MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough came out swinging Monday morning, accusing House Speaker Mike Johnson of lying to the American people about the GOP’s latest budget bill.
“He’s lying,” Scarborough said bluntly on Morning Joe. “This budget that Mike Johnson is trying desperately to pass will help increase the federal debt by $20 trillion over the next 10 years.”
Johnson has claimed the bill won’t add to the national debt or cut Medicaid. Scarborough wasn’t buying it.
“You know, he says, you can look at the Bible and figure out what type of speaker he is,” Scarborough said. “I just want to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe he just doesn’t know history and maybe he doesn’t even know current events.”
Then Scarborough laid out the facts.
“If he did,” Scarborough continued, “he would know that actually, 20 years ago or so, Congress balanced the budget four years in a row. And over the past eight years under the Trump administration… they increased the national debt more in four years than every other Congress and every other president had in the history of the country, cumulatively.”
Scarborough apologized for kicking off the show with a rant, but said the stakes were too high to stay quiet.
“When somebody says something that misleading, it’s very, very important that people know the truth,” he said.
He hammered home the scale of the damage: “Do you realize this country didn’t even accumulate that much debt over its first 220 years of existence? From George Washington through Barack Obama… the United States of America did not increase the national debt by as much as Mike Johnson’s budget increases the national debt over the next decade.”
Scarborough also shredded Johnson’s claim to be fiscally conservative.
“He says he’s fiscally conservative – no, he’s not,” he said. “How any Republican could ever claim to be conservative and vote for a budget that adds $20 trillion to a $37 trillion debt and wrecks our economy is just beyond me.”
Watch the segment below from MSNBC:
