Sen. Kaine Slams AOC’s Criticism of Opening the Gov’t: People Are Back to Work with Paychecks Restored, She May Think It’s Nothing, Virginians Think ‘It’s an Awful Lot’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
WELKER: “Senator, you and the other Democrats who did vote to reopen the government are taking heat from some of your democratic colleagues including Alexandria Ocasio cortez. Here’s how she describes the lessons that Republicans learned from all of this.”

AOC: “My concern is that the lesson that they learn side ed is democ are week and the next time we’ll hurt working people more and I don’t want them to learn that lesson.”

WELKER: “What do you think about Democrats projected weakness here?”

KAINE: “I have 220,000 federal employees in Virginia and together with their families that’s probably 700,000 dependents, getting them all back to work with two paychecks that they’ve missed restored, with protections against future firings. Folks like aoc may think that’s nothing. Virginians think it’s an awful lot. Second, if the goal was to try to get health care front and center, she was not at the table with the Republicans in the Senate, and so maybe she thinks that the Republicans would have caved would it have been another week of snap recipients losing their SNAP benefits? Another month of air traffic or air travelers enduring chaos and even danger? Another two month happens of federal employees losing paychecks? I was at the table with the Republican senators, and I knew if we wanted to get to the health care discussion we had to open up government and that was a vantage point I had, that a lot of folks who were lobbying criticism didn’t. I’m getting great feedback from virginiians Virginians and those are the 8.5 million I represent.”