Ron Johnson calls out debt ceiling dilemma as ‘phony crisis’ easily solved by House bill
Julia Johnson
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EXCLUSIVE — Ahead of President Joe Biden’s meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) amid the looming June deadline to raise the debt ceiling, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) slammed the dilemma as a “phony crisis.”
“If you had a treasury secretary with even an ounce of integrity and responsibility, that treasury secretary would say, regardless of what happens in Congress, we’re going to prioritize the money coming in, and we’re going to service our debt. We’re going to make sure we take care of Social Security. We’re going to take care of the top priorities. We have more than enough revenue coming in to do that,” Johnson said in an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner.
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The senator said he does not expect the United States to default on its debt, explaining that the “easiest way to avert this crisis at this point in time” is to “pass the House bill [and] move on.”
According to Johnson, the House Republicans’ debt ceiling increase is “actually quite modest in terms of what they asked in return.”
“They wanted a whole lot more,” he added.
“There’s some good, very good aspects to what the House bill passed. We should pass that in the Senate, and President Biden ought to sign it,” he said.
Biden’s administration has signaled an unwillingness to negotiate on the debt ceiling, despite hosting the Tuesday meeting with McCarthy and other lawmakers.
“Look, there shouldn’t be negotiations on the debt limit,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday. “This is something that they should get to regular order and get to work on. We should not have House Republicans manufacturing a crisis on something that has been done 78 times since 1960.”
Last week, the president also slammed the predicament as “a manufactured crisis … driven by the MAGA Republicans in the Congress.”
However, Republicans have used the debt ceiling fight to call attention to the nation’s increasing debts. House Republicans are further asking for spending cuts to address the level of debt being assumed by the government in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.
“They continue to spend like there’s no tomorrow and continue to mortgage our kids’ future. And there just aren’t very many people like myself that are trying to sound the alarm,” Johnson said.
https://twitter.com/SenRonJohnson/status/1654951085121978369?s=20
“We’re printing all this money. We rely on the fact that we’re the world’s reserve currency. Well, that’s changing,” Johnson explained.
“We see Saudi Arabia do deals with China and Brazil, and, all of a sudden, oil is not going to be traded in strictly U.S. petrodollars. They’re going to start using different currencies,” he warned.
Then, he said, “the U.S. government is going to have to be borrowing at world market interest rates.”
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Asked if he thought Biden would sign the House’s debt ceiling increase passed by the Republicans, the senator said, “I hope so.”
The U.S. has until June 1 to pass an increase to the debt ceiling, a deadline given by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. The secretary claimed that without raising the debt ceiling, “we will be unable to continue to satisfy all of the government’s obligations” potentially by that date.