In a wild fight that came on Wednesday, December 17, U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) went to the Senate floor to advocate for a popular bipartisan bill, the Mikaela Naylon Give Kids a Chance Act. The bill would, if passed by the Senate, as it has already been passed in the House, improve outcomes for kids with cancer by both ensuring they have access to critical treatments and promote much-needed research into childhood cancer.
Unfortunately, the bill currently appears to be dead in the water, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) shut it down, nixing it. It was in response to that decision from Bernie that Sen. Mullin went nuclear on the socialist senator, exposing him as someone who is “literally killing kids for politics.”
Slamming Bernie in a stump speech on the Senate floor, Sen. Mullin said, “Why wouldn’t you want to allow kids, our kids, an opportunity to simply have the same opportunity as adults do with cancer?… It’s hard to explain why we wouldn’t want to do that, but yet, I understand that [the] senator from Vermont intends to object to the Senate doing this, and I think it’s wrong.”
Continuing, the senator went nuclear on Bernie for holding the lives of children hostage over other, unrelated healthcare spending, saying, “I think it’s dead wrong to think that someone is willing to hold hostage a child who’s fighting for their life that simply wants to have an opportunity to try an experimental drug that may extend their life one week, one day, or may even cure it, and you’re willing to take that away from the family because you have ever priorities, because you want to hold it hostage, so you can try to do something with community health care centers.”
Adding to that, Sen. Mullin noted that he even supports the healthcare centers that Sen. Sanders was holding the childhood cancer bill hostage over, saying, “I support community health care centers. I want them. They’re important to rural Oklahoma, but there’s a time and place for everything. And to hold this bill hostage because of it is not right.”
Building on that, he then snapped that Bernie is playing with the lives of children, saying, “You’re stealing a family an opportunity to spend maybe an extra minute or an extra day, or maybe a lifetime with a loved one. I don’t know how you argue against it. I don’t know how you can possibly stand up there with a straight face and say, it’s just politics. This isn’t just politics we’re playing with people’s lives. So, this is more than just politics, but I will tell you that if this is objected to, and we can’t find a path forward here today, I can promise you I will not stop fighting…it won’t happen.”
Then, hammering Sen. Sanders as the Grinch who is stealing the lives of kids, he snapped, “What’s happened right here in front of us: The Grinch is stealing kids’ lives, and they’re stealing hope from the families, hopes from the families that might have an opportunity just to try—for a political agenda. And I hope to God that every single family that’s going through this will hold the Senator for Vermont accountable, and the state of Vermont will hold him accountable too, because he’s playing with kids’ lives. He’s literally killing kids in front of us because of his political movement, and it is ridiculous. It is therefore I object.”
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Featured image credit: Shelly Prevost from San Francisco, United States, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bernie_Sanders_2016_(27049475591).jpg