. Those measures are set to exhaust this summer when the U.S. will default for the first time if Congress does not raise the limit.

Raskin slammed Republicans over the REIN Act and their insistence on cuts as a precondition for raising the ceiling, even as they did so regularly under former President Donald Trump:

We’ve created 12 million jobs in America. How many million jobs did they wanna erase over there in their desperate, sudden pursuit of inflation? You know, they raised the debt limit three times under Donald Trump!

Now they walk about the debt limit all the time. They raised it three times! And they contributed under Donald Trump 25% of all the debt in the United States from George Washington to Joe Biden! Twenty-five percent of the debt under one president: Donald Trump. And they did that, and now they dare come to talk to us about inflation and the bill they managed advance is one to have some people passing more paperwork around. Come on, give me a break. Give us something better than the “running on empty” initiative with no new ideas at all.

Watch above via C-SPAN.

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