December 9, 2020, 12:28 pm
Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) is gaining a reputation as one of the most online and best online U.S. Congress members. She’s added to that thanks to a Tuesday night Twitter thread that accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for blocking bipartisan COVID-19 relief bill efforts.
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Porter began her thread declaring that she came to Congress knowing that she “had a reputation to pull back the curtain for the American people and expose corruption in real-time.”
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She then characterized McConnell’s actions over the last eight days to “tank” a relief bill that both Republicans and Democrats support.
The thread points out that both parties agreed to a $900 billion package she says would “fund another round of small business loans, support hospitals and essential workers, and help the 10 million people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own.”
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Then, she asserted that even Senate Republicans came to a compromise that would allow the bill to work. However, as she alleged, “McConnell is refusing to bring it to the floor [for Senate debate] unless it wipes away all COVID-related lawsuits filed that ‘allege injury or death’ due to corporate negligence.”
Porter goes on to argue, “These lawsuits represent the worst of the worst examples of disregard for human life—cases filed on behalf of nursing home patients and grocery store workers who died because the company in charge of keeping them safe prioritized cutting costs over protecting them.”
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Finally, she tied McConnell’s actions to President Trump’s ongoing election fraud accusations, saying, The same McConnell who said that President Trump is ‘100% within his rights’ to pursue baseless lawsuits alleging election fraud is now refusing to pass urgently-needed relief unless it strips those same rights from the most vulnerable among us.”
She ends by saying, “This must be exposed.”
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The Hill, which reported on the Tweet thread Wednesday, characterized McConnell’s position as a little more yielding than Porter depicted it. It claimed, “the Republican leader on Tuesday proposed that lawmakers could keep two thorny issues, the liability protections and funding for state and local governments, out of the next relief bill.”
Still, the article also noted that earlier overtures McConnell made to compromise were given serious side-eye from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) As Pelosi said in The Hill‘s article, “Leader McConnell’s efforts to undermine good-faith, bipartisan negotiations are appalling.”
*First Published: December 9, 2020, 12:28 pm
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