EXCERPT:
MULVANEY: "Joe, good morning, happy New Year, merry Christmas. I think what he was trying to do was simply send a message that he wasn’t really happy with the bill. This is not at all unusual. Keep in mind, the whole bill is $2.3 trillion. I think it’s actually a little bit bigger than that. Anytime you have a bill that’s that large, you’re not going to like any particular part of it. People have focused a lot on the Covid relief, and the $600 versus 2,000 but there’s about $1.4-1.5 trillion in other spending in the government funding part of the bill. The reason you get massive bills is Congress is supposed to break those down, 12 bills during the year, but they are lazy, and they don’t so they throw it all together at one bill at the end of the year, and essentially challenge any president to either sign it or shut the government down. Joe Biden is going to face the same difficulties next year. But I think what the president was doing is sort of throwing down a marker for his next political race, possibly and say look, I don’t think this was enough money. I happen to disagree with that, I think that you do have the opportunity here to break it into smaller pieces. Yeah, we had some bad economic numbers in the last 30 days but good numbers before that. There’s no reason to absolutely go big right now, you can sort of take this month by month. But I think the president was sending the message that Congress is broken, and it is. I think a lot of us were relieved he did sign the bill because I don’t think there was a plan if he didn’t, but I don’t think he’s happy about it."