Hot Air Blog
The conservative fiscal hawk from the Keystone State, Pat Toomey, appears on Hugh Hewitt’s show tonight, and let no wiggle room about the standoff that’s coming. For those of you on the right who just know the Republicans are going to cave yet again when faced with the media firestorm and blame game over defaulting on our obligation, Senator Toomey, along with Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul and many other voices from both Houses of Congress, seem to be galvanizing very quickly for the standoff that is coming.
Here’s just a bit of what Senator Toomey said:
HH: So looking at that, are you willing to go through, as Senator Paul said on the program last week, before Senator McConnell came on, Senator Paul was on. He said look, I’ll go through the debt ceiling. In fact, he won’t vote for a debt ceiling without a balanced budget amendment. I don’t think many people will agree with that position, but are you willing to see it go through in order to get real reform?
PT: Well, I was on Morning Joe a couple of days ago, Hugh, and I made the point very clearly, if we go past the deadline on debt ceiling, it means some bills don’t get paid for a while? That is disruptive, that is not optimal, I certainly hope we can avoid it. But I would rather pay that price, if that’s the price we have to pay to start to get us on a sustainable fiscal path, I’d rather pay that price now than the kind of fiscal and financial and monetary collapse that awaits us if we continue with this Obama spending policy. So the answer is I’m not voting for a debt ceiling increase unless we get some meaningful reforms that start to put us on a sustainable path.
HH: Will you use the parliamentary tactics available to you to force that as well?
PT: If the reforms are not adequate, I will.
Message to Congressional Republicans. The more members take a public hard line on the debt ceiling debate, drawing a very clearly line in the sand that they are willing to take us over the edge barring significant reforms to entitlements, the better. And the sooner, the better.