House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) slammed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Wednesday after the senator’s office mocked so-called “blue state bailouts” as Congress hammers out another relief package during the COVID-19 outbreak.
“Look at the language of Mitch McConnell: ‘I’m not bailing out blue states, they should go bankrupt,'” Pelosi said in an interview with the Washington Post. “Really? Really? How insecure is he in his own race in Kentucky to have to resort to that pathetic language?”
Earlier on Wednesday, McConnell’s office had issued two press releases on his interviews on Fox News and Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. Both releases had sections on “Stopping Blue State Bailouts” and “Preventing Blue State Bailouts” that quoted the Republican leader’s complaints about assisting Democratic regions of the country amid the pandemic.
“We’re not interested in solving their pension problems for them, we’re not interested in rescuing them from bad decisions they’ve made in the past,” he told Fox News host Bill Hemmer. “We’re not going to let them take advantage of this pandemic to solve a lot of problems that they created for themselves, and bad decisions they made in the past.”
“There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations,” he told Hewitt.
In that interview, McConnell even argued that the states ought to go bankrupt.
“Yeah, I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route,” he said. “It saves some cities. And there’s no good reason for it not to be available.”
Dump the Turtle…
It is ridiculous the superhuman candidates we have to field to unseat these feckless, old, white Republicans. They can run a corpse as long as the escaping gas sounds like a dog whistle.
it seems to me that the most recent “small business bailout” was based on a promise that states and localities would be getting help in a subsequent bill. Pelosi needs to hit the pause button right now, because its pretty obvious that McConnell will stop any bill to help the areas hardest hit by the pandemic — and send the message "if states and cities suffer economic crises, the damage to small businesses will be incalculable,and the billions being spent on the current “rescue” plan would have been wasted."
Republicans Proved Deficits Don’t Matter
The PPA is a big business giveaway in practice. It is a Republican ask masked as a Democratic one. McConnell has shown his cards and is kicking state and USPS funding down the road with no intention of every passing it.
Pelosi needs to add state and local funding at levels even with PPA money. She shouldn’t settle for this paltry $25 billion for testing. $250 billion for business should be matched with $250 billion for government.
If McConnell doesn’t like it Pelosi needs to walk. It’s the only way to negotiate. Republicans will take the blame in November if this doesn’t pass, and America will be better in the long run if we suffer a little now and get rid of the Republicans, rather than if we reduce suffering by a token amount and then let Republicans destroy America and the planet.