Friday on Fox News Channel, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) went on offense against his colleagues for the procedural manner used to pass the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill.
Earlier in the day, the House of Representatives approved package passed the Senate earlier in the week. However, House members were forced to overcome a procedural move from Massie attempting to force members to vote in person.
“I mean, here, think about the arrogance of these congressmen,” Massie said. “They’re telling the truckers to keep driving so that their grocery stores will have groceries. They’re telling the UPS drivers to keep bringing their Amazon packages. They’re telling the bagger at the grocery store to keep bagging those groceries.”
“But these congressmen make $174,000 a year,” he continued. “They’ve got the best health care that you can buy these days right now. And they’re telling people that they should — that the congressmen need to stay home, but everybody else needs to work for them. I think that’s the wrong message, but that’s — really gives you a glimpse into how some of these people in Washington, D.C. think.”
The Kentucky congressman also insisted House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) did not fulfill his pledge to allow for debate, noting that he was denied an opportunity to speak and argued McCarthy was motivated by his quest to become House Speaker.
“First of all, they had four hours of debate, and they couldn’t find one minute to allow me to debate,” Massie said. “That’s because they don’t want to hear the truth. If this bill is such a great bill, why not have everybody vote on it? Now, the vote he’s talking about, you know, writing her name on a slip of paper? That’s not showing up in casting a vote that’s going to be recorded for all time in the congressional record. If you — and so, it’s not a real vote, he was trying to have a pretend to vote to placate everybody and say that you could stay home.”
“By the way, Kevin McCarthy wants to be the next speaker, so he wanted to make this as easy as he could on everybody,” he continued. “He was trying to be Santa Claus and say, you can stay home, and you don’t really have to vote. And we’ll pretend like we’re voting here, and then we’ll tell everybody that’s what it is. The problem with Kevin’s plan is it didn’t satisfy the Constitution. I literally had to tweet the Constitution and shame everybody, basically, into acknowledging that if you don’t have a quorum, you can’t pass a bill in Congress.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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