Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, told Newsmax on Wednesday he sees so many loopholes in the debit limit deal reached by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and President Joe Biden that he will be voting against it.
"This bill is not what it's all cracked up to be," Cloud, a member of the House Appropriations Committee and conservative House Freedom Caucus, told "American Agenda." "Over the last two to three years, we've seen our government grow to the tune of about 40%, so the spending levels that will be put into effect with this bill basically enshrines that growth into the status quo of where we're going to go as a baseline going forward.
"And then you look at where the debt ceiling is going. We didn't even have the courage to put a number in there. We instead put a date that falls into a lame-duck session [of Congress] that comes after the next election so that the American people won't be able to weigh in to this and right before the next president takes office. You've got to wonder why we're going about that."
McCarthy has said the deal delivers several big victories for the GOP, but Cloud said that after looking at key point after key point, he doesn't see them.
"When you go down some of the talking points, there's just loopholes throughout [the deal] that bring into question whether there's those alleged wins are going to have enforceability to them," he said. "We didn't come up here to play the old-school, D.C. swamp games."
In April, the House passed the Limit Save Grow Act that called for spending cuts in the first year because, Cloud said, part of the game in Washington is passing a bill saying cuts will be made over 10 years, "and that 10 years never comes, and the spending saves never happen."
"A part of this deal, there's talk about [spending] caps over the next two years and then talks about six years," Cloud said. "They're saying it saves $2 trillion over six years, but a lot of that's in that [last] four years is really just up in the air. We don't know if it's going to happen. It never really does up here.
"You go line by line throughout the bill, what you find is a lot of the alleged wins just don't have the enforceability mechanisms there that I would need to be able to support a bill like this."
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