During a July 26 interview with Margaret Brennan, the moderator of Face the Nation, on CBS News, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was sharply critical of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom he accused of “shoveling cash at the [coronavirus pandemic] problem and shutting America down.”
Cruz also accused Democrats of deliberately seeking to extend coronavirus lockdowns of businesses and schools so that President Trump suffers politically ahead of the presidential election:
We’re 100 days out from the presidential election — the only objective Democrats have is to defeat Donald Trump. And they’ve cynically decided [the] best way to defeat Donald Trump is shut down every business in America, shut down every school in America.
Cruz told Brennan that we are now faced with two simultaneous national crises. One is the global pandemic, which has taken the lives of over 600,000 people. Cruz said that “we need to do significantly more to fight the disease.” In addition to the pandemic itself, said Cruz, “we have an absolute economic catastrophe. We have over 44 million Americans [who] have lost their job, and we have got to get America back to work.”
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Cruz continued by saying that Pelosi’s objectives are focused on neither of those crises. He said that our objective as a nation should be helping Americans get back to work, noting, “They want to be able to provide for their family.”
Pelosi’s objectives — in contrast — are “shoveling cash at the problem and shutting America down.”
Cruz said that Pelosi and the Democrats are pushing to add an additional $600 a week of federal money to unemployment benefits when Brennan interrupted to say that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to take unemployment benefits down to 70 percent of prior wages.
The Texas senator continued:
Except, the problem is, for 68 percent of people receiving [unemployment benefits] right now, they are being paid more on unemployment than they made in their job. And I’ll tell you, I’ve spoken to small business owners all over the state of Texas who are trying to reopen and they’re calling their — their waiters and waitresses … they’re calling their busboys, and they won’t come back. And, of course, they won’t come back because the federal government is paying them, in some instances, twice as much money to stay home as…
Cruz obviously intended to say something along the lines of “they were making at their jobs,” but Brennan cut him off to ask him if he was open to a lesser amount.
Cruz said that instead of “just shoveling trillions out the door, we ought to be passing a recovery bill.”
He defined a recovery bill as legislation that would lift the taxes and the regulations that are harming small businesses so that people can go back to work.
As one example, Cruz said we could suspend the payroll tax, which would give a pay raise to everyone in America who’s working.
He emphasized that a true recovery bill would be a bill “that actually gets people back to work.”
Photo: AP Images
Warren Mass has served The New American since its launch in 1985 in several capacities, including marketing, editing, and writing. Since retiring from the staff several years ago, he has been a regular contributor to the magazine. Warren writes from Texas and can be reached at [email protected].
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