Bernie Sanders Has a Message for Paul Ryan, ‘You lost.’

Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 01:37 pm

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On Ed Schultz’s radio show, Sen. Bernie Sanders responded to Paul Ryan’s Wall Street Journal editorial with a simple message, ‘Ryan lost by 5 million votes’ in 2012.

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Sen. Sanders said,

You read an editorial today in The Wall Street Journal by Paul Ryan who was the vice presidential candidate of the Republicans in the last election. What they now want to do is cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. So we can reach an agreement with them if we annul the election. Ryan lost by 5 million votes, but he’s saying let’s forget about that. Yeah, I lost the election. Yeah, the Republicans lost two seats in the Senate in the last election. Yeah, we lost seats in the House. Yeah, the Democrats got more votes than we did in the House. Forget all of that. We now are in a position to blackmail the United States government, and we are going to push through the agenda that we campaigned on, and we lost.

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Here is the point that people have got to understand, why this is so very, very important. If the president or the Democrats were to succumb to this blackmail, Ed, what it would be is a dagger in the heart of the democratic process, because in a sense, what Paul Ryan is saying is yeah, I lost the election. It doesn’t matter. I want you to implement all of the ideas that I campaigned on and lost. You know what? The American don’t want to see cuts in Social Security, or privatization of Social Security, They don’t want to see cuts in Medicare. They don’t want to see cuts in Medicaid. They don’t want to see the EPA abolished, the Department of Education abolished. They don’t want to see the VA privatized. They don’t want to see the minimum wage, the concept of the minimum wage, done away with so that the people of America could work for four bucks an hour.

And what these guys are saying, all of that doesn’t matter. Now, if we succumb to that right now. If we say, oh, you’re right. The election didn’t really matter, and we’re going to succumb to your blackmail. They will be back next year, and they’ll be back the year after that, and elections will have not all that much importance.

As Sarah Jones correctly pointed out a week ago, Paul Ryan is back and setting the stage for an economic catastrophe. Sanders had the tone of Rep. Ryan’s Wall Street Journal editorial nailed perfectly. Ryan’s big solution is that Democrats should agree to the Ryan budget. Ryan is demanding more tax cuts for the wealthy, and the gutting of entitlements. Ryan’s editorial was nothing more than a debt ceiling ransom note.

The isn’t the first time that Bernie Sanders has taken down Ryan. In 2012, Sanders slammed Ryan’s hypocrisy of voting for Bush’s unfunded wars, then demanding entitlement cuts from Obama. Bernie Sanders is the biggest congressional champion of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA. Koch best boy Paul Ryan represents everything that Sen. Sanders is fighting against.

Paul Ryan is doing the same thing on the debt ceiling that his fellow House Republicans have done with the ACA and the government shutdown. They are trying to undo the results of the 2012 election. The message that Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democrats are sending to Ryan is that voters rejected your ideas in 2012, and we are still rejecting your policies today.

In short, you lost.



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