Alabama GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions said today Congress has waited so long to deal with the debt ceiling that it will now become weighed down under a mass of complex legislation to avoid a more serious fiscal crisis.
“It certainly needs to be done and why take a chance with something as important as our national economy,” Sessions said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “So therefore I think most of us are willing to accept a good deal less than we’d like to see as part of a beginning to alter our debt course in America.”
The ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee was asked whether he was disappointed that the House was having such difficulty passing a debt deal.
“Well, I hope they can get it passed, and I believe they should try to, and they’ll have to be some more compromises and work,” Sessions said. “But I have to admire the new members of the Congress — they were elected in record numbers last fall — and they didn’t come here to just do business as usual, they want to actually alter this debt course we are on.
“The reason we are having a fuss over the debt course is the debt — it’s the debt that is really endangering America — the debt ceiling is like the thermometer that says 104 degrees,” he said. “It tells you you’ve got a problem and we’ve hit it too quickly and we’ve gone up too much, too fast, and we’ve got to bring it under control.”
Sessions said he has been “a big critic” of Majority Leader Harry Reid for the Senate not “having a budget process.”
“We’ve had no real bill put forward [and] the president hasn’t spelled out anything yet in writing,” he said. “He talks these numbers — but when you read the details they’re not there.
“And they’ve avoided accountability, they’ve avoided having any real votes and that’s the mistake, I think, and it has put us in a position where at the last minute — as I predicted — we’ll have all kinds of complex legislation, and wheeling and dealing, in an attempt to avoid a crisis and we should have dealt with it weeks — months — ago.”
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