Sen. Mike Lee says America’s debt burden will doom the country, unless we quickly change course.
“We can still depart from our current course,” the Utah senator told The Daily Caller Thursday during an exclusive “Newsmakers” interview from his Washington Senate office.
The national debt is now rapidly approaching $21 trillion.
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“We are playing with fire. And in the long run, we are going to cause a lot of problems and we will eventually doom ourselves economically and otherwise if we follow the current pattern and fail to reform it.”
After Congress voted in early February to raise the government’s budget caps by approximately $300 billion and suspended the debt ceiling, Lee ripped Republican lawmakers for abandoning “limited government conservatives.”
That move, Lee said, was “a reversal from the promises that have been made on the campaign trail on countless occasions by countless Republicans running for federal office. This is a concern to me.”
Are Republican leaders fiscal conservatives?
“You’ll have to ask them what they think,” Lee replied. The budget deal “cannot be described in any universe as a conservative measure, and that’s why I voted against it.”
“Particularly troubling is the fact that not only was it not conservative, but it was presented to us as a binary choice within hours of a government shutdown, with no opportunity to improve it. So we were told, you either vote for this and all that goes along with it, all of the defects in it, all of the hidden easter eggs in there. In this six- or seven-hundred page bill. Or you vote against it and be accused of causing a government shutdown.”
“This is wrong,” Lee said. “This is government at its worst.”