Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) took off the gloves to ship a stinging blow to her home-state Republican colleague Sen. Ron Johnson simply weeks earlier than the midterms, accusing him of making an attempt to take girls “again to 1849” and intestine Social Safety and Medicare.
Usually, lawmakers from the identical state observe ceasefires, significantly so near an election, to allow them to work collectively within the legislature. However Baldwin took the chance to assault Johnson after he voted towards a unbroken decision to maintain the federal government working whereas legislators work out a long-term spending package deal. (The interim funding invoice handed, and President Joe Biden signed it into legislation Friday with simply 11 hours to spare, which means funding is now safe till mid-December.)
“My Senate colleague from Wisconsin final night time voted towards shifting ahead to fund the federal government, preserve the federal government open and keep away from a pointless authorities shutdown,” Baldwin stated at a Senate Democratic management press convention Wednesday as Senate Majority Chief Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) stood close by.
“Senate Republicans like my counterpart from Wisconsin have proposed sunsetting, reducing and placing Medicare and Social Safety on the chopping block with each price range yearly,” she stated.
Baldwin additionally ripped into Johnson for working to obliterate girls’s reproductive rights, saying that he and different Republicans have “enabled and proceed to assist taking girls again to 1849 … and preserving them there with out the proper and freedom to make their very own private selections about their physique, their well being and their household.”
After the U.S. Supreme Court docket jettisoned Roe v. Wade and its half-century legacy of guaranteeing the proper to abortion in June, Wisconsin reverted to an 1849 statute that outlaws abortions even in circumstances of rape or incest.
Baldwin concluded: “Let me simply shut by saying whether or not it’s Medicare, Social Safety, well being care, pharmaceuticals, reproductive well being care, we’re making it clear to the American individuals who is on their facet and who isn’t.”
Johnson stated Thursday he wasn’t stunned Baldwin attacked him.
He’s broadly thought-about essentially the most susceptible Republican senator within the midterms. A life-size sculpture of Johnson product of cow manure is presently touring Milwaukee as a part of a protest towards his declare that local weather change is “bullshit.”