On Saturday, the Senate voted for final passage of the stop-gap funding bill to prevent a government shutdown. The upper chamber passed the continuing resolution by a 72-25 margin.
While U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Tuscaloosa), voted for the bill, U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville voted against the bill, arguing it will only make inflation worse.
Over the weekend, Tuberville explained why he voted against the spending bill during an appearance on WABC’s “The Larry Kudlow Show.”
“I didn’t go and run for this job to run our country into the ground,” Tuberville said. “And people in Alabama want us to quit spending … this CR is just the standard for us to just continue to spend at the current levels that our government and Congress has passed.
“But now the Democrats use it basically for a checkbook, and they put all these other things on there.”
Tuberville said inflation is actually worse in Alabama than the official numbers suggest.
“Inflation is much more than 8% or 9% here in Alabama, it is way out of control,” he said. “We continue to spend money… we continue to spend it, it’s going to be that much harder to get back it into balance, and right now it is way out of control.”
Tuberville is also concerned that a Democrat-controlled lame duck Congress is going to spend even more before the Republicans take over.
“No matter what happens in the election you’re going to see probably from about the 10th or 11th of November all the way up to Christmas and even the first of the year the Democrats are going to spend spend spend,” he said. “You’re going to see another reconciliation. You’ll see more spending. They don’t want people working, and that’s just the opposite of what we need to be doing.
“We have to get people back to work.”
The lawmaker believes the country is still headed in the wrong direction and that there will be dire consequences if that isn’t changed soon.
“This is the worse that I’ve ever seen it,” he said. “And if we don’t make an about face on this socialism charge, I don’t know if we can gain it back in the next two years even if we get control of the Senate and the House … I hate to see this country go like this.”
Tuberville also went further in a previous statement, calling the funding package “a reckless approach to governing.”
“A continuing resolution is meant to maintain government funding at its current level until Congress passes appropriation bills. But, in what has become standard practice this Congress, Democrats were set on using this legislation to spend as much unrelated money as possible, as quickly as possible,” he said. “This is a reckless approach to governing. Hastily spending billions of new dollars by attaching them to a continuing resolution is an irresponsible use of taxpayer funds.”
