Newsmax host and former White House press secretary Sean Spicer warned Republicans that Democrats still aim to pass President Joe Biden's Build Back Better legislation despite Sen. Joe Manchin's opposition.
Manchin said Sunday he would not support the roughly $2 trillion social spending and climate legislation. Spicer, though, told journalist Sara Carter, "I still think there's a play to be had" for the senator and his party.
"The fight is not over," Spicer said Tuesday on Carter’s podcast. "We have a reprieve but at the end of the day, these guys are not giving up. They are going to continue to figure out how to break this up and get it through.
"So, they're going to go work with Manchin. They may not have had a great week, and they might be frenemies today, but at the end of the day, the bigger goal remains, and that is figure out how to break some of these things up."
Although polls indicate Republicans have a great opportunity to take control of Congress in next year’s midterms, the "Spicer & Co." co-host said Democrats will try to make the most of 2022.
"They have 11 months until they lose the House of Representatives officially," Spicer told Carter, "and until that time, they will do everything then can to break this up into morsels … big, expensive morsels … and get it passed."
Spicer, who recently wrote "Radical Nation" to explain how pervasive government is becoming, was asked what items in Build Back Better most worried him.
"The biggest ones are the ones that we don't know about, when you have something that's over 1,700 pages long there’s stuff that’s in it," he told Carter.
"There's a payoff to the media that they don't want to talk about, meaning they're subsidizing local media because they're failing. So there's a payoff to the media. There's a $1.5 billion payoff to trial lawyers so that they get paid on the front end for suing people.
"Then you've got the climate change stuff, 88,000 [additional] IRS agents. All of these things — it's Big Government baked in."
He also mentioned a provision in the bill for "reclaiming" unused green cards dating back to 1992 and giving approximately 400,000 people residency in the U.S.
Spicer also warned about Democrats' intent to find "nontraditional" judicial nominees who seek to legislate from the bench.
"Watch the judicial nominees," Spicer told Carter. "These people are reaching out; they're trying to do this diversity thing where they’re finding people who sat in a park bench to be a federal judge because they’re woke."
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