The Paycheck Protection Program is an overwhelming success, and it's "just unconscionable" that Democrats are blocking another $250 billion to be added to it, Sen. John Thune said Friday.
"Washington Democrats are playing political games with people's lives," the South Dakota Republican said on Fox News' "America's Newsroom." "This is about American workers and right now, we've got a crisis, we have an emergency and the Democrats in Washington don't seem very interested in helping to put out the fire."
Instead of approving more money, Democrats are holding up the legislation because "they always want to attach other things that are not related" to it.
"All it takes is a little bipartisan cooperation," he said. "We could move this thing and it (would) be done. We could get the dollars back out on the street, businesses applying, and workers keeping new jobs."
He described the measure to add money to the bill as a matter of "changing a number" to increase the amount of funding, "nothing more, nothing less," but Democrats opposed it.
"What the Democrats always try to do in circumstances like this is try to hijack the process to get unrelated agenda items included," said Thune. "Speaker (Nancy) Pelosi does this all the time. That's why the last round of funding got slowed down by several days is because they bring these things to the table and attempts to try and accomplish their more permanent liberal agenda, and we don't need that right now."
Also on Friday, Thune discussed China and coronavirus, commenting that "misinformation and disinformation" have been coming out of China from day one."
"That is finally coming to the surface. Eventually, it was going to come out that they were understating the number of deaths and the impact of this worldwide," said Thune. "Hopefully it's a wake-up call to the world about how they operate, the lack of transparency, the censorship of journalists and it's going to take a global international response to hold them accountable."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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