Klobuchar: ‘Very Disappointed’ at Lisa Murkowski, ‘Putting it Mildly’

PSAKI: “Let me ask you, I mean, it seems like a year ago, although it was just a couple of days ago that this bill passed the Senate, and your colleague, Senator Lisa Murkowski, who I know you’ve worked with on a range of things, but ended up being the deciding vote for passage in the Senate after she seemed to extract concessions specifically for her state. How disappointed were you when she did that? What do you make of it?”
Klobuchar: “I was very disappointed in that, putting it mildly. I think the people that are really going to be disappointed are the veterans, as we go into 4th of July tomorrow. We’re going to have their SNAP benefits either eliminated or reduced. I think the people that are going to be really upset are the people who are going to be thrown off their health care. That’s 17 million people. And the worst of the whole thing is that a number of the changes that were made to help Alaska actually dragged in a whole bunch of bad stuff. And my favorite example is on SNAP. It’s $200 billion in cuts for food assistance. And as Torres just described, Congressman Torres, the majority of these people seniors, people with disabilities, veterans, kids, well, this is going to really hit in rural. And one of the things they did to help Alaska was say that states with the highest error rates with SNAP, because Alaska is the highest, and they couldn’t get that by the parliamentarian to just single out Alaska. They tried Alaska and Hawaii, they tried Alaska and D.C.. and they finally ended up with the 10 states with the biggest error rates. And those states get one to two years off of having any of these cost shift cuts. My favorite example, and there’s many, is that Florida, which has a high error rate, could avoid for two years paying a billion a year in their cost shifts. And Texas, that has a lower error rate, will pay $700 million each year. Jen, you can’t make this up. But it was all about reeling in Alaska, and that’s what they did. And you see a number of just completely crazy things. They want to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse? They’re actually encouraging it. Because if I’m a governor in a state, I’m like, ‘Get my error rate up because it could save me $1 billion a year on a state budget,’ where you already have 44 states that have — they have balanced budget amendments and the like.”
PSAKI: “It’s hard to make sense of, is one way to describe it.”