Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) this week predicted President Donald Trump’s administration will award generous funds from the Coronavirus relief bill to companies located in battleground states like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
“In the midst of an election season, mark my words that you will suddenly find companies in battleground states receiving a whole lot of generous financial incentives,” Sanders predicted on NPR’s “1A” before Trump signed the bill on Friday afternoon. “In terms of this particular administration, the Trump administration, I do not trust them at all. I don’t trust their competence. I don’t trust their honesty.”
Sanders said Republicans wanted to give Trump a “blank check” of $500 billion, which he said is the “most dangerous” part of the bill, “to do anything he wanted to do” before Democrats put restrictions on the funds and “fought for more transparency.”
The Vermont Senator and presidential candidate said even under the best of circumstances, he worries about the White House getting $500 billion, which Sanders emphasized was a quarter of the $2 trillion bill, “to be doling out to corporations that they deem in trouble.”
Sanders said the Coronavirus could be the worst pandemic since the Spanish of 1918 and added that Congress will have to “come back and address the need of working people in a far more substantial way” because “there is a widespread understanding that we are in an unprecedented moment in American history.”
Before the Senate passed the bill on Wednesday evening, Sanders ripped his “anti-worker” Republican colleagues Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Ben Sasse (R-NE), Rick Scott (R-FL), and Tim Scott (R-SC) for being “very distressed and “very upset that somebody who is making $10, $12 an hour might end up with a paycheck for four months” that is a little but “more than they received last week.”
“Oh, my God, the universe is collapsing. Imagine that! Somebody is making 12 bucks an hour, now, like the rest of us, faces an unprecedented economic crisis with the 600 bucks on top of their normal, regular unemployment check might be making a few bucks more for four months,” Sanders said on the Senate floor. “Oh, my word, will the universe survive?”
Sanders said the Republicans criticizing provisions to help low-income workers are the very same folks who “had no problem a couple years ago voting for a trillion dollars in tax breaks for billionaires and large profitable corporations.”
This weekend the left accused Trump of politicking when a Washington Post report found that Florida received all of the medical supplies it needed from the Trump administration while states like Maine got only five percent of what it requested.
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