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.”
