House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) Slams Pelosi For Not Funding Small Business Loans Sooner: “There Were 22 Million Reasons Why They Should Have Said Yes”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) slammed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi For Not Funding Small Business (PPP) Loans Sooner. Saying “There Were 22 Million Reasons Why They Should Have Said Yes, Because There Where 22 Million people Unemployed”.

Listen to The Full Interview Below:

Full Transcript:
GUY BENSON, FOX RADIO HOST: Joining me now is Kevin McCarthy. He is the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, GOP member from the state of California. Mr. Leader, welcome back to the show.

REP. KEVIN MCCARTHY (R-CA): Thank you so much, Ben (sic). Appreciate it to be back.

BENSON: All right. So we just had this breakthrough yesterday. And finally after days and days of frankly Democratic obstructionism, a deal was met. It was passed out of the Senate. You guys are up next in the House. I just want to play for you on this deal what Speaker Pelosi just said about it. Listen to cut 28.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA) HOUSE SPEAKER: So in terms of holding up the works, they were the ones who held up the works for a package that is more effective, fair and the rest as we go forward. And I don’t — you know, they — they like to say we held up. No, we didn’t hold up, they held up, and now we have prevailed. This is a real victory.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

BENSON: OK. Your response?

MCCARTHY: I don’t know how she says that with a straight face. Let’s just look at the facts. Let’s not play politics, let’s look at the facts. More than two weeks ago when this — when this program first entered to help small business to keep their employees, we realized it became so popular. So the administration asked for more funding. Mitch McConnell, the leader in the Senate, in a pro forma meeting goes in with one page. One page of papers on the Senate floor, requests $250 billion more to put into the programs so it will not run out of money, so businesses won’t lay more people off. Democrats send people to the floor, because you want to do it by unanimous consent. They object. We come back the next week, they object. The only people who held this up were Democrats. The record shows it, the history shows it. But Nancy Pelosi as the speaker went on late night T.V., opened a refrigerator I could never afford, pulled out this gourmet ice cream and showed the world that she does not have an understanding of what’s happening. When I was 20 years old I opened my first small business. I worked there. I was the first to work, I was the last to leave, and I was last to be paid. Every month I wondered whether we were going to get through. It took off, it did well. Do you know what every small business is doing right now? Every owner is sitting at their kitchen table wondering how they’re going to stay afloat with their doors closed. Government is providing them because they said they had to close their doors. Here’s money if you use 75 percent of it to pay your employees, so they don’t go the unemployment line. You don’t even have to pay it back, it’s free. Here’s money for your rent, here’s money for your utilities.We had moved in the last 14 days as much money as the Small Business Administration has been able to move in 14 years. And the only reason why it stopped is the Democrats objected. And then the world got upset — and her own members started calling me saying, I’ll vote for it. Nancy is wrong.

BENSON: It — it is sort of stunning and Orwellian to listen to what you just said. And I can just say I’ve been following this extremely closely on this program, your timeline is absolutely accurate. This is not a partisan shading or partisan spin. That is just the truth, what you just said. And for her — and she’s giving these interviews with her chocolate and her refrigerators, whatever, while there were five days with this tank empty for small businesses. She was encouraging, in these interviews from her kitchen, encouraging Senate Democrats, hold the line, keep obstructing, we want a different type of deal. Finally you guys were able to come to some sort of agreement. And it’s fine, but there were people sitting there – business owners, trying to figure out – 700,000 were in the pipeline wanting these loans and there was no money to give them. I mean, a single day can make a huge difference for a small business, Congressman, and it seemed like she was oblivious to that.

MCCARTHY: You know how big it’s going to make, Guy? Tomorrow on Thursday we’re going to get the new numbers of everyone who had to go to unemployment last week. Every single one of them pretty much that is going to go to unemployment is because the Democrats held this up. I said, when they went through it, I could not believe they were doing this. There were 22 million reasons why they should have said yes, because we have 22 million people unemployed when they did this. Every week some new millions of people are there. And think of the hope – think if you’re a small business owner, you’re holding on – that you made that application, you’ve got to have (inaudible) applications in, and you’re promising your employees, no, no, no, no, no, we’re going to pay you, we’re going to pay you. Then they look up on T.V., the money’s run out, and the Democrats say no. And then she goes on television, oh the Republicans did it. Well history only shows we went in (ph) — and the exact same thing happened when we did our first bill, the CARES Act. I was in the meeting that Sunday morning when we had Schumer, McConnell, and she said no because she was worried about election law, Planned Parenthood, Green New Deal, and sanctuary cities. And I literally told her, I am not holding a bill up because you want to change the election and what’s going to happen in November. This is about the coronavirus. This is about the health of the Americans and our economy.

BENSON: Yes, it’s brazen – it’s really, really brazen. I think she figures she’ll get some media cover for it, but man, anyone paying attention knows the truth, and it is not what she said. By the way, I would mention the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was asked, how many jobs do you guys estimate that–

MCCARTHY: Thirty million–

BENSON: — this PPP program had saved – he said 30 million jobs have been saved by their estimation. So let’s talk about what comes next, Mr. Leader, because by some accounts, and I’m reading some very smart people saying, even though you guys just pumped or are going to pump $300 billion more into this program, that could run out in a matter of days very, very quickly, because the demand is high and there is this pent-up pipeline of applications — then what happens?

MCCARTHY: Well we’ve got numerous programs at work here. It’s not just here that we’re putting money. For the small business emergency disaster where a number of people have loans, we put another $50 billion in there, but that has a multiplying affect, that’s actually worth about $350.Then when you look at what we’ve done for our bigger business — and think about the statistic you have right now – 74 percent of all that $349 billion that already went out went to companies that had a payroll of less than $60,000 a month. Sixty percent of all the money that went out went though a small bank, a bank with $10 billion in assets, and that’s one of the smaller categories we have. So you’re looking at a program that’s actually – that’s working. But when you wonder, why would Nancy Pelosi did this, think about what she did when the president stopped the flights from China. She had a bill on the floor – a no-ban bill to actually make it harder for him to do something like that. When he said that on January 31st, on February 24th she told everybody come on down to Chinatown, it’s OK. And now she goes back and writes a letter and says the president was wrong. The president made that decision in January when the World Health Organization was saying it doesn’t transfer person-to-person.

BENSON: Well I mean, look, she’s also going to – and this is predictable like the sun rising in the East, when the bad unemployment numbers come out, she is going to blame those on Trump too, right? Even though it was her party that held up all this money.By the way, just so I can ask you – I see your colleague Steve Scalise is on the news channel right now. What’s the timetable that you guys have been given? The Senate got this thing done yesterday. I know people are desperate for this to become law as soon as possible to replenish that fund. What’s the vote schedule today in the House?

MCCARTHY: Today we’re not voting, tomorrow we will vote. Members are coming back. And we have to vote in a different manner, right? So we will break it up. It won’t be your normal looking at everybody onto the floor, because we’ll have social distancing.

BENSON: Right.

MCCARTHY: We take all the members, and by their alphabet we break them up into nine different sections. The last section is if you were late. And you’ll have a timeslot to go through. Now her first vote that she wants to have – before she wanted to create proxies. Remember we got rid of proxies in 1994, but that was only on committees. But now she wants to create (ph) proxies for the floor. More than 200 years of a history we’ve never allowed this–

BENSON: Interesting.

MCCARTHY: –where (ph) one member – one member could have 30, 40 different proxies. Every person in America has a member of Congress broken up in almost an even population. Why? Because you lend your voice to that congresswoman or congressman for two years. That’s your accountability on who you want to do – you don’t lend it to some other member to hold that vote. And this – they want to use this opportunity to seek power. Remember what the number three majority whip said, Clyburn, he literally said that coronavirus is an opportunity to restructure government in their liberal view. You had Congresswoman Jayapal, you know what she said? She was upset that they even agreed to allow this money for small business —

BENSON: Yes, because (ph) of leverage.

(CROSSTALK)

BENSON: Congressman, we’re up on a break. So today’s a travel day, tomorrow you’re voting, and then the future, there are more fights to come. We look forward to having you back on this program. Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy from the House of Representatives on “The Guy Benson Show.”

Thank you, sir.

Thank you,