Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) said Sunday that she supports a GOP-led strategy to use the debt limit as leverage to force spending cuts.
The congresswoman aligned herself with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who floated the idea last week, saying if Republicans regain control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, he’ll use his newfound power to hold Democrats responsible for spending.
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“We’re not just going to keep lifting your credit card limit,” he said during a Punchbowl News interview. “We should seriously sit together and [figure out] where we can eliminate some waste. Where can we make the economy grow stronger?”
Cuts could come to programs such as Medicare and Social Security, though McCarthy has since sought to assuage concerns about such a move in the face of Democratic attacks, as well as funding the United States gives to Ukraine.
Mace, who sits on the House Oversight Committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union that she supported the strategy — and added that if small businesses could make cuts during COVID-19, so could the government.
“At the end of the day, when COVID-19 happened, you had the federal government and state governments literally shut companies down,” she said. “Businesses had to make tough decisions about how they were going to keep their doors open. The federal government just kept getting record revenue year over year and hasn’t had to make those tough decisions.”
Tapper asked the Republican lawmaker about the effects the cuts may have on the economy and people who are battling sky-high inflation and struggling to feed their families.
Mace said the strategy was more about Republicans having a voice in the conversation.
“Republicans have tried to work with, reach across the aisle, and have been shut out of many of those conversations,” she said. “And so I think that this is a way to negotiate moving forward.”
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Mace also cautioned about how much money Democrats have greenlighted to Ukraine, which is fighting to fend off Russia’s invading forces, and said the government couldn’t afford to keep writing “blank checks.”
