“So that’s not a bitch?” Stewart said Thursday at a news conference on Capitol Hill. “The American heroes who have fought our wars, out there, sweating their asses off, on oxygen, fighting all kinds of diseases, while these motherfuckers sit in the air conditioner, insulated from it all? They don’t need to hear it. They don’t have to see it. They must not understand that these are human beings. Do you understand yet?”
“And if it’s America first, then America is screwed,” he said.
Stewart, speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead,” later said of the lawmakers, “I’m used to lies. I’m used to the hypocrisy. I got used to their cowardice. I’m not used to the cruelty, the casual cruelty…a bill they’ve been fighting for for over a decade.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Stewart said earlier in the news conference, lied to veterans by saying “we’re going to get it done” and then voting against the bill. Stewart also criticized Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican who is retiring at the end of his term.
“Pat Toomey hasn’t lost his job. He’s leaving,” Stewart said. “God knows what pot of gold he’s stepping into to lobby this government to screw more people. I’m used to all that, but I’m not used to the cruelty.”
Stewart apologized for his foul language, but then outlined what senators voted against, with a veteran saying the bill “gives them health care, gives them benefits, allows them to live from becoming addicted, keeps veterans from committing suicide.”
“Senator Toomey won’t hear that because he won’t sit down with this guy because he’s a terrible coward. Can you hear me?” Stewart said. “None of them will hear it. And none of them will care.”
“What just makes the gut punch that much more devastating is that all these people came here so they could finally tell the men and …,” Stewart said off camera before the news conference, pausing on mid-sentence and burst into tears. “Their constituents are dying. And they’re going to do it after a vacation? You don’t — tell their cancer to take a vacation, tell their cancer to stay home and go visit their families.”
Stewart told Tapper about a veteran who “attempted to take his own life based on his frustration with this system and this denial of care process.”
“And these guys are like, ‘Oh, don’t worry. Maybe we’ll get to it now, maybe we’ll get to it in the lame duck session.”Some of those people won’t be around,” Stewart continued. “They live scan to scan. So they can pretend they’re on Senate time, but these other people are on human time. And that time is precious.”
The goal, Stewart said, is to keep lawmakers on Capitol Hill until the bill passes.
“When you fight for this country, you can’t leave until the mission is over, until your job is done. They don’t let you just walk away. And we think the Senate should uphold the oath that the men and women who fight for this country should be held accountable,” he said.
Toomey declined to comment on Stewart’s earlier criticism, saying: “It’s not worth responding to.” He denied as “absurd” that objections to the bill were prompted by Democrats striking a separate deal on the reconciliation bill.
When asked to respond to Stewart’s comments, a spokesman for McConnell referred to his remarks from Thursday morning. McConnell said he supported “the substance of the bill” but added “even on legislation that is so important and so expensive, the Democratic leader has tried to block the Senate from any semblance of a fair amendment process.”
McConnell argued that the legislation, as written, “could also allow Democrats to effectively spend the same money twice and enable hundreds of billions in new, unrelated spending on the discretionary side of the federal budget.” He pushed for a vote on an amendment from Toomey aimed at reducing spending from the package.
An earlier version of the legislation passed the Senate by an 84-14 vote in June, but Senate Republicans voted overwhelmingly against a procedural vote Wednesday night that would have ended debate on the bill and set it up for final passage, with 25 Republicans in The Senate, which supported the previous version of the legislation, voted against the procedural vote.
“This is complete nonsense,” said Democratic Sen. Kristen Gillibrand of New York. “This is the worst form of overt politicization I have literally ever seen. This is complete madness. We have the votes.”
Gillibrand says she will ask for unanimous consent Thursday if she can get playing time, “and as many times as it takes to get this back on the floor.”
“We had strong bipartisan support for this bill. And at the 11th hour, Senator Toomey decided he wanted to rewrite the bill,” she said. “How he convinced 25 of his colleagues to change their vote, I have no idea.” What the hell? How does this happen? there’s no point. This is an outrage and there must be accountability.”
Susan Zeier, mother-in-law of the late Sgt. Alumni Heath Robinson, for whom the bill is named, called out the Republican senators who voted against the bill Wednesday night.
“Senator Rob Portman was Heath’s senator,” Zeier said. “They voted against my family. They voted for us all to suffer.”
“They don’t care about the veterans. And as someone said before, everyone has pictures with veterans on their Facebook pages on their website, it was by not supporting veterans. If you voted against this bill, don’t support veterans,” she said. “I’m done.” And next time I’m back here, I better sign the damn bill at the White House.
A spokesman for Portman told CNN that Ohio Republicans plan to vote on final passage of the bill, just as they did during the initial vote in June, but that he voted against the procedural motion on Wednesday as a way to express his displeasure with the way in which the Democratic leadership handled the amendment process.
Pelosi said the move by Republicans to reverse course last night was “very hard to explain. There is an immorality to it that 80 percent of Republicans would say no.”
“We all share the horror and all of that,” Pelosi said. “We’re not going to stop until we get the job done. I don’t know what we can do to convince the Republicans to do the right thing.”
The legislation was negotiated between Senate Veterans Affairs Chairman Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, and the top Republican on the committee, Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas. After the failed vote, GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said Republicans had supported the bill, but there was an agreement for two votes on amendments and that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had “backed out” of it, prompting the uproar in the hall.
“Democratic leadership passed on Senator Tester, Senator Moran, made an agreement that there would be two amendments, Senator Schumer agreed to the same. And then they gave it up,” Cornyn said.
Cornyn said Republicans hope to reduce mandatory spending in the final package now that the bill is in limbo.
“This bill will ultimately pass, but it will be more fiscally responsible,” he said.
“My view was that this has to go. I want it to pass. I want to do everything I can to see this go sooner rather than later. And I was willing to wait to try to fix the problems that I see with legislation,” Moran said earlier Thursday. “And not all of my colleagues agree with this strategy.”
Stewart rejected assurances from Republicans that the bill would eventually pass.
“All cowards. All of them,” Stewart said. “Now they’re saying, ‘Well, that’s going to happen.’ Maybe after we get back from our summer vacation, maybe during the lame duck” – because they’re on Senate time. Do you understand that you live here? Senate time is funny These moms live to be 200. They are turtles. They live forever and they never lose their jobs and they never lose their benefits and they never lose all these things. Well, they’re not in the Senate. They are on human time. Cancer time.”
This story was updated with additional developments on Thursday.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Susan Zeier.
CNN’s Manu Raju, Ted Barrett, Morgan Riemer and Shawna Mizell contributed to this report.
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