Rep. Hoyer Chides Senate Republicans For Stimulus Delays

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer Thursday chastised Senate Republicans for not passing at least some form of another stimulus act after rejecting the House Heroes Act, which would have allowed more resources for the fight against the spread of coronavirus. 

"This is a crisis, but the Republicans are twiddling their thumbs while Rome is essentially burning," the Maryland Democrat said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "(Senate Majority Leader) Mitch McConnell's response was (to) let the states go bankrupt. I suppose he's saying let the unemployment rolls grow, don't help families, don't invest more in testing and tracing, and trying to prevent this disease from spreading even further than it has."

Since Senate Republicans didn't like the House bill, they "should have acted on their own," Hoyer continued, rather than working on confirming judges "so that they can make an ideological judiciary sympathetic to their point of view."

Instead, there are now more than 130,000 people who have died, and more than 3 million people who have contracted coronavirus, and the Senate "ought to be actions...pass their own and let's see if we can make them compatible."

And, he added, the coronavirus victims died because President Donald Trump "thought it was a hoax," Hoyer claimed, but specifying that their deaths were "not directly attributable" to Trump's words "but certainly his inaction."

"We could have saved literally tens of thousands of lives had we acted decisively," said Hoyer, "but this president ignores the facts, ignores reality, conjures up his own reality, and fails to respond to real problems."

Trump also "either did not want to know, or knew the information" on claims Russians had paid a bounty for American deaths in Afghanistan. 

"Then this pandemic, which we are confronting, [Mitch] McConnell and [Kevin] McCarthy in the House of Representatives, the Minority Leader in the House of Representatives said: no, let's wait, let's see what happens," Hoyer said. "Well, we see what has happened. It has gotten much, much worse."    

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