Senator Barrasso Calls COVID-19 Relief Bill a ‘Payoff to Democratic Supporters’
Senator John Barrasso is firing on all cylinders this week as he offers his opinions on a wide-array of topics involving COVID-19, the COVID Relief Bill, President Biden, and more.
Barrasso is pulling no punches when it comes to his condemnation of what he, and many other Republicans view as a “liberal wish list.”
In a video posted to his various social mediums, Barrasso called the COVID Relief Bill a “wish list of liberal spending, packed with pork.”
He said it was a “blue state bailout that punishes states who refused to completely shut down during the pandemic.”
“This bill is not about coronavirus relief,” Barrasso stated. “This is a wish list of liberal spending. This is packed with pork. Yesterday, we pointed out Pelosi’s ‘Tunnel of Love,’ to Silicon Valley and Schumer’s bridge to Canada. As we pointed those out, those have now been removed from the bill. But those were small items compared to the amount of money that New York and California are going to get in this blue state bailout."
Barrasso stated that, "Governors around the country are up in arms about this. My home state governor in Wyoming has joined 20 other Republican governors. And it is bi-partisan because the democrat governor of Kansas, Governor Kelley, has joined in this, saying...this was biased. This is a biased piece of legislation. They got it right. They talk about how punishing it is to their states, who didn't do a complete shutdown at the time of coronavirus. They made a decision to try to keep people working, keep people on the job, let people go about their lives, instead of shutting down like New York and California did."
Barrasso said that the way the bill is formed, and the way relief aid will be distributed, is based more on favoritism than actual need.
"So if you're trying to do a distribution formula to try and help states who have been hurt the most by the virus, you might say 'how many people were sick there? How many people lost their lives there? How has the virus itself impacted the health of the people?," he argued. "Not say which states chose to shut it down, clamp down, with a wink and a nod from Joe Biden, running for president, saying 'keep it closed, I'll make sure you get paid off. Big.' That's what this is. This is a payoff to his Democratic supporters in Illinois, in California, in New York, and he's asking people from all over the country who have done and acted responsibly during all of this...to pay the bill."
These statements came just a day before the Senate did, in fact, pass the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill.