Jon Stewart is speaking out against Sen. Rand Paul’s opposition to fast-tracking the bill funding a 9/11 victims’ compensation fund, calling the Republican lawmaker’s decision “outrageous.”
“It’s absolutely outrageous, and you’ll pardon me if I’m not impressed in any way by Rand Paul’s fiscal responsibility virtue-signaling,” the former Daily Show host told Bret Baier during an appearance with 9/11 first responder John Feal on Fox News on Wednesday. “Rand Paul presented tissue-paper avoidance of the $1.5 trillion tax cut that added hundreds of billions of dollars to our deficit and now he stands up at the last minute, after 15 years of blood, sweat and tears from the 9/11 community to say that it’s all over now, now we’re going to balance the budget on the backs of the 9/11 first responder communities.”
The new bill, an extension of the September 11th Victims’ Compensation Fund, would funnel payment into the compensation fund for seven decades, which is estimated to cost $10.4 billion. After Sen. Mike Lee placed a procedural hold on the bill, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand requested unanimous consent, which would allow the bill to skip several steps before being passed. Rand Paul, however, stopped the bill from being passed unanimously on Wednesday.
On Fox News, Stewart attacked Paul’s legislative record: “He is a guy who put us in hundreds of billions of dollars of debt, he was the 51st vote on that cut, and now he’s going to tell us that a billion dollars a year over 10 years is just too much for us to handle?” he said. “There are some things they have no trouble putting on the credit card, but somehow when it comes to the 9/11 first responder community, the cops, the firefighters, the construction workers, the volunteers, the survivors, all of a sudden, ‘Man, we gotta go through this.'”
Steward added that the program has been running for five years, and that a special paymaster testified in front of Congress that there had been no fraud, waste or abuse in that time.
In a comment to Fox News, Sen. Rand Paul’s office responded, “Senator Paul is not seeking to block anything. He is simply seeking to pay for it. As with any bill, Senator Paul always believes it needs to be paid for. Senator Paul is simply offering an amendment, which other senators support, to pay for this legislation.”
(Excerpt) Read more in: The Hollywood Reporter
