'It’s shocking': Joe Scarborough slams efforts to rationalize GOP’s 'damaging effects

10 July

Image via Screengrab.

When the merits of President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" were being debated in Congress, some GOP lawmakers were highly critical of its draconian cuts to Medicaid — including Senators Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Thom Tillis (North Carolina), Susan Collins (Maine) and Josh Hawley (Missouri). But while Collins and Tillis voted "no," along with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), Murkowski and Hawley voted "yes."

Murkowski and Hawley have been trying to justify their reasons for voting for the megabill, which Trump signed into law over the 4th of July Weekend.

But during an angry rant on Thursday, July 10, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough argued that their explanations fall painfully flat in light of the harm that Medicaid cuts will inflict.

Scarborough lamented, "It's shocking," warning that the cuts will cause millions of Americans to lose their health insurance and rural hospitals to close.

The Never Trump conservative told fellow host Mika Brzezinski and their colleagues Mike Barnicle, Jonathan Lemire and Willie Geist, "Let's not play this game that you can just pick out one side of the bill and let the other side of the bill move forward. There's a reason why Republicans slashed rural hospital funding. There's a reason why Republicans slashed health care funding, and the reason they slashed health care funding is because it was the only way they could get enough cuts to get other members of their party to support the massive tax cuts for billionaires and multinational corporations. You don't have one without another, because if Josh Hawley and Lisa Murkowski and red state governors, our senators, had not voted to slash health care in their states, rural health care in their states, then none of this would have ever passed."

Scarborough continued, "And so, you can't you can't pretend, Willie, that you can have tax cuts for the billionaires, that you can have tax cuts for the multinational corporations, that you can have tax cuts for the monopolists in Silicon Valley, that you can have tax cuts for the richest people on the planet. You can't pretend that you can have that without the coinciding slashing of rural health care spending. So, they had to slash health care to give their billionaire buddies in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street tax cuts. Josh Hawley knows that. Lisa Murkowski knows that. They just voted to give billionaires, multinational corporations and people who run monopolies in Silicon Valley tax cuts because they value that obviously more than they value…. the people in their own state, who are going to see health care slashed."

Watch the full video below or at this link.

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