Sen. Lindsey Graham said “there is no good reason” why Congress shouldn’t quickly pass a coronavirus relief bill and that lawmakers should be punished by the American people if they fail to do so.
The South Carolina Republican appeared Tuesday evening on Fox News to assert that the relief bill is a crucial measure that should bridge partisan divides. He said “special-interest politics” were what was holding up the passage of the bill.
“There is no good reason left to deny the American people the relief they need,” Graham said. “Every restaurant and bar in South Carolina is closed. As long as you can’t congregate with 10 people or more, the entire economy is shut down. So, people need a paycheck.”
“They need to have burdens taken off them; their student loan payments deferred. There are so many good things in this bill, there’s $2 trillion. It is very generous,” he continued. “And what’s holding this bill up is special-interest politics, and if in the next 48 hours we do not pass this bill, everybody in the country should cut off our pay.”
The remark echoes those of GOP Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona, who, on Tuesday, proposed a bill aimed at withholding pay from senators until a coronavirus stimulus package is passed into law.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that she hoped to pass the spending bill by unanimous consent, which would allow the legislation to move forward without calling lawmakers back to Capitol Hill for a vote. Graham also said during the interview that he was supportive of allowing remote voting for lawmakers.
“Yeah, we are in a war,” Graham said in response to a question about remote voting. “We’re in a war against a virus.”
Graham said that people should look to New York, which has been the state hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, to see just how bad the outbreak can become. He emphasized that the health of the nation comes first in the “war” against the flu-like virus.
“I’m all for trying to jump-start the economy and turn it back on where it makes sense,” he said, “but what is happening in New York could come to South Carolina or any other place if we really don’t watch it here.”
“We are at war with this virus — I want to starve it, I want to bomb it, and I want to kill it,” Graham said. “You starve it by having social distancing … you bomb it by having therapies that will make it less lethal, and you kill it with a vaccine.”
The United States saw its 50,000th case of COVID-19 on Tuesday and experienced the first death of someone under 18 years old the same day. As of late Tuesday evening, more than 53,000 people in the U.S. have tested positive for the virus, and 703 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University.
