The Hill News

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made the following statement Wednesday regarding the President’s request to increase the debt limit and the importance of passing a Balanced Budget Amendment:

Yesterday morning, I came to the floor to announce my conclusion that, despite his repeated claims to the contrary, the President has no real intention of cutting spending or dealing with our deficits and debt. It had been my fervent hope that the President could be persuaded to view the upcoming debt limit vote as an opportunity to change direction, to cut spending and debt, and to preserve entitlement programs.

But those hopes evaporated when the President began to insist in recent weeks that he would only consider spending cuts later if Republicans agreed now to one of the biggest tax hikes in history. Republicans refused to be drawn into this legislative trap. And when Democrats proposed a smaller plan that they claimed, without any details, amount! ed to more than a trillion dollars in cuts, well, we refused to go along again -- because we knew that it didn’t.

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