A new Department of Justice judgment fund totaling $1.776 billion was created as part of a settlement from President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the 2019 leak of his tax returns. Republican senators reacted with strong criticism after the fund was announced. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche met with Republican senators to discuss the fund, and the meeting was described as extremely contentious. Several senators, including Bill Cassidy, Thom Tillis, John Cornyn, and Rand Paul, expressed anger about the fund. The criticism centered on the impact on legislative priorities and the risk of losing enough votes to pass reconciliation and related border funding measures.
"There were fireworks at an epic level. And I gotta say, it was one of the roughest meetings that I've seen in my entire time in the Senate. There were a lot of Republican senators who were just pissed. Cruz went on to cite Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) as being quite unhappy with the president over this new fund."
"We have a 53-47 majority, Cruz stressed. If you lose four senators, you're below 50, and you can't get anything done. That is going to be a complicating factor for the rest of the year. He continued: Fiery does not begin to cut it. The senators I mentioned, they were pissed, but almost every Republican senator was there, so my guess is that there were probably 45 senators in the room. At least half of them were blasting the Attorney General."
"Basically, the message they said is, You know what, we were gonna pass reconciliation this week, we were gonna fund all of ICE, all of CBP, all of Border Patrol, and then you announced this judgement fund,' and right now, here's the challenge. If [Majority Leader] John Thune [R-SD] had put reconciliation on the floor tonight, the Democrats would have put a bunch of amendments on the floor to unwind the judgment fund, then we would have lost everybody. We wouldn't have lost it close. It wouldn't have been 51-49."
Read at www.mediaite.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]