Thune on Fox News: President Biden Must Negotiate with Speaker McCarthy

Interview

"I guess what I would tell you, Neil, is that in the end, anybody that's in that room other than the speaker of the House and the president of the United States probably is somewhat extraneous to what needs to be done here.

This has to be a deal that's negotiated between Speaker McCarthy on behalf of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and the president, who ultimately would have to sign a bill into law.

The Senate's role, obviously, would come into play if and when there's a deal that would have to be voted on in the Senate. But until they reach agreement, I think for all intents and purposes, the Senate really is, you know, we're observers to this at the moment. We'll have a role at some point. But for now, it's got to be a two-way conversation between the speaker and the president.

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If you look at the next 10 budget years, every dollar we borrow, 50 cents of that is going to be used to pay interest alone. And if you look at the amount that we're paying for interest in 2010, we paid a little under $200 billion a year in interest on the debt. In 2022, we paid $475 billion just in interest on the debt. That's a 142 percent increase in that short amount of time.

This isn't sustainable. We have got to do something to address the debt. And what House Republicans and what Senate Republicans supporting them are saying is, look, this is a divided government. This requires negotiation. You want an increase in the debt limit, let's do something about the debt and incorporate some spending reforms and some budgetary restraint as part of that process.

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We're $31 trillion in debt and spending almost half a trillion a year on interest on payments on the debt. We've got to start drawing some lines here and start getting this situation under control, and that starts with these negotiations between the president and the speaker."

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