(KCPW News) Republican Utah Senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee rejected the debt ceiling package that passed the Senate today and was swiftly signed into law by President Obama. Hatch says conservative lawmakers won some achievements in the final plan, but he wouldn’t back anything that didn’t include a balanced budget amendment.
“I don’t think it sufficiently provides us with a solution to the debt crisis that the markets are really demanding, so in my view, the only solution to this spending crisis is what we refer to as Cut, Cap and Balance,” he told reporters.
Hatch claims this vote was different than his past support of raising the debt ceiling because of the size of the debt, saying the country is in “dire problems.”
Senator Lee, a freshman Tea Party Republican, also refused to raise the debt ceiling without a balanced budget amendment. He addressed his reason for rejecting the bill on the Senate floor.
“It doesn’t contain any permanent, binding, structural spending reform mechanism of the sort that will be necessary to make sure that we get out of this problem, to make sure that we end the problem that we’ve created through Congress’s reckless pattern of perpetual deficit spending,” said Lee.
In the House, Blue Dog Democrat Jim Matheson was the only Utah lawmaker to support the final debt ceiling package. In a statement, he said the bill includes true spending cuts and caps discretionary spending for the next ten years, which he supports.
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