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Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, slammed Democrats for pushing their spending bill and “lying” to Americans as a marathon voting session on the party’s social spending and taxation bill continued.
Speaking during an exclusive interview with “Sunday Mornings Futures,” Cruz argued that the bill will “kill manufacturing jobs” and “hammer small businesses” as well as “drive up gas prices.”
On Saturday night, the Senate began what is commonly known as a “vote-a-rama” on Democrats’ social spending and taxation bill, more than 11 hours after it first came in for a rare weekend session.
A vote-a-rama is the final step before final passage in the Senate’s budget reconciliation process. Democrats are using that process to pass the bill along party lines, avoiding the 60-vote filibuster threshold.
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The marathon session includes votes on dozens of amendments to the bill, proposed mainly by Republicans.
Cruz told host Maria Bartiromo that senators had been up all night and were still in the middle of voting when he joined her on the program.
“The Democrats to are on the verge of ramming through what really is a terrible bill,” he warned.
Republicans’ first tranche of amendments included provisions on energy, climate, the IRS, and more. Democrats appear prepared to vote down those Republican amendments, even if they support them, to prevent Republicans from injecting poison pills into the legislation.
The social spending bill currently includes more than $400 billion in spending and more than $700 billion in taxes.
The vote-a-rama caps more than a year of reconciliation negotiations by Democrats, who initially tried to advance President Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill worth more than $3 trillion last year. The new version of the bill, called the “Inflation Reduction Act,” is significantly scaled back from that.
Sen. Ted Cruz slams Democrats’ social spending and taxation bill and accuses the party of lying to Americans based on their voting records. (Reuters)
The Texas senator argued that the bill “has billions in new taxes on U.S. oil and gas production.”
“We introduced amendments trying to take those new taxes out so all the Democrats say they’re worried and want to lower gas prices, they all just voted to raise gas taxes and to raise your price at the pump,” he told Bartiromo.
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The Texas senator also accused Democrats, including Sens. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., and Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., of “lying” about wanting gas prices to be lower for Americans because “they stood up and voted to raise the gas taxes, stick it to the producers, make our consumers pay more at the pump.”
“That’s the end result they want, and their voting record proves it,” he argued.
Cruz also noted that the bill will double the size of the IRS.
“Those IRS agents are designed to come after you,” Cruz argued. “They’re not designed to come after the billionaires and the big corporations, they’re designed to come after small businesses and working families across this country.”
“The Democrats are making the IRS bigger than the Pentagon plus the Department of State plus the FBI plus the Border Patrol combined,” he continued. “This is a massive power grab.”
The senator then called out Democrats for voting against “common sense amendments.”
“I introduced an amendment to say don’t create 87,000 new IRS agents, every Democrat voted no,” he said.
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“I just introduced an amendment to say that Joe Biden and the federal government should not be able to sell oil from our strategic petroleum reserve to the Chinese communists. Biden’s sold over 2 million barrels of oil to the Chinese communists. Every Democrat but four voted no.”
“They are bound and determined to try and ram this terrible bill through,” he stressed.
Fox News’ Tyler Olson contributed to this report.
