Following a move by House leadership that sent members home until Tuesday of next week, Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) gave a breakdown of the spending fight from Washington, DC.
Stating his reasons for not supporting yesterday’s procedural vote on the appropriations bill for the Department of Defense, Rep. Crane said, “The status quo, the swampiness in this town, is so ingrained that if you don’t forcibly stop it, it will continue.”
As our country faces a financial crisis, Rep. Crane reiterated his position that passing any appropriations bills without first agreeing on a top line spending number for FY24 is foolish.
“Just this week, we hit $33 trillion in national debt. We have at least a $2 trillion deficit every single year in perpetuity going forward. And you could argue it’s $3 trillion a year because of the money we have to spend on interest…”
“The other reason I didn’t vote for that bill was because of the money still going to Ukraine in the DOD [appropriations] bill–it was about $300 million […] People in my district, people all over the country are so tired of funding other, never ending wars while we don’t have a southern border, our own infrastructure is falling apart, and we continue to spend and spend and spend money that we don’t have.”
On the road ahead:
“There is a little bit of hope–yesterday afternoon, after shutting everything down, about twenty of us got in a room that were conservatives and moderates, and we’re now working on the appropriations bills as we should have been doing for months and months and months.”
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