Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” criticized the left for getting “pseudo-celebrity” to make up “false accusations” about a healthcare bill for veterans and 9/11 first responders who were exposed to toxic burn pits.
While Toomey did not mention comedian Jon Stewart by name, Stewart had been attacking the senator over his objections to the burn pit legislation in media appearances.
Toomey said, “This is the oldest trick in Washington. People take a sympathetic group of Americans, and it could be children with an illness, it could be victims of crime, it could be veterans who have been exposed to toxic chemicals, craft a bill to address their problems and then sneak in something completely unrelated that they know could never pass on its own and dare Republicans to do anything about it because they know they’ll unleash their allies in the media and maybe a pseudo-celebrity to make up false accusations to try to get us to just swallow what shouldn’t be there. That is what’s happening here.”
He added, “This is why they do this sort of thing, Jake because it gets very deep in the weeds and very confusing for people very quickly. It’s not really about veterans’ spending. It’s about what category of government bookkeeping they put the veteran spending in. My change, honest people, acknowledge, will have no effect on the amount of money or the circumstances under which the money for veterans is being spent. But what I want to do is treat it for government accounting purposes the way we’ve always treated it for government accounting purposes because if we change it to the way that the Democrats want, it creates room — in future budgets — for $400 billion of totally unrelated extraneous spending on other matters. That’s what I want to prevent.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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