Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on Sunday accused President Joe Biden of "scaremongering" the United States over the national debt and said he's willing to "tank the economy" rather than negotiate with the Republicans on how to solve the issue.
"It really is unfortunate to see how Joe Biden is approaching this job," Cruz told "Fox News Sunday." "It's all politics all the time, and he consistently goes to the hard left. He's off in Hiroshima right now, in Japan. He should be in Washington, D.C. He should be sitting down and working out a deal, working out a compromise."
Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy spoke by phone Sunday while the president was returning to Washington from last week's G-7 summit in Japan. The speaker called the talk "productive" and said he and Biden will meet to discuss the national debt limit Monday.
Cruz spoke out against Biden hours after the president said he was "blameless if the United States defaults on its debt. He said Biden should have remained at home rather than heading to Japan to address the leaders of the other G-7 nations.
"He could take default off the table," he said. "Joe Biden doesn't want to take default off the table. Why? Because he wants to scaremonger. He wants to scare people into saying, 'Look at this bad thing that I, Joe Biden, am threatening is going to happen.'"
Biden also said Sunday that he can increase the national debt ceiling by invoking the 14th Amendment, but Cruz called that "legally frivolous."
"Someone else who agreed with that was Barack Obama," said Cruz. "The left tried to convince Obama to do this and Obama said, 'No, you can't do this under the Constitution.'"
Meanwhile, Cruz was asked about votes that occurred multiple times to raise the debt ceiling while former President Donald Trump was in office, but he said that was different because now, the national debt's magnitude is "massive."
"During Donald Trump's presidency, during COVID, Republicans and Democrats in a bipartisan way passed emergency COVID relief that was very expensive," said Cruz. "What happened subsequently is you had Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi do a complete takeover of the federal government and they went on a spending binge."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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