Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., on Sunday blasted the progressive Democrat embrace of defund-the-police efforts, particularly during a “golden age of crime.”
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Barrasso said Republicans aim to do just the opposite.
“What do the Democrats want to do? They want to defund the police,” he said. “And what do Republicans want to do? We want to defend community across the country.”
According to Barrasso, the victims of crime and violence should have “a right to safety on the streets.”
“But this seems to be the golden age of crime in America,” he lamented. “Murders are up, shootings are up. So that's what we need to deal with. And the president of the United States has a speech, and what does he talk about? He talks about guns.”
But Barrasso didn’t just single out President Joe Biden.
“This is an administration that has surrounded itself with defund the police advocate,” he charged. “Also we see it in the attorney general's office and in the Cabinet.”
Barrasso also ripped Biden for his “whiplash” change of stance on an infrastructure bill, deriding the president as “like a weather vane going to whoever the loudest voice is at the time.”
“You can get whiplash by trying to follow Joe Biden on this,” Barrasso said. “First, he agrees with a bipartisan bill focused on real infrastructure, and within two hours he buckles to [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi [D-Calif.] and [Sen.] Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.] who say, not so fast — unless this is handcuffed to this massive tax and spending bill, we're not going to send it to the White House.”
He added: “Then you had outrage by the folks who were in the bipartisan group working with the president, and then what happens? Two days later he flip-flops again.”
Barrasso predicted it’ll be a “long hard slog” to get approval for raising taxes to fund the social infrastructure package.
“There are so many liberal programs in here, very expensive,” he said of the proposal. “The whole Green Bad Deal… I think [Biden] is going to have a hard time doing it, and it's not going to happen quickly.”
The senator added that Biden’s priorities are clear — and not what Americans want.
“To know somebody's values look at their budgets,” he said. “Joe Biden, very clearly, does not value our nation's security or our military because the budget that he has applied to those two is even less than the rate of inflation.
“And he has massive increases in his budget for the [Environmental Protection Agency], for human services. All of those sorts of things, but at the same time, China is really ramping up its spending on the military.”
Biden “is making us, America, much more vulnerable to enemies from within as well as from without,” Barrasso asserted.
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Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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