House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden reportedly reached bipartisan agreement on a new debt ceiling bill this week, but Republicans apparently aren’t too pleased with it – something the “Morning Joe” hosts called out as “hypocrisy squared” on Wednesday morning.
The new bill, which is set to face a vote on Wednesday, needs to pass the Democrat-controlled Senate before the June 5 deadline set by the Treasury Department, or the country risks default. On Tuesday though, the Freedom Caucus minced no words about their feelings on the bill, saying “we will do everything in our power to stop it and end it now.”
In discussing that opposition on Wednesday morning, host Joe Scarborough was just kind of flabbergasted, considering how Republicans handled the debt crisis while Trump was in office.
“They not only raised the debt ceiling, Republicans under Trump in 2017, 2018 and 2019, and they not only did it without an actual debt limit, they kept it open ended so they could say ‘Hey Don, spend as much money as you would like,’ which is unusual,” Scarborough yelled. “They didn’t even put a limit on it because they wanted to spend so much money! It’s incredible. Three times! Three times, even as the national debt soared to record levels.”
Getting into more specifics of how the debt issue was handled at the time, Scarborough homed in on the “hypocrisy” of it all.
“They said not only are we going to raise the debt ceiling — to just like, where there’s actually no ceiling — and not only are we not going to attach cuts to it, but we Republicans who are running this place, we’re going to attach billion dollar spending bills to the debt ceiling increase,” he said.
“I mean, the hypocrisy here, I mean it’s just — there has to be, I don’t know, super-duper-califragilistic hypocrisy,” he continued. “It’s hypocrisy squared here for these Republicans who suddenly are so shocked and stunned that we’re actually having to pay for all this spending and tax cuts that they loaded onto the budget back from 2017 through 2021.”
As the discussion continued, host Mika Brzezinski eventually summed her thoughts on the GOP up in two sentences.
“They’re counting on people not remembering, being too busy and not holding them accountable,” she said. “And they just take a position that serves them at the moment.”
You can watch the full “Morning Joe” discussion in the video above.
