Sen. Mike Lee, who voted against passing the House bill suspending the debt ceiling until 2025, said Sunday he is "still not persuaded" that the bill will do what it says it will do to control deficit spending.
"The process has failed time and time again," the Utah Republican said on Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures." "Democrats and Republicans alike have refused to engage in actual compromise and instead decided to fund everything or as much of everything as they possibly can without economizing. Nobody in the world gets to do this."
So instead, both sides agree to fund each other's priorities, resulting in the nation accumulating $32 trillion in debt, and now, with the bill that's been passed, "they're going to perpetuate that problem and add about $4 trillion to the debt over the next year and a half," said Lee. "It could be more than that."
Further, the bill "fails to accomplish any of the major objectives that they claim it accomplishes," said the senator.
"Significantly, more Democrats voted for it in the House than Republicans, and more Democrats voted for it in the Senate than Republicans," said Lee. "They played Republicans here, and they're still claiming victory. This is not a victory, this is capitulation."
And as a result, the Senate got to vote on a "different bill entirely" than the House's initial "fantastic bill," said Lee.
The new bill, though, does not include the REINS Act, which requires Congress to enact spending measures, which would make a "major difference for our economy," said Lee.
But the new bill sent by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden was "one that nobody had seen," and less than 72 hours later, the House passed it, with the Senate passing it a day later, Lee said.
"It had a regulatory pay-as-you-go measure," said Lee. "The regulatory pay-as-you-go measure means nothing because it's waivable at the discretion of the Biden administration."
Lee also on Sunday spoke out against the Biden administration's whole-of-government approach with climate agenda, calling it a "big mistake."
"As I said as a member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee just a few days ago, we have to remember that American people use carbon-based fuels," Lee said. "Fossil fuels have an impact on our lives, and we have to consider not only what people don't like about them, but also how we benefit there from them. If we lose that, we'll find ourselves in this morass in which we will have no ability to live our lives as we would prefer. We will have no ability for poor and middle-class Americans to get ahead. This will be an invisible tax on everything we buy affecting poor and middle-class Americans disproportionately."