WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) joined Brian Brenberg, Jackie DeAngelis, and Taylor Riggs on Fox Business to discuss border security, the threat of TikTok, and rising inflation. Excerpts and full video are below.

On Border Security:

“The problem Joe Biden has on this issue is the American people get to compare two presidents and not just their rhetoric, but their actions, and not just their actions, but the outcomes. We've lived four years with Donald Trump as president where he secured the border. Now, [we have lived] nearly four years with Joe Biden as president where he opened it wide-open, invited everybody in, gave them parole and amnesty to anybody that comes across. Now, somehow, he's surprised crime is on the rise, that sanctuary cities need help. He's got all the power Donald Trump had. Donald Trump fixed the problem; this guy enhances the problem. It's not complicated.”

On Threat of TikTok/Pending Legislation:

“The bill in the House has so much momentum it certainly seems clear it's going to come our way. The Senate will do what the Senate does, and that is slow everything down, listen attentively, [and] deliberate unnecessarily long. […] But it does seem to me there’s momentum in the Senate, as well as the House, to do something. Whether it's as dramatic as the bill coming out of the House or whether it's something more modest, I don't know. I am of the opinion, personally, that while First Amendment rights are paramount, they are not guaranteed, and they shouldn’t be guaranteed that you can express your First Amendment rights by using a Chinese Communist Party platform that can collect your data. We have simply got to do more to strategically decouple our supply chain from China and do more to prevent data from going to China—particularly the Chinese Communist Party. I don't think there's any way to do that with an app like TikTok without decoupling it from Bytedance.”

On Inflation:

“When we talk about inflation, what we consider month-to-month or year-over-year, we look at it as a rate. When your rate of increase is lower than it was the previous month of the previous year, we somehow take a victory lap. […] But the reality is the people back home—they're dealing with the aggregate over three years now of 18 percent increase in inflation, in prices. That's the new floor, 21 percent for food. A lot of the core inflation obviously is energy. North Dakotans like high energy prices in the marketplace, so to speak, but we're also energy consumers, so we would like a nice balanced, predictable rate of inflation and prices, and we have not caught up. We have not had wages and salaries of middle-class America catch up to the aggregated increases under the Biden administration.”