Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell again expressed reservations for federal aid geared to help states and local governments suffering coronavirus-related revenue losses. According to Louisville’s Courier Journal, the Kentucky Senator said Tuesday that he supports some targeted aid to states and local government, but that the next “plug” of such funding cannot be used to help “pre-existing” fiscal conditions. McConnell also said that “the only way to rescue this economy is to get back to normal” and that while another round of federal pandemic relief may be necessary, “it won’t be another” $3 trillion. “That ain’t going to happen,” he said.
McConnell came under fire last month for insinuating that local governments were using the pandemic as an opportunity to get the federal government to “[solve] their pension problems” and suggesting that states and municipalities should “use the bankruptcy route” instead. His office later referred to prohibiting such requests for federal aid as “stopping Blue State Bailouts,” a comment that Governor Andrew Cuomo took issue with. “It really is offensive,” the New York Governor said. “You talk about one issue where you think you can get past partisanship and pettiness, and now you talk about helping communities where people are dying, and you say they are blue states?”
Cuomo, describing McConnell musing about bankruptcy as “one of the really dumb ideas of all time,” noted that the Senator’s home state receives a disproportionate amount of federal funding compared to New York. “We’re the number one state in donating to the federal pot,” Cuomo said at a press conference, while “Kentucky is the number three state in taking from the federal pot.” On Tuesday, the Courier Journal reported that McConnell said that while declaring bankruptcy is not possible for states, it is “an option” for cities, “though he recalled mentioning that approach only as a possibility, not as a recommendation for navigating out of financial woes brought on by the coronavirus.”
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