Thomas Massie on his COVID-19 bill maneuver: "I was just standing up for the Constitution"

The GOP's Nancy Pelosi

He's like the kid who wants to take his ball back and go home because the team only had eight players instead of nine. He's like House Leader Nancy "Hands a Flying" Pelosi who delayed the Coronavirus bill for three days before it could be passed.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is now the most hated man on Capitol Hill after he almost derailed the coronavirus relief bill because he wanted a formal vote last Friday, oblivious to the notion that desperate times call for desperate measures.

He spoke with Fox News in an attempt to provide an excuse for his grandstanding.

“I was just [grand]standing up for the Constitution, and I did it in a [pseudo]professional manner that did not delay the bill,” Massie claimed in a phone interview, because he couldn't be in the Fox studio in person due to the crisis.

The useless Congressman added, “This is the biggest transfer of wealth in human history.” And the rules come before the lives of those who make them.

The Constitution requires that a majority of members be present on the floor of Congress in order to do business, but his colleagues, who were bright enough to want to safely isolate themselves from the virus, believed it more important to do so than to follow that rule. After all, it's one way to avoid adding to the spread of the pandemic. 

They weren't amused with Massie and neither was the American public.

“Massie has now become the most hated person on Capitol Hill," said Rep. Peter King, (R-NY), who, at 4:30 a.m. drove to the Capitol to ensure the measure got passed Friday.

“Congress should show up to work if they're telling truckers and grocery store baggers to show up to work. A congressman making $174,000 with health benefits should sure as hell show up,” Massie said, forgetting that truckers, while doing yeoman's work, are not sitting among hundreds of colleagues holding a virus hoedown.

Before the vote on Friday, Massie was pressured by congressional leaders to drop his objection.

“I was proffered several things in exchange for withdrawing my objection to the passage of this bill... I was also threatened,” he said.

“I feel like an endorsement was proffered and a committee assignment was proffered,” Massie whined.

Trump also called Massie on the phone Friday morning and urged him not to object, for fear that would delay the bill. Massie said that he would keep the conversation he had with President Trump confidential out of respect for him.

But Trump obviously wasn’t happy with transpired on the call. “Throw Massie out of Republican Party!” he tweeted that morning.

“Workers & small businesses need money now in order to survive. Virus wasn’t their fault. It is ‘HELL’ dealing with the Dems, had to give up some stupid things in order to get the ‘big picture’ done. 90% GREAT!” he also tweeted and currently holds the record for the highest number of tweets than any other U.S. President.

Massie said he also received threats from the public that day, telling him he needed to be “taken out and shot” and “should go die” among other threats to him and his family, which is not the nice way to remove him from office.

Capitol Hill police and Massie’s local sheriff agreed on providing extra security for his house in Kentucky while Massie was in D.C.

Undeterred by the threats and offers, Massie spoke on the floor of the House later that day and explained: “I came here to make sure our republic doesn’t die by unanimous consent in an empty chamber, and I request a recorded vote.”

Massie's effort was emasculated, as congressional leaders had already figured out how to get around his objections — by filling the chamber with enough members to demonstrate a quorum.

So when his request for a recorded vote was denied, the idiot's objection “on the basis a quorum [majority] is not present” fell flat. 

The presiding member of Congress declared that enough members were present, and they passed the bill with a quick voice vote, in which individual votes were not recorded.

Massie said he left a voice message for Trump later in the day to try to patch things up and hopefully get his endorsement for continuing to have a political future. “The message I left was, 'Look, the bill wasn't delayed by what I insisted upon, and that's because I didn't surprise anybody. I told everybody at least 24 hours in advance what I was going to do.'”

Big deal. He told everyone what a grandstanding fool he intended to be on the House floor.

That time actually gave a majority of representatives enough time to get to the floor of Congress, even though they still refused to hold a recorded vote once there.

“They were trying to avoid accountability,” Massie said, adding that some representatives were trying to hide from putting their name to such an expensive bill. 

And he knows this as a fact, how?

“The tragedy of this bill is it’s a massive wealth transfer from the middle class to the moneyed class [rich investors and lobbyists]. Just going by the numbers — the most that somebody qualifies for is $1,200 under this bill... where's the rest of that money going?”

The balance of the money is going to aid the states, unemployment benefits, airlines, hospitals, business loans for the 'little guy', and to smaller irrelevant programs having nothing to do with the virus. At least the GOP objected to that but House Leader Pelosi pushed the pork and held the country over a pork barrel as the clock was ticking.

“We should be responding to the virus itself — and if there's any relief, that should be given to the taxpayers, not to the moneyed class,” he said.

“Responding to the virus means giving a guarantee that any American – whether they're a politician or a celebrity or a grocery bagger at Kroger – can get access to this [coronavirus] test,” he said seriously, not mentioning the fact that politicians have taxpayer funded private health care insurance and are not forced to be covered under Obamacare.

“If it costs $100 to test each of 350 million people — that's $35 billion, which is 1.5 percent of this bill,” Massie said, not considering the economic ramifications of how the virus is crippling the nation, and the fact that there is more to the pandemic than simply testing for the virus. 

How about the need for equipment and research for a cure?

“The only way we can allow people to go back to work is to figure out who should be at home and who should be at work. If you know from testing that you're not a carrier, or you know that you're immune to it, you should be able to move about freely,” Massie said, evidently not thinking about the damage that has already been done by the global work outage.

But his faulty reasoning about the bill hasn’t persuaded everyone.

Todd McMurtry, who is Massie's primary challenger, is trying to make hay of the situation. 

"I think what he did is unconscionable, and I think it's disqualifying. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody in the House gets sick and I wouldn't be surprised if one of those people had a bad health outcome and that's on Thomas Massie," McMurtry, said on Saturday.

“I've seen his votes over the years and I realized that he's totally ineffective and he's purely ... a libertarian ideologue," he said of Massie, also accusing him of not voting with Trump enough.

Massie said he supports the president but he's only telling a half truth.

“I've only had praise for the president in the three-and-a-half years that he'd been president. Of course, I've had some policy disagreements, but I’ve never let it become personal,” he said.

Massie said he helped Trump with his actions on Friday, by setting a precedent that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can’t pass bills with an empty chamber.

“What I did this week by forcing Nancy Pelosi to make people to come to work in order to pass the bill, gets him more negotiating leverage going forward.”

And possibly expose them to the virus.


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